What was I thinking?
Or was I thinking?
Walked past my kids’ old school, Webster Elementary, today,
then came to a place where I looked up
over a white roof into a normal
blue and white sky.
At that moment
All my life
I’ve empathized with those mystical people -
St. Teresa and others described in William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience -
sighing and groaning in the ecastasy
of God’s direct presence
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and took pictures
of the white roof,
of the surrounding trees,
of the sky itself with nothing more in view -
now I see -
of a man in a yellow shirt on the far end
of a distant street.
