Alms you Resist

"So you are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me." – Mary Oliver, from West Wind









Now, today, there will be no boat. Not even the hardened fisherman who hold those long motor stems of the flat bottom can quite make it in. The bay is a backwater and it is of the season that is still gray across the surface, the thinnest of lenses, only enough for the flagging seagulls to peck away at the accumulated detritus of the thousands layers. No, today, there will be no boat. All this way you have come, as if pulling your pack through the winter months like the prisoner who has escaped and wanders alone through unknown woods. All so that you could reach a wild portion of the ocean, a ragged beach, maybe, where nobody has been since the natives, and call this home in your mind for a minute. You would send a skiff out and watch it live – the dynamics of floating, above something so clear and wise as warm water, that is spring. Even then, true to yourself, you might not swim out to the floating skiff but, like the predicting of the coming summer months, watch it, and by the powers of the mind, feel its thin casing of a hull touch the water, slip down a finger that is splashed when, at that very moment, is where you wake up and you see that the world is before you, awake, alive, full adequate. For now the gray curtains have been drawn over the sky. It is that old house, and the bedroom is on the second floor, windows closed, the sharp tracking of an oak limb across the roof as it carries rain drops like alms you resist.