Departure

I stood next to the schoolyard fence, looking down the sloping stretch of wet street. Black band of asphalt cut between two rounded hills both green with short grass that followed three days of rain. Cold wind rode along the fence line snapping through the flag overhead. To the left, project apartments sat tucked into the slope, each cut at a different angle. Through these cinder block buildings three boys ran pulling shirts and jeans from clothes lines. A woman leaned from a window to call out.

While this little sequence occurred, I did not arrange the sights or attempt to distinguish one sound from another. I didn't move. I waited. Then, in that quiet gap between the what now and the what next, impact, weight, scale, sequence, even where I was lost an edge of specificity. Just for that instant, the one or two loud sounds, the rising glow of street lights, gaping ditches in the hillside, further tumble of boys in the wet grass, my internal discourse fused into softer shapes. Reds, and whites, denim, cotton, skin, and geometry blended to a single color and a simple shape.

For maybe a minute but no more. That’s how I felt just before I left.

December 14, 2010

Journey by Light

Simple light took me: gold, white, intended, fluid. Will I steal its shine by speaking of what I can still remember? That, once taken, my forward momentum increased to become an arising as present as the emptiness that opened its mouth in the light’s wake behind me?

Let’s say without debate that I was a flying thing, humming low, an insect of spark and photon, following the black band of river water that twisted through twin rock faces. I was powerful. Small. Fast. Out of my body but closer to myself. Speechless and honing into a twisted, electric spiral - a speck caught in a jet stream.

I directed the nose of my flying shape into improbable transit through the river's bends. I stoked an image- a flicker of a circle where other small beings had set aside a place. I could see them gathered and waiting. They were waiting for me.

I can also remember that by this journey I found my way home. I traveled in perfect darkness through much of the night.

December 3, 2010