Wander Song

1.
I sweep my arm in an arc through the dark space in front of me. This blind gesture gives shape to my impulse to reach, to stretch, to open. Urgencies more energetic than words want to find a means of expression and a place to stand outside of what I can say or do.

2…
To insert myself into this time where people shrink themselves, make small their imaginations, strive to merge, blend, disappear. By our own design and with no rocket we could reach distant sparks, slip from dimension to domain, discover islands without needing to sail to them, make peace with phantoms that now turn their backs on us in spite. We are ever the curious ones, still the explorers. If we cannot fly out, we scatter in bits. We are not creatures who thrive from limits.

3…
Buried in kivas of crumbled pueblos are clay and stone fragments that witnessed chants, wander songs to spirits they asked for assistance. They must have known of these points of entrapment that precede explosion and redouble the next expansion. Speck of consciousness – unique cluster of photons that hurtle in a lightless journey – guided by the songs that sent them outward toward the next earth, the next moon, the next iteration of what we can’t now know.

4…
What stories do you whisper to your children so that they hear what the heart needs, remember how we held their hands, recognize their own kind among the many that would dissuade or discourage them? How can their link to who we were refuse to be lost? How can we not bind them to things that no longer help? These children will need to travel light. What must they know from us without chance of forgetting?

5…
I have set aside a pair of walking boots in the nighttime quietness of my house. I have placed just one of my oldest books next to these shoes. Even if scraps of this book’s pages survive, they will imply a vanished legacy. The code will suggest and awaken the way the old songs must have. I recall things that no one has ever told me. How can that be? It must be time now. I am ready. We are ready even if we don’t know why or what that means. We are ready.

Dream of Vanquished Colonels, One Living and One Gone

I am standing before my regiment. They are red-sashed, chins jutting, straight-standing, still. Waiting for one signal to move, prove precision, underscore discipline.

Then a voice that speaks through this dream reveals a truth into my left ear – a secret that unfolds as the troops and I stand together on this flattened field – that they are a rabble without me and I am nothing in their absence. There exists this interface and beyond that, no other point against which I might know that I am real!

And even more is missing. My gut tightens when I remember that you are long gone. Not there to stand next to me, to see me before these three battalions. I can't show you, cannot exist in your witnessing, find substance through your half-grinned nod.

So then this is a nightmare! A threatening dream that repeats. The rip of it cuts as if for the first time– that no soil holds the print of your feet, no shadow falls from your raised arms, none of your spoken words echo outside of my memory. You exist as a hole within of me, – empty space – a nothingness as immense as ever you were fact - when you stood over my kneeling form, proud, conquering. I no more than a boy’s soul in my tough thin jacket of flesh.

I can’t reject this dream, these recessed facts. Emptiness can’t be chased from where its existence cannot be shown through taste or touch.