Moment

This moment.

Walking down the mountain

this rock is here

               not there.

It is shaped just so

               not any other way.

This plant is there

               not here.

It is shaped just so

                     not any other way.

A living plant, thriving

               while this other plant is dying

                    and that one over there

                              is clearly dead.

This lizard

               is on a rock over here

                              in the sun

not anywhere else

until my moving shadow sends him scurrying

       for a still shadow.

This moment.

Rock

     plant

           lizard.

There is fog over the ocean

               all the way to the horizon,

almost no wind

               in a season when it’s usually windy.

And though it seems that wild onions, indian paintbrushes,

buttercups, bush lupine, monkey flowers and morning glories are blooming

               everywhere,

   they are not.

Everywhere is a collection of precise somewhere’s.

Each plant is in its place and nowhere else

and there is considerable space between all of them

filled with many others less obvious to the eye right now

—wild cucumber vines,

Yerba Buena, coyote brush, ferns,

incipient goldenrod and stinging nettle

shiny bushes of the three-leaved oak

               men curse and deer devour

                                          --the blooming

                                   and not-yet-blooming—

not to mention the grasses—veldt, fountain, giant reed,

               wild oats, smooth brome

—the seeding

   and not-yet seeding--     

       each an exact life in an exact place                                                               

   in its own moment

               in my moment

                              in this moment…

the one that is not mine

the one that cannot be owned,

                                              only entered.

My body has lived sixty-seven years

               beyond my mother’s,

not forty-seven, not eighty-seven

but this body right now

               thankfully strong enough                                                                    

that I am here on this mountain,

though my skin has given up some radiance

as a homage to time,

       

This moment.

My eyes with bifocals

               not the falcon’s vision of my youth

but not the blindness I may one day

be privileged

               to know as a very old man

whose moments will be more laden with memories

               than the making of them.

Body strong.

Breath strong.

Spirit strong.

This moment.

Bereft of mother

father

      brothers

               alone here on this mountain

           the deep sorrow of walking so far beyond them

               fully mine

the deep joy of finding a companion

               to walk with me

to the end,

of seeing my son become a man beyond

               the one I raised him to be,

of having good work helping others in ways

               I never imagined

--all gathered together,

fully mine.

This moment.

            My moment

               --loved and loving

still striving

still striding toward that very specific

final step

beyond anger and judgment

                   where the embrace

of all that has come and might come

                              is complete.

Rock

plant

lizard

body

breath

sorrow

joy

memory

yearning.

I am here

                                   nowhere else

                              shaped just so

                                   not any other way,

                         fully in my moment

                which opens its chrysalis

                              into

               the moment that cannot be owned,

               the one that can only be entered,

               the one that I enter

                              now.

C 2014 Bob Kamm