Presence
I, the sum of my anonymity,
Come into the Missouri Botanical Garden,
Under a ninety-five-degree Saturday-afternoon sun.
As usual, I assume my space on a wooden bench
Whose slats, mottled with moss and lichen,
Invite my solitary shape to accommodate to nature.
A mist-gentle rain slips, invisibly, through the leaves
Of a sawtooth-oak-tree canopy
Shading me, temporarily,
As I leisurely eat my hummus-and-crispbread lunch.
Decidedly, I'm in no discernable hurry;
Time and I have nowhere else to go, to be,
Even if the billowy gray-white clouds do seem rushed.
And now, my legs ask if they can lead the way;
They must know something I don't.
Over the labyrinthine steppingstone path, we go,
Following the riffling stream, to its mouth,
Then down into the Japanese Garden,
Where a bride, in white, and her gray-suited groom
Are about to become wife and husband, one from two,
When they repeat their own "whither thou goest, I will go."
My soul pauses, to commend them to serenity of spirit.
Because of the deep, unremitting heat,
Few people are circling the four-and-a-half-acre lake.
I've never sensed such sweet seclusion, here,
Or believed that the sum of my anonymity
Could be such a serenely ubiquitous presence.
06/12/10
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