Bamboo forest
Green stalks rising straight from a floor of brown-sharp dryness, pushing among the cool diamonds into the shade. And then cold winds come, ice crystal forms, making these green fibers heavy, bending them back, tearing them, killing them. Ice melts and children come to play, move their hands along the sharp grain, grasp the dead wooden knobs in games and take the sticks away. Small bent women, grey hair tucked into kerchiefs, or their long-legged grandsons, take the dead for tinder, for modest kooking fires or wildly-burning night flames. The space is opened, cleared under the leaf-shade-canopy for new stalks to rise and grow.
I press my breath and catch my feet, stare up along htis close vertical perimeter to heaven. I breathe, smile, hands on my hips in this space, upward-reaching from its edges. A cathedral? How could stone butresses hold this? Natural as breathing, moving as prayer, lovely as the life that belongs to it.
September 7, 2000 9:40 am
Conceived after bikeriding, sept 5.
Return to my writings!
