the fall

I went to the park again today. I meandered, swinging my arms to move the blood into them, climbing rocks, stretching my legs. On the way back to work I took a path around a pond, which was covered with duck weed. The grey light on that perfectly flat green expanse made me want to walk out onto the surface of the pond, sliding my feet like a child on a polished floor. Where the ducks swam into the duckweed they cut tracks of open water, which languidly half-closed behind them.

At the edge of the water, in a place where the path came close, there was a group of mallards. They were digging for something under the water, sleek heads going under and the bright pearls of water running off their green necks when they came up for air. I stood watching them for a long time. It might not count as prayer, but God was apparent to me in the elegance of those birds, unconcerned with the future and perfectly at rest where they were. I think the “fall” that all religions seem concerned with comes from there, the recognition that animals occupy a state of grace that is alien to us.

Maybe the truth is that animals are still living in the Garden of Eden. The Fall happened when we forgot that we live there too.

懐かしさ

Today I took a walk in central park for my lunch break. I fear the time change, when suddenly it will be dark when I leave work. Then I’ll really have to accept that the winter is coming, and that there will be no more long evenings sitting on my roof looking out at the trees and buildings and open apartment windows, smoking shisha and watching the sky. It will all be cold air and protection, chapped lips and the wind howling through the narrow streets.

So I spent an hour in the early afternoon walking around in the sheep meadow, spinning in circles, watching the frisbees fly back and forth. The sun felt like honey, warm pouring over me wherever it touched, the shadows cool as glass. Why didn’t I spend every day doing this? Is the coming of fall inextricably tied to regret?

Now is the last sip of summer, when the sweetness has collected in the bottom of the glass and you’re heartbroken because there’s not enough left to savor, and you just have to tip your head back and try to catch every drop.

searching for it

In my dream I was on a train somewhere in the west, passing by a mountain range that stood out against the sky, three dimensional, in brilliant colors. I looked at those mountains and knew that they were not real. “When the train goes behind those trees,” I said, “I will make the mountains into buildings before I get to the other side.”

But when the train passed the trees, instead of mountains there was a flat plain of water, as far as I could see, brilliant with reflected light. I gave a slight mental push, and towers began to rise out of the water, the same colors the mountains had been. When I finished bringing them up there was a city there, the skyline tracing the same shape in the sky that had been a mountain range before.

Then I became greedy. “If I can make cities,” I thought, “I can also fly above them.” And when I tried to fly, I did leave the ground, but something about the effort of it robbed me of the recollection that I was dreaming. I flew, but there was no exhilaration, no sense of freedom. It was a waste of the gift I was briefly given. And the dream changed around me to shades of brown and white, strict straight lines, an agitated figure running through a grid searching for something it would never find.

Sleeping or waking, I am grasping for too much.