For Him also
Time apparently non-existent before God
premiered His kaleidoscopic Creation,
breaking Himself into pieces – near and far,
large and small, lover and Beloved;
space emerging with time like conjoined twins;
color not existing until He broke
the Light of Himself over His own knee;
movement not existing until the fragments
swam to each other, embraced and kissed.
Separating Himself; leaving us
to make our own sense of His strewn
bits, textures, shapes and colors.
For us all apparently to exist and know ourselves
but for Him also, in relation to us,
for how could Love ever Be without a lover
and how could God ever exist without a
witness?
O child of God, the One became two,
says the old man, then three, then ten thousand.
Yonder
You might have to leave your home
and go yonder; leave your loved ones,
the land of your birth and go yonder;
for the sake of family and friends,
go yonder, yonder, alone,
across the wide meadow;
nothing romantic or remarkable,
just the quiet unfolding of fate
and the winding of the path into the hills
from which comes your strength.
O beloved Lord, you might ask,
or silently require of the impersonal Way –
open Your gate – for nothing else matters
because everything else matters;
because ephemeral beauty, truth and virtue
are beautiful and virtuous and true;
because Love is majestic and Its own validation.
You might have to leave home and go yonder,
yonder, yonder on a singular path
until God and It, the Life and the Way,
are no longer out of grasp
but in your hands and under your feet at last.
O child of God, lonely is the path of Love
and
impersonal the Buddha’s Way.
Untapped reservoir
When I had nothing better to do,
nothing else going on, I would reach out
to the Lord of the universe. Little ol’ me.
And, of course, when troubles arose
I was always right there tugging at His coat.
Just in case it was true.
One day, down a lonely path,
through a flurry of leaves,
I saw Him ahead of me, plainly beckoning,
inviting me to His house for tea.
If you’re not too busy, He said.
If you’ve nothing better to do.
Tears, held back a lifetime,
wet my cheeks, the sleeves of my coat –
cleansing rivers coming from the broken,
untapped reservoir within my chest.
O child of God, wherever fate takes you
never
forget the mercy of the Lord of Mercy.
Adapting the words of Shunryu Suzuki –
God is not something to find.
God is something you are.
The Way is not something to figure out.
The Way is something to express.
Let’s sit down here in the cypress shade.
In this quiet dust take up our instruments.
And we will ask no questions;
take no measurements
but learn to play and sing –
not to express ourselves but to express God.
O child of God, Meher said you are looking
for something you have never lost.
Salt grain
Today the ocean is rough; yesterday it was serene.
I no longer hope it to be one way or the other.
My shouting above its roar, flailing about in the
surf,
my quiet prayers ashore, leave no lasting
impression.
There is a way of sorts – a footpath through the
dunes
that widens upon a rock-solid perch with a
panoramic view
where I might sit dispassionately; partake of the
salt air,
the siren music, become drenched in its erratic
spray –
at a distance – breathing room –
until that distance dissolves
in the salt grain of an ocean drop
joining without boundaries or objections
its mighty eternal, infinite
storm and calm, ebb and flow.
O child of God, the Ocean calls you.
Work to get more than your feet wet.
The formless pitch
When the stars go out at last,
God will fold up the tent,
His performance over for a while.
We can all have a good rest.
The catch is that each star
must burn itself out deliberately,
voluntarily, against all good judgment,
accepting its own inherent emptiness
rather than the roaring flame
of its separate existence.
It will happen – it is foretold;
as one by one the innumerable,
temporal stars give way to the original face of God
made visible again in the formless pitch.
O child of God, you speak of stars while failing
to
grasp the immediate at your fingertips.
Flatfoot
Feed me something that sticks
to my ribs; fills my belly.
Pour me a cup that’ll buckle my knees.
Let me hear shouts of Jesus
among the wooden pews.
I want to flatfoot to a fiddle tune,
boots scraping a raw plank floor.
Daintiness is for tatting doilies.
Utter me verses blunt and thick,
rough as a cob.
My house is the one
where my grandfather entered the world,
made of chopped-down timber, daubed mud,
a stone and mortar hearth. It’s where I first
look for rudimentary comfort and warmth,
to find the treasure I was promised
lies buried somewhere beneath.
O child of God, there are as many paths to God
as there are souls in the universe.
Peeking over the edge
I light a tea candle in my room
before a photograph of the Tomb
adorned with dried Samadhi roses
and assorted other gleaned icons
relevant almost exclusively to me
in a round red shallow, bowl-shaped
votive vase, the flame at once
strong, high, bright;
shadows thrown about the room.
I lower my eyes and gently invite
truth, surrender, Oneness, God
into my makeshift prayer chamber.
Much later, I raise my eyes again,
prepare to rise upon my muscles.
The flame is low, meek by then,
barely peeking over the edge,
floating humbly, improbably
in the spent fuel of limpid wax.
My room is dark again; vast,
intimate, evidentially divine.
O child of God, to experience the Everything
allow yourself to be reduced to nothing.
Deathbed
Sort of poetry by then, her juxtapositions
sans sequences, contexts, continuums,
sans tenses, pertinence, conventional wisdom;
a dark, intuitive truth, poetically incoherent
beauty
plumbing a deeper level if (loved) one
only knew how to listen,
but one never does;
wrapped up in who she thought she was
and should have been,
tried earnestly to be or not to be;
exhausting after a while the listener,
telling her last minute truth
from the bed of a murmuring brook
and really what is there left to say or hear
after a lifetime of chatter and love,
dutiful endeavor, compulsive volatility?
That was her poetry, too, largely incoherent
to everyone around even herself
and yet, as I have suggested,
strangely brave, beautiful and worthy.
O child of God, how better to greet the mystery
than with humble bewilderment and incoherence?
