Grass Docks.

On winter mornings the sun rises late enough for me
to wake in time to catch some of that special purity.
You know: the sun invisible, but the colors of the sun
coming through, filling the sky with majesty.

I put on a puffy coat, head down to the grass docks,
which is the bank of a lake near my apartment.
The name doesn’t make much sense: it’s true they’re grassy,
but they are not docks. Boats don’t come and tie up there.

It’s only a private area, hidden from view by an embankment,
and protected by a great swooping beech tree.
There’s a grill dedicated to someone who died twenty years ago,
with small vines growing up through the grate.

The one docklike thing about it is that instead of sand or muck,
the border between land and lake is a wall of planks and pilings.

Those frozen mornings, I go down, protecting
the precious time with myself before I begin to think.

I take in the dazzling surface of the water, lit up with reflection of sky,
or unlit, a texture crushed smooth like velvet or graphite, a fire within like sapphire.
And I contemplate how freezing it would be to jump, how jolting,
like a heart attack, the panic, on your skin and in your stomach.
And I look at the trees’ silhouettes, and listen to the birds,
whose wings beating can be heard overhead as they pass above in swarms.
When it’s quiet, you can hear birds’ wings beating.

I stroll slowly, carefully, down the dock, such as it is,
this walkway of short cut planks dividing messy,
branchy, curled-oak-leaf land from dark, opaque, obsidian water.
The contrast is severe.

There are branches sticking out of the water,
and there are reflections of branches hanging over the water.
Seagulls, a heron, Canada geese, and ducks fly around and land
skimmingly on the pond and take off again, flying new circles.
They never fully come to rest.

When Jung read Ulysses, he said, “what is so staggering
is that behind a thousand veils, nothing lies hidden.
The book turns neither toward the mind nor toward the world,
but, cold as the moon looking on from cosmic space,
allows the dramas of growth, being, and decay to pursue their course.”

Yeah, something like that
is what I mean to balance as I step from plank to plank.
I must keep looking down, so I don’t fall in,
but I want to look up, to enjoy the scenery, the special moment.
What did I miss, I wonder, as I reach the end.
And the answer comes: everything.
You’re missing everything.