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.