No greater metaphor
To my reason for being
Than a remote highway
Through open country
I’ve not yet explored
With the tools in hand
To tell the tales
Of my discoveries
More and more
Discovery comes
As reflections of my self
In the landscape of existence
My presence in this moment
Is but a wisp of a cloud
In a windswept sky
A drop of rain
In the eons of torrents
Which gouge a canyon
From a plateau of stone
Try as I might
I cannot grasp
The monumental meaningless
Of my own existence
Leaving me to acknowledge
The incalculable significance
Of drawing a single breath
Here am I
An infinitesimal ephemeral wisp
In the cloud-strewn sky
Of existence
Claiming my glorious place
In the magnificence
As if a passing moment in eternity
Were eternity itself
I set down the words
But do not own their meaning
Any more than I control the wind
The sun
Or the rain
I release them
Into the world
Let the prevailing winds
Take them where they may
Perhaps to find the meaning
They have for you
These leaves may seem
Like a reminder of past glory
These leaves may seem
Like a reminder of future possibility
But the leaves
Are just leaves
All the rest is just stories
I tell myself to make sense
Not of leaves
But of my own existence
Words arranged in verse
Form a matrix of possibility
An author’s intentions
A reader’s interpretations
Layers deep
Miles wide
All this also present
In a single word such as
Aum
Love
God
Beauty
Perfection
Each a poem with all the
Subtle renderings and possibilities of
Angelou
Frost
Dickinson
Shakespeare
Plath
The final meaning rests solely
And rightfully with the reader
I lived my life
So very small
Now left to wonder
Shall I shuffle off
Before I ever roared
As so many others
Come and gone
Faintest whispers
On the wind
Once the light entered the bowl
Something magical happened
Something I’ll probably
Never fully understand
The light coalesced
Hardened
Formed swirling tendrils
Of incandescence
Well
I understood one thing
Light was alive
No
Not alive
Conscious
And what I was witnessing
Was the comingling
Of unmanifested being
One each to a tendril
Swimming as if a school of fish
In a golden bowl
Struck just the right way
By the sun
And then it was gone
Light
Was merely light
Again
But some trick of the cosmic tail
Had let me in on the secret
Because in an instant
I’d known
Light
Is love
And love
Is light
When we are unmanifested
In this purest spirit form
We know this as surely as
The necessity of a breath
We know it in a way
A brain cannot grok
But our manifest purpose
The meaning of our existence
Is to remember
And for a moment
Looking into a sunlit bowl
I remembered
A glimpse of the unknowable
Out of the corner of my eye
A memory I struggle to keep
Every day
A perfect world
Constructed with ruthless precision
Would be far too mundane
To provide the challenge
Which offers existence
Meaning
Slowly
We learned new ways
To have meaning
Purpose
New ways to love
And be loved
In return
Every photograph untaken
Every brush stroke unpainted
Every stanza unwritten
Every story untold
A small darkness left unilluminated
Pix to Words 