(.........Aug26) The River Of Ordinary Moments Poem by Max Reif

Because living is a river of ordinary moments,
each moment connected to the next,
there is nowhere we can go to escape
from our fate which is to merge
every swell of the stream
back into the ordinary,

and all I can hope for is that gentle, light
sense of well-being as my little canoe bobs
in the current of everyday,
sailing downstream, ever downstream.

I am stunned by the beauty of the ordinary,
so that sometimes the ordinary seems mis-named, and yet
it is ordinary because it is quiet with no fanfare:

a man picking his way through the oranges
at the farmer's market,
a woman taking a leisurely bath,
a child playing in the grass in the back yard,
all the people in a street just walking.

No one is enthroned above every one else,
this river is absolutely democratic,
every thrill, every intoxication flows on downstream
as does, sooner or later, every sorrow, every loss,
though those are a little harder,
the hole seems to take longer for the waters to fill.

No one is famous to the ordinary,
you can't impress it.
The ordinary is the real wife of every man,
the real husband of every woman.
It is where you return from all your expeditions,
and it is all anyone could ever truly want.

And so today, when I received fulfillment
of a certain small desire I'd had as a poet,
and I felt hands starting to tug at me inside,
trying to take me somewhere,
trying to hoist me on their shoulders
and parade me through the streets,

it was like the dividing was beginning
of everything from everything else.
I felt the walls of 'I' begin to solidify
and separate me from everything,
the way a butterfly feels
sitting on a branch in the sun,
waiting for his wings to dry and chitin to harden
after crawling from his chrysalis,
ready after that to preen and flit and die,

and I reply to those voices, 'No, thank you',
and I say to those tugging hands, 'No, thank you',
I do not want to be
taken from the flow of the ordinary
to any pinnacle or promontory from which
I will only have to climb, or fall, down again,

I do not want to be special in that way,
I want the tick of thoughts in my mind to run out
and the storehouse of thoughts to be emptied
and not replaced by any others,

I want to disappear, disappear
and become that current
that all distinct drops are lost in, and then
the ocean into which all rivers go to die