Feeling To Infinity

Time after time, we hear politicians promising to make
the world a better place, but by now we realize that
those who believe their words are only dreaming.

Some imagine that accumulating great material wealth
will assure enduring happiness, but eventually learn
to their dismay that they have been only dreaming.

Unscrupulous preachers claim they alone can lead you
to the Light as long as you pay their asking fee, but if
you blindly follow them, then you are only dreaming.

There are those who propose that life is predetermined.
Others believe in free will. People will believe all sorts
of things, though belief itself is really only dreaming.

Some will say that “might makes right”, and whomever
has the deadliest weapons wins, but history has shown
over and over again, such notions are only dreaming.

Others will assert that their race, or gender, or the religion
they espouse makes them superior to their fellow humans,
but those who adhere to such ignorance are only dreaming.

Ending each verse with the same words is a clever literary
device, but if I imagine that my lines will be remembered
even to the next day, then I’m certainly only dreaming!

I read it over several times, editing here and there,
until at last I was quite pleased with the result.

When I awoke this morning, however, the poem
was completely forgotten. Isn’t that how it goes?

Perhaps those who visit with me now and then
will come across that poem in their sleep.

They may read it and later wake up smiling,
but not sure why — life is funny that way.

Really, it doesn’t matter. We’re all making poetry
in our sleep, then forgetting it again and again.

We all imagine we are awake, mostly because
dreaming can often seem so real, so poetic.

Every moment is a new poem we are adding
to the luminous book of our lives.

When we pass over, our friends will read each line
and offer their sincere congratulations for having
made the effort. The praise will be well-earned.

With each new life we start again with a clean
blank page. All former dream poems are forgotten.

They are left behind on a shelf in the big library
while we work out our new materials here:

poems of innocence and experience, of desire
and its satisfaction, of love and loss, of forgetting
and then remembering, and all that comes between.

Water is the most versatile world traveler, and since we are
essentially water beings, we have all been everywhere too.
Even though we might momentarily appear as solid and
separate beings, all of our molecules are connected.

If we truly understood what we are made of, we might
put an end to all of our conflicts right now and happily
splash around without some grudge or score to settle.

Just so, upon hearing a songbird trilling, we can be amazed
all over again that water can do such a wonderful thing —
it can turn itself into a tree, a bear, a mother hen, a cloud,
and even the one who is reading these words right now!

To all water readers, I salute you! Water sends salutations
of gladness and recognition to itself in the watery forms
of you and I and all of our trillion oceanic friends.

Likewise, perhaps we can better understand what
they mean when they say, “Go with the flow!”

After all, stagnant water can become pretty odorous.
On the other hand, still pools may hold many secrets in
their depths, so we need to learn to live with contradictions.

Even when the river pours itself into the sea, water is not
done. It really has no end. It simply recycles itself perpetually,
in harmony with the respiration of infinity, as do we.

When we miraculously appear in this world, water has not
increased itself; when we pass on, water is not diminished.

There is a vast and luminous space of pure awareness
within which all water is eternally transforming
as the liquid play of consciousness itself.

The next time you’re out for a swim in the ocean, river,
lake, or neighborhood pool, turn over on your back
for a moment, look up, and imagine that!

She never did emerge alive from her covers,
but instead left a short handwritten note
on the table by her bedside. It read:

There is a bottle of good wine in the kitchen
cabinet, right above the sink. Enjoy it.

There is a wheel of freshly smoked cheese
in a drawer in the refrigerator. Enjoy it.

The baker down the street on the corner makes
an excellent sourdough baguette. Enjoy it.

When your babies try to speak for the first time,
listen to their whole story, and enjoy it.

If you hear small children conversing happily
with their invisible friends, enjoy it.

Whenever someone smiles and tells you
that they love you, enjoy it.

If you wake at sunrise, go to your window,
open it wide, inhale, and enjoy it.

At sunset, if you see flocks of birds winging
homeward in the vanishing light, enjoy it.

When your best day and your worst day
turn out to be the same day, enjoy it.

When criticism and praise both amount
to exactly the same thing, enjoy it.

If your friends and enemies become the same
cherished dear ones in your eyes, enjoy it.

When you can swallow the infinite ocean
of hope and fear in one gulp, enjoy it.

If, for you, love is all that matters, enjoy it.

When guardian angels part your rib cage
so that your waiting soul can fly out at last
and merge with the great light, enjoy it!

