a reclining tilt -
that somehow feels
I will need
to have it adjusted
out -
I can see the underside
of the falling snow
and know that it has seen
the world from a vantage
point I do not share.
A pinpoint in a universe
of hundreds of billions of whirling
and tidal swamp rivers of carbon
and light; the "I" that feels so
vital and important in
my body - in my chest -
is nothing at all
against the ALL
of it ALL.
How does a snowflake
wrestle out of me the impossible
and exact meaning of personhood
that I so cleverly built up
beyond its place in
the whole.
The moist heat
of my sons' new
born breath
poured across my face
as I lowered my skin
to theirs' - instinctively
connecting across
a train of time and
neural pathways of
countless other fathers
seeking to touch
the other side born
right here. Something
I could not see took me out
beyond the edges of my "me".
Who schedules these
departures?
What does a falling
leaf not tell me because I
absent myself from
its descent;
or what does a snow-drop
whisper my way (that I miss)
as it piercingly
unfolds toward the sun.
William Carlos Williams
expanded placing
Rutherford on the page
and
he became sidewalks
and tree roots pushing up
and out.
Blake with his golden thread
took on all
of the generative probings into
the hermetic enclosure
of the heart
by binding his insides
to everything-else outside.
Whitman with his body
electric sewed up all
mankind - destroying the
boundary between ANYMAN
by making EVERYMAN one.
O simple frozen
crystalline petri-dish
of the universe and sky,
sing to me in your falling
of the stratosphere
of your birthing. Sing a long
plaintiff note of forces beyond
the fiscal cliff. Remind me that
my cells were made
for wonder; my neurons
made to paint and vision
awe. Give me a fearful
pile of ash and I will listen
for what brought it into
being,
and what suspends its
meaning in the circuitry
of the cosmic double helix
and in the axons and dendrites
of the Milky Way.
A deer catches
your eye across the
meadow,
a dying man
holds hands with his
family,
an ocean brings full-surround
beauty in the thunderous crashing
and in that instant
you are borne aloft and soar.
Who writes these movements
of dissolution and loss?
Feeling its vapid
finitude on the skin of its
own self,
the "I" wisely dies
into merger with
a whole from
out there.
Sing snowflake,
sing new leaf,
sing dying tree and
adder
for the despair of self
identification is wrest from
the soul by the amazement
of the other.
These signs
are written in words
all around and within
us. Annihilate the spec
of separateness
and see how light
is all there is.
Sing falling leaves
of a new day;
sing me out of my self
into a budding grandeur
only tempered by a
disappearance of self
importance and rivalry.
Sing wind of a way
beyond annoyance
into a zephyr of
confusion and bewilderment
that carries me to new shores.
It has always been the
simple that confounds the over-thought.
It has always been the child
that leads us.
Oh frozen angel that has
called me into this,
stay a little longer
and
hide the path
I fall
into
without thinking
each day.
Oh unexpected harbinger
that has taken me outside
of my own petty self
and delivered me to the
doors of the house of
WONDER, do not leave me.
Only stay.
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