Following Bouyancy

floating in the Eno on a hot day ... ahhh

Naked in the Eno,
    hot day,
sun beating sideways on
silver ripples,
pale green leaves,
turtles toasting their shells
while I toast my pale skin
beneath the yellow eye.

Tufted titmouse and chickadee calling,
the slightest breeze soft kissing
my vulnerability.

Skeeter bugs skate on the river surface,
purple violets and spring beauty blossoms
crowd the river's edge.

Oh–

“Follow your bliss,” the wise men say.
      My bliss is out here,
squidging toes into riverbed sand,
as a slow slow tide washes over my body,
                          only me
                    only me here
with the rest of the world,
                           the wild,
the world far from any well-marked track.

I sink back into the current
legs lifting, belly to the sky,
hair drinking in brown water,
grown heavy

floating
breeze and river

my soul a dogwood blossom
caught in the wind,
carried away by this hot sunny day
and the cool relief of giving in
to the riverway

the river’s way of
       drifting
             ebbing
rapids here and there
but rare,
               wide, deep course
finding the down-hill path
                            down …
                down …
down

following
perfection

mind gone buoyant
soft in the current
where-ever gravity leads.

 

August Blackberries

The children are picking blackberries
     and so am I,
basking in the sticky haze of out-reached brambles,
tempting and wooing those with open mouths
          and patient eyes to its side.

I am surrounded by dark deliciousness,

lost in a wilderness of simple joy,
     everything just as it should be,
the blackbirds singing with ease
while bees find heather blossoms
to make sweet what good they have,
just as I reach into the prickles, glad,
     hands bleeding berry and blood,
to fill these hours with a heavy harvest.

          Each berry is a heart,
exuding fecund life that carries on,
each summer's end a frenzied beat in time
until the next cycle gives out its
                         blessings.

                         These little gifts
hum with the sun, perfected
     by a thousand warm rays
     and the wild welsh wind that
whips across this ancient mountain side,
     once a glacier's path to sleep,
now a grassland of gorse and heather,
     broom and blackthorn.

The rain has been kind and also fierce,
     awakening the earth to her softer side,
          and I had forgotten the delight
     of standing quiet with ten thousand fruits,
listening to each murmured story

     rise up from the roots like sap in spring,

singing the earth and me into deeper life.

I cannot forget this moment
as life holds out both hands,

all bright with child-like pleasure.