Of course, people say a lot of things, few of which
are actually true. I say that whatever happens
might just depend on everything:

the way the first people who crawled out of the sea
stood on dry land, looked around, and sniffed the air;

the stunning colors in the clouds over one continent
after the super-volcano exploded on another;

the cumulative cries of all the babies ever born;

the exact amount of blood spilled into the earth
during all of man’s endless wars;

the happy games Cain and Abel played as children
before there was anything to gain or lose;

the frustration we feel when the seeds we’ve set out
for the migrating birds are eaten instead by squirrels;

the tears in the eyes of all the lovers on railway platforms
as they wave farewell to their beloveds rolling away;

the horror on the faces of all the mid-wives and healers
burned at the stake by the church as witches;

the secret agreements made between grinning psychopaths
over how they would divide up the nations of the world;

the songs of the last whales before their species
was finally hunted by man into extinction;

all the wishes made upon the stars and blown-out
birthday cake candles that never came true . . .

Yes, I could go on and on, since the reason for anything
is everything, but perhaps I should stop here and let
you, the reader, add some reasons of your own.

Together, we could compose a text that never ends,
and even if it somehow did, something else will
continue on — something always does.

Our canary begins singing in earnest at sunset.
He stands on his hollow coconut composing
spontaneous arias to the vanishing daylight.

He has no idea if he will see the sun rise again.
This lends an extra measure of poignancy to his
operatic solos, and a richness to his trills.

At dawn, he can’t contain his joy — he just has to
let the whole world know how fantastic it is to watch
the sky gradually fill with luminosity once again!

At the fish store, all of the dead fish rest in peace
on a cool bed of ice. It appears that they are
all looking in the exact same direction.

Their little eyes and mouths are fixed in an expression
of awe and wonder, as if they are glimpsing the after world,
where all fish can finally speak their minds out loud.

If we could somehow listen in, we might hear a tale
of how they came down out of the sky long ago
to make their homes in the rivers and seas.

We all came down from the sky — Americans, canaries,
fish, and every part of our floating world — we descended
from above, even though there’s really no “above”.

Our mutual history is a history of light, light modifying itself
into the transient forms of you and me and everything,
whether happy or sad, or just standing in a cage
of light, singing our dear little hearts out.

Here, there is no defining line to separate
flesh and bone from this pillow of stone.

Tonight I seem to drift through myself,
astonished by the radiant brilliance
of your exquisite light’s reflection
pulsing softly in my heart.

Because I am only here to love you,
my palms turn naturally upward,
holding my heart in my hands.

This infinite Presence is all there is,
now wearing the forms of you and I.

Even in and as these fragile forms,
it still outshines all pretense of duality.

This is what it does, it is what we do.

All ears are pressed against infinity.
All of space is sighing, listening.

We both follow backwards into that.
We seem to move, yet we’re standing still.

A single syllable appears before our eyes
which we cannot forget, we simply can’t.

This incense I burn between my fingers –
a slight sensation before the final ash.

In that momentary flicker of recognition,
of unobstructed clarity, here it is now,
one word that breaks the trance
of any doubt or hesitation:

Ah . . .

What remains, once the fictions of illumination
we have cherished are revealed for what they are?

At dawn, light spreads evenly over sage and fool.

At noon, lazy carp graze silently in willow’s shade.

At dusk, bonfires along the shore blaze up against
the dark immensity that reduces them at last to ash.

At midnight, no word.

2.

An intermittent freezing drizzle shrouds
a light-torn sky; from vaporous snowfields
a diamond sutra forms, white narcissus opens.

Dreaming of the spirit world, etched stones
slumber while this old good-for-nothing
smokes the pipe of evanescence.

Tonight the gods are silent, yet in the dark
a lone wolf’s cry expresses wondrous power.

In reply, the restless wind, whirling around
some random flakes of drifting snow, agrees.

Perhaps it’s just as well, since I’m not going
anywhere anymore — I’m fine right where I am.

If anyone wants to find me, they ought to scrutinize
their motives – would it really be worth the effort
to track down this useless old bag of bones?

When I first met my old master, he invited me to join
him on his mountain. “Come with me”, he smiled.

As it was, he’d prepared a guillotine for me.
When I finally managed to get away, it was only
a headless corpse that walked from there downhill.

I marinated in the spicy stew of the world for a while,
long enough to recognize that I had two hands,
a beating heart, and two good feet.

Lazing around the murky backwaters of mere knowledge
and experience, I bided my time among the denizens
of the red dust towns who slaved for bowls of rice.

Having dined enough at the smoke and mirror buffet
on the world’s meager charades, I finally washed my plate,
then made my way to this humble hut high above the clouds.

Here, sky-deep in dawn, I wade happily along the pristine
streams where sleek rainbow-colored trout go leaping,
impaling themselves on beaming streaks of light.

A primal ecstasy engulfs me here, thrills me beyond
saying, till in the chilled euphoric quake of clear-light
morning majesty, I slip into the nameless — I am gone.