Wonders

I Just past the moon-curved waterfall a woodland goddess changes into a slender girl with red-brown hair bent over in reverie, then into a broken tree trunk with white-brown bark torn to show the inner red wood... Cloud-smoke floats over a grassy plain: six horses graze in slow motion, light rain washes their red-brown hides. A score of pigeons circle twice before winging out of sight. II Tai Kwan Do aspirants in white swirls of abrupt gestures envelop their instructor deep in concentrated calm, beyond those still attacked and attacking... Somewhere nearby, a bigot's mind is healed: cut down by cancer, he is cured by chronic pain from causing hurt, prays for life, all life, his life. Between partners divided by doubt the Choice coils, ready to strike. III Again Joseph is summoned. Dreamers proclaim his speech as lucid as sharp colors converging on a fauvist canvas, as spontaneous as two dancers leaping through shared space. Playing Shakespeare's Hermione an actress adds subtle inflections to each night's performance, steadily turning Character into Self. Three dancers gather imaginary flowers, fling them over an embracing couple. IV A young poet drops his pen, astonished by the twenty lines he has just written, certain it is the Poem of Total Realization... A blind Cyclops cries for beauty, King Fool pants for a purifying stream, the youngest priestess stares into the oracle fire. An alien astronaut, hurtling across Jupiter's lordly orbit, in a blink of light speed, feels Space Rapture for the first time in six hundred years of space flight.