David

By Marian Glaser © April, 1998

Picture Link

When David woke up he felt joy, happiness, energy.

He’d climbed out of the fog that had surrounded him for years.

Suddenly he saw the world in a new way. He had risen out

of the mental mist that had clouded and clogged

his vision, making him see shadows instead of the illuminated grass.

After his wife and their daughter had moved it had deepened and densened to dark murk.

He leapt out of bed, drew his curtains, and saw

men and women walking briskly, eyes down, not taking time to notice

the red, white and salmon roses blooming in his neighbour’s yard or

the park’s trees and grass. He’d take a holiday today and explore.

Everything stood out as if spotlighted in a museum.

Too bad he had to spend the time dressing, cleaning, cooking and so on

before he could go out. The last time he’d felt this impatient

he’d been eleven, eager to meet his friend Patrick and dip their emptied jam jars

in the creek, hoping to see a rainbow flash of minnow in the crystal water.

His father had yelled “Stop!” as he pushed his chair away from their breakfast table,

his eight year old sister had stuck out her tongue and his mother had demanded his help with housework all morning.

The mist had gathered then but vanished later as Patrick and he had played baseball or

just wandered and cycled that whole idyllic summer.

The immediacy he’d felt then was recaptured as he lounged on the park’s shorn grass,

absorbed by the reflected weeping willow, cloud and blue sky.

Maybe he’d be fired tomorrow but today he needed this.

It reminded him of what Brian had said of feeling centred while being on a river

in South America. For him it had been a mystic experience.

He had felt no divisions between man, God and universe in that moment.

It sounded like Meister Eckhart or anon’s Cloud of Unknowing.

For him the experience was more secular. He felt Hopkins’s line.

There was the dearest freshness deep down things.

The sunlight shimmering on the small breeze-created waves of this creek pond fascinated him.

The variations were more complex than any moire submitted with a math’s chaos thesis.

He hoped his inscape was bright enough so that he’d see like this again.

He certainly wouldn’t forget this morning any more than those dreams that resembled visions.