If night and day are but the wink of God’s eye,
A million calyxes have opened and closed in a single wink.
Desire blinds and bewilders memory of love, like the slow torpor of heat escaping a tormented earth
the wrath that follows is a midnight howl,
a bloodless gash in the soul of man,
wrought in the anvils of lust,
ever gluttonous bitterness, ever paralyzing,
now violent now lecherous, a pestilential torrent beating against the castle of the soul,
sullen like a devil who cannot wet it.
Sorrows only end when we become perfect witnesses
and he who no longer seeks umbrage in grief nor joy ,
he who is like the stillness of a quiet summer night,
seated in the garden, moonflowers vining their way into the light,
he has learned the secret of witnessing,
he is the perfect witness, for he has nothing to gain from the object of his witnessing,
nothing to prove,
in whom self has conquered self,
for whom only the bliss of knowing the love of God exists—
to seek such a purity of intent in the works of life, to work as witness,
to love the wicked and good,
hold the sinner and saint in one’s arms with the same devotion, with the same unflinching embrace of truth.
Indeed only these can be judged as true works, works wrought in the fine filigree of sacrifice,
as a reaper’s scythe against the harvest,
pitiless in its shearing of sheaves,
yet seeking not its fruit for his own gain—
stern, simple, salutary,
like a a stack of white linens
freshly dried in the sun.
Knowledge is like this: a play of a play within a play and the world is its stage–
as darkness is the source of light and light the cause of shadow,
the lie also bears the seed of truth,
for the liar too is a truth-teller
ever revealing the very truth
he seeks to suppress, and so enlightening us all
as a murderer gives birth to life
as a mother suppresses it
As a soldier yearns for peace on the battlefield, so a false peace-monger may be the harbinger of pusillanimity
In evil a glimmer of good
and in the good always the glimmer of evil
all that is is also all that isn’t
and all that was is also all that is and will be,
for matter and spirit can neither be created nor destroyed
and response is not merely a function of the living, but also the non living
Death is but the beginning of life
and life but the beginning of death
Pain the precipitate of pleasure
And pleasure an escape of pain –
as the sun rises in one place and sets elsewhere,
as the tide leaps even as it recedes
amidst the relativity of time and space,
love is the only constant
love that slips a sapling out of the earth and nourishes it with rain,
love that draws a flock of geese into a wild dance against the break of day,
Love that syncopates the choral cacophony of human voices into metric harmony,
Love that pulls the heavens tightly around the earth, like some spangled blanket, soft and ethereal, studded with the diamonds of the night.
