Wood darkens into night
shapes of houses, soft
over a low stone bridge
blown with fallen leaves
Water flutters under it.
One way or another
Out of me
By trails worn in grass
running between sidewalk and river
Or once through rows of ramshackle houses
thinning out towards open country
hinting of apiaries and vinyards
I moved on.
Such dreams are real
by virtue of that silence
left behind by the body
When senses clarify,
distilled to their most potent
aqua vitae.
Can I really claim this mind?
This matted den
I call it mine.
But why?
When deep inside, great tunnels bend
to hide the truth from Ego’s eyes.
Now
A restless cell
divides
It ends, yet multiplies:
Thus the many-mirrored Mother
in disjunction never dies.
I am one and I am many, in an endless string of lives!
And so the chambers deep within me
reconnect and ramify.
…A light?
Yet even here one shines.
Who would have guessed, in waking grayness
That there was another side
to this milky maze of drainage
with which each of us is mined?
There it dances
at the edge,
on the lip of sagging matter
Lighting up a land we’ve left behind.
And our body is the shadow it defines.
These dark waters running,
surging
Passing boulders, cliffs of stone
Through valleys rank with centaurs sunning,
Forests sweetly overgrown
with vines
At last
In moonlight full emerging,
The stream another million finds
In the Dreamtime all converging —
O star-seared sea! O endless Mind!
My grid
Extends to the seam
Between land and sky.
Where it interferes
With other streams,
The disturbance is where
I live.
Outside this box
The million waves
Hum and dance themselves
Into stasis.
So I wait
For a shift
In perspective.
When it comes
I give thanks
To the flow
Which makes it so.