Meditation in Glen Helen

"Who knows what you know that you don't
know you know . . . you know?"

So I went to the Yellow Spring, cupped the cold water
flowing from the red rock and tasted a little,
chill and metal-hard. So the park closes at dusk, and
I've been so much with people that for a while

I disremember how to be alone. So the summer trees unfold
around me, careful, steady, and two guys and a girl
peel their jeans and frolic in the pool below.
Oh, the water will splash. I have my questions.

I will stand together with the others lost and lame
when the time comes, cool at the edge of the river,
muddling my toes in the brown coarse sand,
crying with all the children: what is it I know,

how can the iron-clean water have so little to say?
The forest makes it easy to hide anything, an eyelash,
a brown long-limbed spider, the bones of the first man
to put a hand into the spring and say cold, say good.

Even the last ridge can hold the trees only so high.
Some of the paths are closed for reconstruction.
Some of the paths are broad and clear. Some days
I walk around and around my little town, fussing

at the tv haze, stumbling over the brick sidewalks
quietly being swallowed by the grass. Some days
I believe that everything can be stomped or outrun.
Some days only the highest bridges stand a chance

of surviving the floods. Some walnut trees
are lonely mothers, last year's crop all swept off
by the squirrels who broke the bony sheaths open
and chewed themselves fat on the oily, convoluted hearts.

for J. L.

Copyright © 2004 Jeff Gundy All rights reserved
from Deerflies
Word Tech Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission