Note (1/16/20): This was written in early July 2019 during a rare break in the busy summer season for my outdoor rec/education job with Wilderness Inquiry.
Gray light
Dripping through morning window slats
Calls to mind days
hung in the balance
Sepia tones
and ombré shadows
Backdropped by pitter-pattering
From the slate-like sky
Life for me too
Seems nestled in an uncommon stand-still
My gently ticking watch on the bedside table
The sole indicator
Of forward motion
Of time’s cogs spinning
This suspended morning
Weird to think
How when I go
Fording rapids
Reading the darkening sky over a pod of
paddlers
Chasing the wonder of misty dawns and
mosquito-borne battle scars and the best
bland quinoa you’ll ever know
Part of that visceral reality I seek
Has already occurred
Splices of what I have done
and have been
Filtering through internal slats
like the muted refractions in my windowpane
I gaze through the glass
And see a kid
An orange-hooded rain jacket
brand-spanking new
Frames a grinning face in an expanse of grassy
field in a driving rainstorm
He has no way of knowing how fortunate
he will soon be
To trek many miles
climb many trees
Travel to three continents
Grow into communities and jobs
nurturing his passions
To touch many people’s lives
Through all of this
And develop so much into
his own
For none of that could have possibly
crossed his mind
Nor should it have
As rain splattered his face
And a strong Door County wind
Chilled the pumping hearts and legs
Of these Watershed adventurers
Frolicking joyfully against a
painter’s
backdrop
Of foggy gray brushstrokes
Over three years later
That same jacket still hangs
dutifully
a bit more weathered
and musty smelling
Airing out on a closet door in a foreign apartment
Miles and memories
From that other gray day
Life in the present
is great
is wonderful
But it does well
to not close the shutters
on the past
To allow beams of feeling
emotion
experience
Cast from former skies
To shine through once more
So while today or tomorrow or the next day
I stern along the Mississippi
Carry a wheelchair-bound kid up a mountain
Kindle a passion for educating and projecting
lessons from childhood
onto the children of today
Get soaked to the bone tightening down rainflys
And further forge a life away from my home
A part of me is also at this moment
Blinking away fitful sleep on the Houston airport floor
Buenos Aires en route
College on the horizon
High school in the rearview
But nothing else more important these ten days
than making incredible music
lasting friendships
bonds to new places
and capstones on old
And I am further still
fractured
When a light blue shirt-clad
seventeen-year-old
Begins descent around this hour
Catching his first glimpse
of a metropolis
that he would come to love
Set against a thick tapestry
Of smog
and human busyness
and humming energy
Eyes glued on a window to a seemingly
new world
half a world away
Ears filling with flight deck announcements
not whatsoever understandable
And knowing nothing
Of how much
Sweaty hours of weed-picking
Subway rides and overnight trains
Karaoke songs in a mega mall
Mumbled Mandarin
Fumbled chopsticks
Late-night hotel hangouts and
Early-morning breakfast buffets
Will indelibly alter who he is
Upon re-ascent
Past refracting to present
Present reflecting on past
No
The stilted gray light
Of the apartment window
Does not have much to do
With any of this…
It’s a dreary Minneapolis summer morning
And I’m sitting inside
Simply dreaming of other ones
Yet the slats are open all the same
Suspensions of time and light
Ushering in aging but warm
Hues of the past
Jake Marble 