DOVE TALE

Once I was a scholar annihilating leaves of grass. Another kid had shown the way. Split one lengthwise, blow really hard through it. Later on Walt Whitman would come as no surprise. Or Stirling Moss at Laguna Seca, beeoww! Where's the poetry in that? But I also felt that lilting breeze across my arm, which Walt included. The range of a person not confined to extremes. In this backyard, a habitat of Venus, to hear a waterfall in a drop of rain would be no exaggeration. Let cherry blossoms fall, their subtle drift of all the brightest threads.

The magic carpet, so finely woven, suddenly fell apart. It's passenger disappeared. Everything thing went back the way it was and, that was that.

That is this. Even time eventually disappears. And so all the usual explanations, trailing out past the carpet, are like frayed kite tails. Leaving nothing. Doing nothing is all of this.

An orange rolling over a teeter totter ends up on the ground. Except if, almost impossibly, it comes to rest at the fulcrum. There it levitates. With no contest of mind versus matter, no melding, one can locate what prevails everywhere. The chain of reasoning takes refuge in an imaginary realm, the imaginary root of negative one. A moth flies out.

It's right here. In amongst small cobwebs clinging between leaves, an aura of exhausted witches, in fuchsia bell blooms, lobes of the jade tree. In amongst the hens and chickens, which were passengers on Ken Keyse's bus, recalling his cuckoo's nest. Three cuckoo eggs: turn on, tune in, drop out. Paint the bus. And when everyone gets off, the paint fades. But that egg in the middle was already broken through, and the young bird, flying free, heading out, singing on its own.

On a different journey, launched without reference to time and space, into doing nothing. Squirrel scamps across the fence, coming to a halt just over the bird feeder, under which Frankie is waiting. By now it's almost normal. Undeterred, squirrel leaps into the seeds, lifts out a few with two small front paws, and begins eating. Frankie watches.

The setting sun is within fifteen minutes of rooftops, Frankie still sitting, and the urban forest in deepening green. Squirrel scampers back. Out of sight now. Whose reality? From past conversations with Frankie, it's clear that such questions do not interest him. The doves flutter down. He doesn't like to be petted or fussed over but often comes to sit nearby when I'm doing nothing. At this fulcrum of the day comes hummingbird, not to visit the feeder but to hover by this clipboard, then out into the darkening leaves.

In the distance a squirrel barks, not that there's much to see now. Then overhead the mini-helicopter, one last pass . . .