Words moist like morning mist
blow in from from each side
right and left
meaning taking form in consonants and vowels
drifting
falling earthward
alighting on my wing bones
and sliding down into my hands
and into gravity's clasp
like an invisible handshake
reminding me of an agreement I don't recall making.
Yet here I am committing to it again.
I am remembering again my mother's last breath
engraved in the sinew of my soul
how I was there with her
holding her to the last breath
walking by her side
right up to the invisible doorway she slipped through
going where I could not.
I stood there for a long time
feeling the expanding absence.
By the time she left
I who had come flesh of her flesh from her body
had been with her longer than not
we had the singular intimacy of having shared
the space of one body
as the mysterious process
of multiplication and differentiation unfolded
into tissue and organs a second body my own
and I crossed into this world
across the bridge she had tended
her body
that had once grown within my grandmother
she my mother
ushered me into the world with a brave shout
"Come on baby!"
It had taken 2 days
I had been in my own life and death struggle to cross the bridge or not.
She was barely 24.
(I was and remained an only child)
When she left
the one person whose rhythms has whispered to my marrow as it formed
left.
She the one who had rocked me her body's ocean belly
the one whose voice and laughter had rippled through my cells
the one whose quest and stories didn't allow me to forget
the importance of dreams and visions
(and something she encoded as "the dream"
something her father had shared with her
that was as mysterious as it was sacred)
she shared by example not only walking but water dancing
the love of mystery of awe and silence
and the love of words
(and I know I reminded her of these things:
towards the end of her life I remember her musing
about "how we cause each other.").
With words she had tried to make sense of our wounded lineage
and to speak of dream time.
But wherever she was words could no longer be pronounced
where she had gone was beyond languages' syllables
she had gone to the place that some words only point to
like small humble guideposts at the edge of the untamed,
like small glistening gems reflecting the light of the stars.
The quiet was all that was left
an absence whose dimensions were beyond thought
and there was peace as inscrutible as it was enourmously generous
and space opened up like a blossom from the depths of everywhere.
Space had gathered her up
the same space that holds everything even gravity.
In the time that followed
it was incomprehensible to me why we learn words and how I could exist
without this other body of origen also existing
here in the place we call the world...
Recently in attentive contemplation
sitting on my earth seat
I watched swirling smoke rising
from a single stick of incense into the cool fall air
tumbling upward in ascention
a dance of myriad curvacious currents and changes
fluid forms of liquid air
the same dance as all the waters of the planet
waters of gestation giving birth to form.
I watched
seeing myself in the mirror
in those changing diaphonous currents
multifarious forms
appearing and disappearing
arising from and absorbed by space itself
then I recognized myself as the space,
And again and again one and then the other
dancing tendrils of form and then space—
space that feeds and holds and consumes and is the same as the tendrils.
The two became one
and I became peace
impeccably whole
neither space nor form
neither one without the other
beyond creation and dissolution
residing in the eternal moment of aprehension beyond time
without conditioning
pure a mirror as clear as an untouched lake:
I rest in the absence of perturbation
I am that
body with no body
no body with body
I am the particularities and that which holds all particularities
wholeness
I am home
I never left
–Lorena Wolfman
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