Rain has kept our creek flowing all summer long.
Titania leaps in and out.
I hear her smack water as telltale cattails quiver.
With padded feet impervious to bristle and thistle
she’s unstoppable, a zooming sprinkler system,
leaving me spattered as she zips by.
All right. I admit my envy. See, I think I was meant to live like that.
Like the child that I used to be, somersaulting through grass,
rolling down hills, a frenzied little dervish twirling and
whirling, (when being dizzy was just plain fun),
or climbing up an angled tree, claiming a cloud of my own.
When biking over asphalt roads
my tires sang a symphony with crickets, blackbirds,
frogs a’croaking, calves a’bawling, kittens mewing in the barn.
This body is not the one I need.
Although I do my best.
Try to tend it well.
Try to maintain, train.
Encourage muscular strength, balance, agility, good posture.
But it is work! Work it seems I must do to be here and endure.
Now we pass the gravity box, lovely as a fat stick of butter
waiting near the oats, swathed but not yet combined.
I want to eat this moment. Take the beauty in.
Then Miss You-Know-Who goes dashing by, spraying me again.
I do see. I do know that part of me runs free in her.
I deliver up a yodel and a yip yip yip.
A prayer to the sky and for my silly friend.
Damn. You are amazing, my crazy silly friend.