Hiking to Sirius Through the White Tanks

  Listen

She played from my desire to be one, 
To enter straight into the mind of Earth,
To move beyond the purpose of my life,
Observing forms and gathering what I could,
To go inside, to fruits there of my source
Inside these stoic beings holding still 
For every portrait, every reading, not 
Revealing what they think, although they speak
In harmony and rhyme, as if they know me. 

This world of things, so many worlds away: 
The rainbow-colored mold, the cracks in boulders, 
The giant cactus and the tiny grass,
The dead wood trees placed as a centerpiece…

To all of this the reed flute speaks. 
She, too 
Can only be a facet in the whole, 
Who knows but notes to harmonize her pitch.
She shares of what she's learned and who she's heard 
In all her travels through the heart and mind 
Of me, the news of humans and their yearning. 

The plants and birds all listen carefully. 
They breathe their mute collaboration back.
And we would never even know that they were 
Listening, that this was the completion
We all sought, expressing but one thought, unless 
We believed, and as we believed, the branches 
Sprung to our life, the poles glowed with our visions, 
The birds echoed the notes we actually played 
Exactly as we played them.
We saw the crab  
That formed around a star, we felt the wind 
Of non-material intelligence 
Expand our own listening mind to silence.

At last, the hum of all that is, in orbit
Around us, in layers that we pass through like 
The cities in our dreams, until we find 
At center is the sun of our own eyes, 
That knows by knowing only of ourselves, 
The one unchanging as the vistas move
From light to light, from crags that reappear
When mist escapes beyond the visible,
To canyons reddening deeper, needing 
To be seen, then fading to oblivion.

And mournfulness and ecstasy soon come
To take the place of what is gone, as fractured 
Gifts of vast undifferentiated love,
So perfectly aligned to what you're seeing
You'd think that you created them yourself.
The spiral spins in circles round your eyes.
All is allowed, and all is sanctified.
All is allowed, and all is withheld.

These fields of thinking rock and feeling green
Are no more human than I am, the mind
That moves it all is alien to hawk
And man alike, though both will move within it,
Circling the grandeur of our likenesses 
As unrepentant servants of its love.