Steven Deutsch

It’s Not Complicated

Our yoga instructor
calmly commands
our attention,
as she stands
a perfect tree
on the waxed wooden floor
of our ancient gymnasium, 
and proposes, this week,
to teach us how to breathe.
“It’s not complicated,” 
she whispers conspiratorially--
“we begin by breathing in
and finish by breathing out."
 “Joyfully,” she adds with a sigh
that compounds our perplexity.
But it’s not complicated, and
by the tenth or twentieth try,
we are emitting such gladdening exhalations
that only those wizened practitioners,
who hover above the river Ganges,
inhaling and exhaling in rhythm
with the planetary globs
would dare to rival us.
It is as if we were born to breathing.

“And next week,” she says 
with a barely perceptible wink,
“We all will learn to stand.”

 

Steven Deutsch, a semi-retired practitioner of fluid mechanics as applied to mechanical hearts and valves, lives a quiet life in State College, PA with his artist wife, Karen.