By James Oppenheim
Once I freed myself of my duties to tasks and people and went down to the cleansing sea...
The air was like wine to my spirit,
The sky bathed my eyes with infinity,
The sun followed me, casting golden snares on the tide,
And the ocean—masses of molten surfaces, faintly gray-blue—sang to my heart...
Then I found myself, all here in the body and brain, and all there on the shore:
Content to be myself: free, and strong, and enlarged:
Then I knew the depths of myself were the depths of space.
And all living beings were of those depths (my brothers and sisters)
And that by going inward and away from duties, cities, street-cars and greetings,
I was dipping behind all surfaces, piercing cities and people,
And entering in and possessing them, more than a brother,
The surge of all life in them and in me...
So I swore I would be myself (there by the ocean)
And I swore I would cease to neglect myself, but would take myself as my mate,
Solemn marriage and deep: midnights of thought to be:
Long mornings of sacred communion, and twilights of talk,
Myself and I, long parted, clasping and married till death.
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I had a morning of laundry and finishing a big project Cheryl and I have been working on for months. Then, after lunch, I talked to Kay, Linda, and Hildy, my good friends since high school -- now that one of them has gone back to work on Fridays, she asked if we could switch chat days -- so that was awesome. We ended up not taking a walk because it rained for so long, so I was a slug.
In the evening we watched Da 5 Bloods, which we'd been meaning to see anyway and Chadwick Boseman was a definitive reason. It's very violent and quite depressing (basically, no one gets out of Vietnam even if they survived the war) but the acting is excellent and it's quite powerful, though really tough to watch. Here are some of the gardens at the Audubon Naturalist Society from Sunday:
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