A prairie warbler’s song circles higher and higher.
A motionless dragonfly dries its wings in the sun,
and I become translucent, like wings, like a song
rising within the air.
Why we need these opening acts
to see into our soul
I do not know.
Perhaps two lives cannot exist in the same moment
in the mind of God.
Perhaps there are innumerable gods
and countless millions of moments.
Perhaps the warbler’s song and dragonfly’s wings
are as empty of self as this moment,
and this moment empty even of God.
Come night, we are willing to feel what we cannot see.
Desperate for light, other eyes open within us.
How dark is your day?
How close your true concern?
Clear the deck of the obvious
and don’t be ashamed of what you want.
Shadow man,
If you could reach the sky
Rather than living on surfaces,
Blinded by a light obscured
by a lesser part of you,
If you became a sky shadow
Inverting all you believed
Finding an inner light
And, passing through your self,
Spread across the empty universe
Becoming yet remaining what you always were,
Then you would be.
A cruising car and a cawing crow
splash their being equally across the void.
There is no avoiding it: without you
there would be something.
You are stretched across the void
like a magician’s curtain.
Behind you, behind this thinness, is the Truth.
“Odds”
Lay down your cards -
you will never be dealt the hand you want.
Don’t just lay them down, throw them down,
because in the moment of release
the chain of reaction is stopped;
all is as it should be.
Fate is frozen
and every hand at the table is exposed,
all following your revealing lead.
What are the odds against this?