Not only colorful beds of flowers
ruffled today by a breeze off the lake
but the ruffled surface of the lake itself,
and later a boathouse and an oak tree
so old its heavy limbs rested on the ground.

And I don’t want to leave out
the uniformed campus guard I saw studying
a map of the campus without a student in sight.

Closer to town, shops under awnings
and several churches,
one topped with a burnished cross,
another announcing a sermon:
“What You Can Take With You.”

So many odd things to see,
but mostly it’s the sun at its apex
inscribing little circles,
little haloes at the top of the sky,
and the freshening breeze,
the nowhere it came from
and the nowhere it is headed,
every leaf wavering, each branch bowed,
and what can I do? I heard myself asking,
with all this evidence of something,
me without a candle, wafer, or a rug,
not even a compass to tell me which way to face.


 = Karen Marek