Momentum When leaves are lushest, before insect hunger grows ruinous and July's relentless sun browns the green, season of flowers but not yet of fruit, when animal young run heedless of the owl's shadow-- the bright moments melt mellow as a square of chocolate in the mouth. To walk these woods in their fullest verve, to share it, all the fire within responding-- the body seems light and well-made, each stride and swing of arm a piece of grace, each breath a meal of florid and earthy aromas, each exhalation a laying-off of stain. Delicious to walk lightly, light-headed, wanting to hold it all ever so, an elfland of June spun out from this bluff above the river. In this moment, the water is a perfect mirror of tree, cloud and sky; rippleless. In this moment of stillness, standing at the rockslide's brink, I feel for once a king in a kingdom of sweetness, sun at my back and all before the glory-lighted land. Turning from the water to my daughter, fierce little clock by which I guage my age, to see if she sees the same moment, I feel it slide away, melting as moments must. "Can I?" she asks, and I nod, so she edges up gingerly to drop her rock that gathers a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand more in a fan of dust and sand down to the shore. When the plume, too heavy to fly long, sifts back, the moment comes for leaving, the walk out down the darkening aisle of maple and beech to the road. She kicks the roadside debris toward home and I follow on once-more graceless feet, sour that these moments fire desire the flesh can't keep, rueing the ever-paling aftertaste of sweetness. © Dale R. Hobson. All rights reserved.