Unlock the bedroom door and with quiet steps
traverse the mile past the 251st section where unfenced caramel cerfs
peacefully graze upon thick, dark Northern grass.
(Their hooves may be silent and expressions sweet, but
when cars, by necessity’s motivation, venture along the snaking
beam, animal eyes flare dumbfounded not seconds before
bodies scatter, blood-stained! The innocent are safe nowhere.)
There you shall witness your small world by newfound perspective:
Do children live within a thousand yards of this place?
Quietness, not definitively tranquility, would prove the impossibility,
but here I Watch two eleven-year old boys dressed in the same
butter-yellow shirts prance towards their unseen, waiting
parent. Only a couple of numbers down, eight years of presence,
and still I could wager my entire loan amounts that we’ll never,
not once, meet.. as we never have.
(Should I smile or frown for the cause?)
But of course children reside in this house, because there, you see,
is a large elementary bird perched heavily on the sturdy, blackened
branch nearby another tenant’s rusty window.
A taller familiar creature looms like a Blue Mountain
in convenient space beyond my own freshly-painted back wall in a spoiled
realm overlooking the same, narrow stream.
Has any resident ever stood on its shore?
I imagine no pair of feet will, or maybe, now that I’m aware,
I shall be the first.
(Amusing, isn’t it, that despite the monthly periods when skies screech
and pour their feminine hearts into the lingering waterbed,
sharing tears of sorrow to unselfishly feed our deadening
gardens, we, in generational ignorance, barely recall its existence?)
Wait, goodness, is that lightning flashing through Louie’s ceiling?
There- there it is again!!- so colorful ? and harmless?
Oh, it’s worse but more common than nature itself now;
a wired box, typically black or silver, in various sizes, propped
in perfect view for anyone able to search for entertainment at moment’s bidding
on the opposite side of reality’s pane.
But WE ARE CONNECTED, argue the plain-faced Giants,
including the eve-angel Kawaski, who, with golden wings spread, claim
our communicational distances are a stone’s throw from handle to handle, and they,
progressing demi-gods, have helped us.
WE CAN TEXT, E-MAIL, ETC.
I inquire: Can’t we walk to converse in a homely fashion?
1: Neighbor, good morning! Won’t you dine with me? (Hopeful smile.)
2: I promise I will when the blue moon rises! Can’t wait to see you then! (Distant smile.)
1: (Inwardly frowning; visibly smiling.)
Perhaps life atop our Hill is this way because there are no pavements;
it is simply a long Road with complexes twenty feet apart,
seamed loosely by electric pole wires.
Occasionally, we, the practitioners of a culture of checking mailboxes
and waving half-hellos in the anxious chance of crossing paths with someone
(as if overpopulation is solely a theory),
exhale in response to the pulchritude surrounding the medium-wealth
home we share, before we retire like lazy bears to a den,
tacitly, comfortably, while disco colors dance across weakening visions and
blank perimeters.
I suppose, to put this simply, once you see a monarch butterfly as beautiful as
the one kissing the mouths of daisies by my bare feet now,
an epiphany envelops your mind and provokes the wonder of why
a nice street like this is only viewed by drivers
breaking speed limits.
(Taking a second glance, nothing has changed.)
And so I sit here on a mossy boulder,
skeptically staring at the presented metaphor of a cozy edifice
where “families” lock themselves in separate rooms to CONNECT TO THE OUTSIDE
WORLD: NEWS, SHOWS, ADVERTISEMENTS, ETC.
I cannot deny I enjoy taking part,
but must we forget this smaller world: home and natural art?
Now you have seen this is an era in which the “medium
of entertainment permits millions of people to listen to the same joke
at the same time, and yet remain lonesome,” writes a man
as he sits upon a cloud above you, pointing to the child who has recently
woken and forgotten how to gambol on a playground.
Heed my advice: leave the door ajar and watch the Cortlandt deer.
