A Reading of the Poem, “Canopy”

Motors run, and the sound of rubber rolling on asphalt

Joins the din of people by the thousands

Looking at their screens

And making purchases, and jockeying for parking spaces.

I am here among the thousands,

And the noise and the smells of exhaust and indifference are in the air.

The places where people go,

The cities, the stores.  The works of humanity.  I am tiny here, surrounded

And unnoticed, and vulnerable, on a concrete sidewalk in the shadow of a building.

But I can close my eyes and roll back the years, and I am

With my dog, and with the old scabs on my knees,

And with the sound of my mother’s voice, behind us, in my ears.

“Be home before it’s dark.”

My short legs take me (and my dog’s legs take him)

To a place in my memory, a place beside the river,

Under a canopy of trees, where I hear

The swish of tadpoles swimming, and the beating of a dragonfly’s wings,

And where there’s fresh dirt on my knees.

It is summer.

I am beneath the canopy, with my dog

And the tadpoles, and the murmur of the river,

When a bird calls (a cardinal, by the sound) to his mate,

Who I am sure is feeding their babies.

My dog and a toad are nose to nose, and

The toad chirps, and my dog looks up at me.

It is summer, and we’re here beneath the canopy, my dog and I,

And the toad and the cardinals.  And I am nine.

I sit down on the ground beneath the cardinals’ tree and

My dog sits beside me.

I put an arm around him and I can feel his heart beating.

My other arm reaches around the trunk of the tree and,

Against the inside of my arm, I feel the rough and unblemished bark

That protects the secrets within this sheltering tree’s heart.

An ant inches across the dirt we sit on, my dog and I, and

Investigates every change in elevation, and pauses at every pebble,

And ascends the tree trunk.  Does he guess at the tree’s secrets?

Beneath the canopy, here in the shade of the tree, with the sun

Shining above and peering sometimes through the branches and the leaves,

My own heart beats in time with my dog’s, and the with the beating of wings,

And with the murmur of the slow little river, and with the song of the cardinals,

And with the pulse of an old tree’s life, and with the twitching of a squirrel’s nose.

Beneath the canopy, the secrets of the world are told and kept.

My hand rests on my dog’s head, and thoughts of what marching time

May show me in the years ahead

Are far away from me, as we sit beneath the canopy.

What matters most here is the ant’s plan, and the cocoons of caterpillars,

And a web that a spider has woven, and a turtle my dog now notices, who moves to

A sunny spot to bask on the bank across the lazy water, and

The fluttering dance of a little white butterfly.

Uncertain footsteps that stray along an unknown path are never taken or

Even considered here, beneath the canopy.

A lifetime of a million lifetimes, of a million guileless souls,

Is lived now, here, beneath the canopy, and

It enraptures a boy and his dog.

Fifty years is spanned with the opening of my eyes, in the shadow of a building.

The jostling, the exhaust, the indifference, the squealing tires

Hang in the oily, noisome air of the present.  How could it turn out like this?

Is this where that long ago uncertain path has always led?  To this morass?  Here,

Where there is no cocoon, no canopy, where all sides are exposed, then flanked?

I close my eyes, and the sound of my mother’s voice mingles with the purling of the river,

And, from beneath the canopy,

My dog and I watch six ducklings swim in a row, following their own mother and

The ways of the river.