Monthly Archives: June 2014

Travel

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Sustained by bouncing
between one sensation sight smell taste sound song and another,

I ride on the spirit of the end of a world cup soccer match.

The mountains are frozen in their dance, dipping down into the cottony mist just to rise again dark and blue and green as my car floats around them.

I give a dollar to the harmonica player hunched like a question mark upon the mosaic of the front of a closed store. I strike a match for Gypsy when she asks and squat to meet her dog Shakey; Gypsy is wrapped in a dress as motley as Tibetan prayer flags, and she lights the second half of her roll-your-own.
I hold that spent match in the corner of my mouth like a blessing, like a kiss, as I walk on.

Like a skipping stone, I skim along between sensations and ideas,
sustained by each image or laugh, every word and rhythm, each sight and color, every sound and song, each taste and smell, and every person—

every person as grimy as a tin can, brilliant as a star.

Bird in his place

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As I sat at a table behind the empty Sunday-morning café, a bird flew and perched up on a street light. It is fascinating how each type of bird, and each bird itself, can have such individual personality. A beautiful light gray mockingbird, he was slender, but cocky, prince of his little realm, throwing his head back to sing, and then looking down at his kingdom—and then he flew away.

I looked around, and there was not a another bird in sight

I am alone, I thought, not another living being.

But the maples down by the creek, and the other trees, they are living beings…so was the roll of grass between us, and the Virginia creeper climbing up the trees, and the scrub and weeds and bushes on the bank behind the trees.

And the cars buzzing past beyond—in each of them a living being: every one, all of them with their own destination, their own fears, their own joys, their own desires, their own cares, their own jokes.

The crazy little mockingbird comes back and looks at his little realm.