From my front porch I can see the gaudy lights of the food kiosk on Broad street…hawking funnel cakes….jumbo corn dogs…chicken on a stick..Do people really eat that stuff, and live to tell about it? Somewhere out in the night the drum corps is marking an ancient rhythm reminding us of some urgency at hand. The night is the time for a parade….the westward traveling stars above in rhythm …The lights and music, and sounds of ardent voices, the laughter of children… bracing against the night…mocking the dark as it were…crying alleluia at the grave.
Now the first float rocks tenuously into view…the drums now louder…hands are raised in the moment…a moment that will soon pass…a moment of exultation…a garish apparition moving ghostlike among us…outward and visible warrant of the transience of life, of things and ways, mutable…of beauty and loss…of life and death…we are dust; and to dust we shall return….the rhythmic truth of the matter…the parade vanishes into the night as if it never were…Mardi Gras ends in ashes swept away by brooms and brushes.
Wallace Stevens says death is the mother of beauty. Indeed in these lengthening days we see new life germinating undeniably in the dead landscape….new life come again passing among us….we travelers passing along the way as well…It is in the journey, in the passing moment that beauty, the promised paradise lies. Raise your hands in honor of that which passes among us. Oh, don’t ask what it is….you’ll know it when you see it….and it comes with all urgency.
