‘IT’S A GREAT ART TO SAUNTER’

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood
the art of Walking…” -HD Thoreau

“bodhisatta [bodhisatta]: "A being (striving) for Awakening…”

  A hundred miles I walked, the Brookline Reservoir
                turning and turning, faster
and faster, churning myself into a buttermilk of
   baffling bodhisattic befuddlement, circling,
           revolving, rotating, now a planet
   cruising through ether-thin cosmos, bumping
           into space junk as I hopped, skipped, and
       jumped around the prolific goose shit in my
path, so that by mile 29 I had essentially
       completed the Appalachian Trail in my
                  mind, and it wasn’t that bad, 
      I thought, you just keep going,
  past miles 35 to 41 into the Smokies, when
      I turned to Maddy, my first girlfriend, dead
          so I learned, at twenty-seven, who once dragged me
  down to the Village, “Listen, that’s Dylan!” she said, who
           just happens to be singing Abandoned
    Love into my IPod ears for the thirtieth time,
       lo, the Alleghenies arrive, and therefore
  time to mull those school murals
     I loved, hauled down by colleagues claiming
        to know better, hey, a good 20 miles
right there, then straight through the valley of
      despair, when the Adirondacks rose majestic before
me, with all creation visible at mile 70 from atop Mt Marcy’s
            peak, before I saw the shadow of death
       sitting next to my father on the bench, near the
oxygen tank and bottle of water ,
              and suddenly, the Green Mountains, so
    soft and green, a place to drift, from mile  82 to 84, while
 floating through poems and sinking into Eva Cassidy’s
              version of Dark End of the Street, before
       picking my way up the granitic hump-busting
                Whites, deeply considering Iraq for five long miles,
           87 to 92, no body armor at all, exposed to every IED
     my head conceals, hoping those piled up lies would somehow
                 bear my weight as I forded impassable rapids of
            blood, before plunging down, down into the
                      dark, relentless forests of Maine, and on to
               Katahdin, mile 100 at last.

Four weeks I walked. I lost ten pounds. I got nowhere
at all. I journeyed everywhere. The reservoir  kept
turning. Mind ever vaster. Thoughts ever faster. I
rose high in the air. I flew over Brookline.

Oh, Google Earth!


September 14, 2007

 

 

 



All written material © Bill Schechter, 2016
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