Flat-footed

a deer, by nature
is never caught
flat-footed, her hooves
are all toes, are they not?
and mine, whose arches bend
like the arc of time
am struck, like that deer
motionless in headlights,
flatfooted

those wolfish yellows slide
to a halt, and off
into the forest she goes
betwixt mistletoe and ivy
trees wide and mighty
prancing on ballet toes -
tell me what is holy
if not this
the dancing doe leaves me
wholly thunderstruck



Sometimes I'm made of thumbs and heels. I finish work, and the end of the day startles me into immobility. Have you ever tried playing soccer on your heels? Or tennis? You've got no reaction time, no quickness. Runners are often told to run on their toes, why? It's a pivot, a brace, a shock-absorbent. The reason hands, and fingers, are so remarkable is the number of pivots allow for a wide range of motion and adaptability. You don't pick things up with your wrist - it wasn't designed for grasping. Yet, between ball-and-socket, elbow, gliding, hinge, and hip joints, our bodies are capable of a wide variety of motion. And each distinct joint doesn't require the capability of each other type, so your hip can't throw (my lack of hips can't throw, that's for certain), and your elbow's don't glide (thankfully).
Tonight, I felt trapped on my heels. Not stressed, not anxious, not upset, just motionless, as though desiring of journey, movement, action, but incapable of such. It's not literal, of course, for I spent much of my "motionless" moments pacing the house, leaving warm trails of footsteps as I defined a circuitous route heading nowhere, and getting there quickly.

Motion

wolf-eye moon rides the sky tonight
orion low on the horizon, fights
the bear, the lion;
reflected in this pond, it's no yellowed pupil,
but maestro swan, stately and solemn -
a string quartet this movement, each stroke
sliding through the black-glass waters
silk smooth, there are lessons here
deeper than the night above
higher than the pond beneath
heaven's eyes are all-seeing,


When I was a child, every now and again our parents would treat us with a trip to the zoo. I liked the zoo. Snakes, monkeys, giraffes, elephants, the nocturnal house, crocodiles, penguins - every corner turned was a new exciting form of life. Only I, competitive as I am, can forge a game out of the zoo so easily as I managed. We would enter the snake house and you got points for how quickly you found each creature, or creatures, in the tank. If you found a creature but skipped on to the next window, and there were more creatures, you got less points. It became a game of motion detection, and spotting sly animals through their clever camouflage.
If an animal moved, I was most likely to catch it first. If an animal sat still, hiding in colors and clever spots, Phil was often more likely to notice it first. I once had a psychology teacher suggest that women have more cones (color vision) and men have more rods (black-white, motion vision, peripherals). I don't know, scientifically, whether this is valid or not. But I've always been incredibly capable at spotting motion.
I've always felt that humankind has a remarkable aptitude for adaptability. Every person has adapted and constructed elaborate defense mechanisms and responses to certain stimuli - responses to culture, relationships, events, fright, food, and so on.
Someone said once that it is possible to master something new every seven years. Now, this depends on what you want to master and how motivated you are, but I think that this is easily within the realm of adaptation and the evolution of knowledge and skill. I'm working, desperately, to train myself in a number of things. It is difficult, but I want to learn not only to spot motion, but really stop and swallow colors. In good paintings, sometimes colors and slurs of motion leap out at you, or you dive into the scene, a daydreaming machine. This is how I wish I could write poetry. Poetry with motion, poetry with color, poetry with a symbioses of these, a merging complete and wholly sanctified, a truth-beauty dream of mobile hues singing, saturated and living, bright as living things in the wake of a storm, thundering.


I don't know 
what death's ultimate 
purpose is, but I think
this: whoever dreams of holding his
life in his fist
year after year into the hundreds of years
has never considered the owl
~ Mary Oliver - Lonely, White Fields