Behind the ten-thousand things

1.

Behind the ten-thousand things,
a nakedness.

Behind every name for "God":
light.

Behind the moon and sun,
behind the space they spin in:
That.

What touches what cannot be touched?
What hears what cannot be heard?
What eternally speaks itself
without uttering a word?

I wake in a rainy dawn,
in a place called "here."
From here I look toward "There"
and am moved to rise,
like hunger
and like ripening fruit.

When That looks out from my eyes,
I become stiller than still,
a dark glass lake, no wind,
empty,
then saturated,
when the moon rises,
with whispers
of myself.


2.  

"And then our singing brought on a different manner of weather.  Then animals long believed gone crept down from trees.  We took new stock of one another.  We wept to be reminded of such color."  ~Tracy Smith


Beyond purple, the flies see.
Beyond music, the wolves hear.
Beyond boundary of perception,
synapses gather qi to fire
our bodies like nebulae 
like paint in water
gathering and spreading,
blossoming in star flowers,
winding our way up the Tree,
like vines, snakes, tongues
of uncoiling phosphorescence.


3.

How many colors are possible when every lens
of every eye
on every surface
of every body
of Her Body
opens?

"Stroke precisely like this," he said,
running his finger gently but firmly
along the meridian line
on my pelvis
where womb channel meets
myocardium.

An ache like the grief of centuries,
and the fire of unborn generations.

A gold seed.


4.

There is a pair of legs beneath this seed,
and ground where foot meets earth.

I stand here, like a left lung in its left cavity.
He stands over there, on the right,
The sky is a little different, a bit darker, a bit thicker.
The flowers have different shapes.

He is remarkably beautiful, over there.

Like lungs of a body bathed in blood,
this rain which has touched a place deep
under the earth
and flown high over the land,
washes over both of us.

Washes and washes.



4.

Behind and within
​the ten thousand things:
a pearl.


~

​