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‘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