Maestra Jill

She arrived five minutes late almost every time,
her head appearing illusively small behind the front windshield
of the beige toyota corrolla she drove like a mad woman
to get where she was going
bearing coffee in a steel container which
she'd pour into little steel cups for them to
drink from as they moved like cows across the grass,
grazing and consuming along the way.
They met three times a week,
early in the morning, when dew drops held tight to blades of green,
and they, being disciplined in things like observation and reverence,
watched their shoes soak the water with ambivalence:
such beauty on the untraveled paths--oh to leave them uncharted and
somehow still arrive.
Once in a while one of them would look back
at their juxtaposed footprints which
gave clues as to their whereabouts (among the radiant rose bushes
on the east side of the park)
though no one would notice
because this park remained undiscovered
--or perhaps just ignored--in a town full of
important scholars and lawyers and upper class moms.
She arrived late because some magazine article
in Rolling Stone kept her attention for 5 minutes too long,
but her companion didn't mind because the article would
become a point of conversation, a conversation that no
matter what ended in political ranting of some kind.
People who notice the soaking of their shoes
can't help but notice the absurdity of genocide
and unbridled spending. The younger one,
who was always 5 minutes early
(which means there always existed a 10 minute gap between them)
loved to hear the old hippie preach:
the unabashed when I was your age, I considered setting
myself on fire with those Buddhist monks in Vietnam.
So many of the hippies,
the younger one's mom included,
forgot about the desire to bear-it-all
for the sake-of-the-All,
but not this one; she still read Kerouac and
listened to Dylan and refused to take any boss' shit.
The warrior, holding the sword and shield
of empathy, lived on in her...
perhaps because she kept doing Tai Chi
long after her husband, the Tai Chi guru, died unexpectedly
leaving her alone with three teen-age,
bi-racial boys to care for in a white-washed,
dreadfully boring southern california suburb.
Once a wife, still a mother, now a teacher,
writer and friend among friends,
she entered the Circle three times a week to
transmit a legacy to this little hot-tempered,
always curious, painfully receptive,
bride of things-bigger than domesticity.
Though the coffee-stocked walks and
Rolling Stone rants taught their own relevant lessons,
it was the rise and fall, the in and out,
the breath moved back and forth between yin and yang that
erased every chalk-board theory of metaphysics in the young girl's head.
"The greatest freedom in discipline."
Lesson, legacy, love, transmitted.