lime and the beautiful, there’s the observation that the difference between beauty and terror is largely a matter of distance. A
single star on the horizon awakens a poignant joy, but much
closer to its fires, the earlier joy grades quickly into a feeling
more edgy and raw.
There is something to be considered here, this matter of perspective. As I pedal along in the darkness, our five tires crunch
delicately over cinders. The boys are quiet, but I can feel the
added ease of Mathieu’s pedaling and, farther back, the pleasant
kite-like bumping along of the bike trailer. Here we are, coasting
along through a common woods on a typical late-summer
evening; more broadly, we’re three ordinary travelers on a small
planet going round an average star adrift in a garden-variety
galaxy—all this, in Buddhist parlance, “nothing special.” Such
an unremarkable moment is but the distance between me and
whatever remarkable jolts and changes wait on the horizon; the
prosaic moment is not separate from its transformative counterpart and whatever ecstasies or heartbreaks go with it, but is of
those things, though their unfolding in the common hour
occurs in increments so minute and suggestive they inspire neither worry nor awe nor terror, but rather a quiet state of mind
that softens me to whatever is out there, to whatever is back in
there: all the strange, spurned, and wondrous things. When I
am attentive to these moments, they ply me like a poem, opening me in ways I can scarcely see. And yet how abundant they
are; how regularly I am imbued with their company! To burst
our surfaces, we needn’t wait for weddings or funerals. The
beginning of wisdom is everywhere around us, always.
We emerge from the woods and come out on the marsh.
Once more, I pause to lean our Burley Train against the goldenrod so we can look up at the fresh constellations. Alexi is bowed
over, sound asleep. As we stand by his trailer, Mathieu asks
when he can start riding his own bike to the Dairy Queen. I tell
him next spring, probably. I regard our rig, all its linkages, and
see that an age is coming to an end. I ask Mathieu if he can find
the Bear, and together we look at the stars over the woods. He
has difficulty locating it, but as he searches he gives me back the
Iroquois tale of how in autumn the bear receives an arrow and
so colors the leaves with her blood, and how in winter she’s a
skeleton upside down, and how in spring she appears back on
all fours, reborn. In his telling he gets a bit turned around and
winds up gazing off to the south. I take the hilt of Alexi’s sword,
drawing it gently from between his legs; Excalibur coming up
from the stone of my child. I use the blade to guide my older
boy, helping him to find the Bear. a
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Tea
Nearly dawn, I’m watching the trees
march out of night, surround again
this house; the dogs
twitch in final dreams; the stove—
this orange, unsteady heat and black iron box
breathes warm mirage into the cold,
into the sky; the yellow enamel teapot
does the same inside.
The tea leaves in their white paper pouch
in their skyblue mug—I’ve brewed thousands of cups
like this: wood house, wood fire, the woods
leaning out of the night, of their stubborn life,
the taste of leaves
hot on my tongue.
— Leslie Harrison
