Sun At Play: Prose Poems

Excerpt

Crazed Enlightenment Refrain

Age Fifty-two. Seven bodies paddle hard for our lives when it hits me. Like once, when I was 24. A jolt—No! An extreme shift of reality. An extended crescendo. Wings unfolding. Emerging from an old paradigm. Every cell in my body seeming to double its motion.

I’m not exactly looking for it. Maybe that’s the key. Never expect and return it may—even after almost three decades. That first expansive rush stayed for eight charmed years then waned as covertly as it had come. Before it subsided, my poetry mentor appeared—as did the mother of my first child. I picked up a guitar, and wrote some songs. A band coalesced. Performances ensued. Second mother and our daughter dropped in. Built a mountain home. Almost like an angelic—or alien—essence had chosen to inhabit me for a time, have its fun, adjust my trajectory, move on.

 Maybe everyone is granted a window of such grace at some pivotal juncture. Some subtle soul-crossroads ritual hidden from everyday awareness. And if so, who’s doing the granting? Maybe it’s as simple as an inborn-migration-completion bonus of leaping from east coast to Hawaii to west coast. Or some cosmic credit for vaulting out of an immoral job, stagnant set of friends, uneasy monotony of sunny days with gray edges.

That heightened state had come naturally, with such keen yet understated ecstasy, it felt like I’d fallen in love with the universe herself—if she was—as I believe—a Herself.

Even now, if I look intently, every tree is a unique explosion of aching vitality. Each human encounter has the potential to light up all involved—even those watching from the sidelines. Every thought surely springs from some grand First Thought.

Heavy oar boats are the norm on this whitewater gauntlet. Nobody is nuts enough to pilot a paddle boat down the Grand Canyon. They don’t have enough heft to avoid the violent, unpredictable waves. The steep drops. Waves reflecting sidelong off the walls. So we decide to push the limits, fill several sandbags, place them on the bottom of the raft. To press it lower in the water. To dig in. Avoid a capsize. Prevent wet death.

My comrades and I slide down the bulging tongue, fully involved in the rapid. “Hard forward!” screams David, the guide. This is no ‘ordinary’ whitewater. It’s the mighty Colorado running at maximum release from the bottom of Glen Canyon Dam. Forty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Churning green and white liquid reality. Raw survival. “Brace!” cries David as a wave breaks sideways across the raft.

I‘m no longer in the boat. Launched into the roiling jade snake. Floating beside the raft. Face up. Half a foot below the surface. Squinting through the liquid racing across my face. Paddle still in hand. River borne. Pure juice. Strangely pleasant. But edgy. Firmly snatched by a comrade and hauled aboard before facing the next massive wave train.

“Yeeehaaah!” Paddles up in a multi-colored high-seven salute. Heightened state? Temperature-induced, athletic high—like rolling in a snow bank after a hot soak?

Out-of-time climax. Lingers sixty seconds. Maybe seventy. I rush to label it:
Major. Meaningful. Momentous.