Posts Tagged ‘mystical experience’
Arbor Vitae
Tree of Life
A child questions whether trees
have their winter roots
in the ground or in the sky
and whether there are leaves
underfoot unseen
filling the veins we mine.
The child is answered
that only human roots
have their trees in the sky;
and if leaves
became an acceptable mode of exchange
our land would still be bankrupt
of wonder.
Toyfish
Silver carp,
fat goldfish in a cosmic pool,
you were my little-girl god;
you were where the thread
crooked
filled the invisible spool
head to tail.
Still swimming like a shuttle
you weave bright
lightyears
between the stars,
those silver pegs where
knots of matter are
on the black frame
of the spacetime loom.
I’ve made a toyfish,
much like you.
Slender, three-finned
it ascends, heaping an overspin
of fire behind it
a trail too fast
unravelling
My new fish dives
like a needle
toward the cratered button
of the moon,
and threads it,
and heads for the dozen big
buttons, grey and marrow-red
and the asteroid
scattered necklace of seedpearls
flung between the worlds.
Silver carp,
slim goldfish in the cosmic pool,
when you’ve unwound
from argent head to tail,
when you’re a skeleton,
a fishbone wishbone
by that first knot
dangling from the finished thread,
My toyfish
that is much like you,
and you,
will make a dark rendez-vous,
a docking manoeuvre
over the last black rent;
will bring you thread enough
to silver the separate spaces
into one whole sun.
Seedbed
Time’s flower the clock
unfolds the child in me
who in my dream awakes
to find her body sepalled green
with flame.
In her brain
the tongue’s blue root,
the fire sings her secret name.
From her navel,
an umbilicus of light
stems a black blossom
whose galaxies of pollen
slow ponderously
winding her in
‘Till the clockflower’s pistils
fall thick as if from rain
and pause in the finished hour
so the key that flicks
the black seeds back
can turn and spin her ’round again.
On wakening she opens
wizened eyes
and I touch
with her timeless hands
the face of an old, old
woman.
