wholeness (iii)

 

 

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