Words diaphonous like the morning mist
that blew in from the northeast overnight
greet me rising from the ravine of sleep
meaning surges forth on the wings of consonants and vowels
that then like low clouds drift
and fall earthward from the skies domain
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 breathe again
as I again remember my mother's last breath
as its form resonates again in my breast
how I held her to the last exhalation
clasping her hand
right up to the exit she slipped through
where I could not pass
but stood motionless
feeling expanding absence.
By the time she left
I who had come here flesh of her flesh
had known being here only within the temporal parenthesis of her existence
where we had shared the singular intimacy
of the space of one body
as the ubiquitous mystery of multiplication and differentiation unfolded
into tissue and organs
a whole second body my own.
I crossed into this world across a bridge her body tended.
Just so once her body had grown within the circumference of her mother
and as she with me had ushered her into the world bravely
in the face of history's difficulties as well as its delights
my mother's voice not lost shouted
"Come on baby!"
It was on the third day of our labor
well into my own life and death struggle.
She was barely 24.
I would be her only child.
When she left surrending her breath to emptiness as full as that may be
the person whose rhythms had whispered to my marrow as it formed
left.
She who had rocked me in her body's ocean belly
whose voice and laughter had rippled through my cells
whose quest and stories were immanent reminders for remembering
the importance of dance and song
—and something she encoded as "the dream"
something her father had shared with her
that was as mysterious and without words as it was sacred—
eluded me.
She shared the dream
by dancing with the wind and the ocean
telling stories of seals moutain lions and ravens with awe and reverence
by sitting crosslegged in silence on surf splashed rocks
by caressing sounds and syllables til they formed words...
I know I reminded her of these things:
towards the end of her life she mused
about how as human beings "we cause each other."
With geneology and expanses of history she had tried to make sense
of our wounded lineage and to heal it in dream time.
And even so perhaps in the middle of some unfinished phrase of the song of life
or as a part of that phrase
promply on that first of march, her last breath swirled away like smoke.
I lay in stillness
wherever she was words could no longer be pronounced
not even the brilliant glistening koans beyond sense of her last weeks.
Where she had gone was beyond languages' syllables
a place some words only point to
like small humble guideposts at the edge of the untamed
or like small glistening gems reflecting the light of faraway planets.
Absense was all that was left
its dimensions beyond thought
its peace as inscrutible as it was generous
space blossoming from the depths of everywhere.
It had gathered her up
holding her just as it contains gravity.
For a long time I could not comprehend why we even learn words
or what it meant to walk across the earth
where her footsteps didn't fall
a place we call "the world"...
Recently sitting quietly
watching swirling smoke rising
from a single stick of sandlewood-rose incense
tumbling upward in ascention and getting lost in the luminous cool fall air
—a dance of myriad currents and changes fluid forms of liquid air
no different than all the waters of the planet
or womb waters giving birth to bone—
there floating forming and vanishing.
I saw myself and all creation
appearing and disappearing
arising from and absorbed by space itself.
We as much space as place
as space carves form and form space
again and again one becoming the other
whirling transparencies
form space form space form
creating each other.
The two one
and I became
the witness and the dance
peace
impeccably whole
neither space nor form
nor neither without the other
beyond loss
residing in eternal awareness
beyond the confines of who I thought I was
or the accumulation of history
pure mirror as clear as an untouched mountain 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
in the space between words and in the words
–Lorena Wolfman
