Red Room Where the Writers Are

ODE TO WALKING AND SINGING (a poem)

Someday I'll set off
walking and singing a Holy Name
and never come back
because there's nothing like it,
small body under a great sky,
walking stick and hat
and the path-ribbon stretching out or looping
as far as you want to go,
no good reason, really, to stop,

especially when you sing,
because the human voice
is a bird in a cage
and song allows it to soar,
and when at the top of its arc the bird
finds the sky is only another cage
a plaintive wail enters its voice,
the longing to go still farther, knocking itself against the door
Beyond.

Amazing what the human voice can do,
this bellows of air transmuting longing
into a golden bird of song!

You have to walk and sing
to know what I'm saying.
Melody is a choice every second,
and if not a choice, a wild heart-stab;
timbre and rhythm, all improv, too,
every step's unique
signature in the air.

Sometimes for awhile the eye takes over,
soothed by green, gathering in spring's sprigs,
passing them deep to keep
against future drought;
or looking at water or distant hills,
or watching the slow meditation of the clouds
as they follow deliberately, gracefully
their invisible shepherd.

Passing a conference of chickadees
and doves, gathered like fruit on a tree,
I playfully unfurl my song to them.
Some of their friends fly over to join in.
Are they singing my chant in their language?
No way to know. They fugue winds down. They
begin their winged departures and I
move on, still wondering.

Cares have been flying off the whole time,
first the ones that always come
at work or in traffic or even at home,
those small, silent freeloaders,
then, after awhile, the bigger cares,
more deeply buried,
cranes or geese leaving on migration.

I'm again the pilgrim
I was at twenty,
pack tied on a stick over the shoulder,
steadying staff in the other hand

and even the next step
a letter as yet unwritten
by the Moving Hand