Crossings
+
Riven, I arrive.
+
Hand to my chest,
fumbling to untie, unclasp,
this nest of wasps.
+
Brushing a hand to earth,
I sow
my hunger in its belly.
+
Even the gawdy mind,
its phosphorescent
pomace, will rest
in that dark gut.
+
At the base of that abyss,
the self, is not a point
but a crossing - no simpler shape suffices.
+
Crude, irrefutable mark,
the stick-person I
retrace into my caverns.
+
A talisman against distraction:
“one-pointedness” in Zen.
Confluence of interminable routes,
“Here, I AM.”
+
My attention betrays itself
reducible to my hungers.
I bless my arms: lie
still at my sides.
+
We begin the incision
in the forehead
as with any little god.
+
“On the crown of the head
… a morsel of uncut stone
… by one touch to maintain
… connexion with the place
… which it was hewn.”1
+
The ground pulls down the plum
snapped from its reaches
which thumps and rolls to a periphery,
where flesh molds and becomes
a new, brief center.
+
I draw the line
from star to stone,
then unfold the horizon
by walking it.
+
“Who will lead me to that… dimmer region
where Thought weds Fact…
the… mathematician and… the molecules
seen in their true relation?”2
+
Speaking, I affix a string
from signified to signifier,
then pluck the chord,
back and forth.
+
Songs mingle, crescendo, crash: do
what time and music do.
Crest and spread.
+
Draw the three fingers
from the fore-skull to the belly.
Draw three raindrops
from storm into soil.
+
As ashes rewind, flame
recalls the tree:
as a tree re-dreams
the gnarled gauntlet of its birth,
you pry the sky-seed
open, wary, side to side.
+
The cross that I trace on myself
is the thief’s.
+
As above, so below.
As with you, so with me.
Under all eloquence, elegance:
profusion blooming from resemblance.
+
Me but not mine.
I am in my body and in the pathways outside of my body.
+
Hope is the loss
I bury in you, and never see.
Thank you for being
my child, that blest
kernel of horizon in my chest:
A way
into here.