The first gate's touch. You touch the world and it touches you--you reach out and find you're cell. A second gate will open before your eyes: a well-timbered womb mumbles back as you blindly beat your drum.
An ear, a hum
holds you
as you suckle life.
Now grown, you see a third gate reflect a fourth:
You Imagine Loves and Hates and I's.
That Four equals Five.
The sixth gate is death and you know its borders well
around words, neither yours nor mine, we pile like snow
onto water. You will say the water's clear and snow melts.
Look closer.
Look beyond the shell
game of life
and feel ohms
like electricity
branching into
the seventh gate: Awe
is not the branch resting on river of life
but a hook inside a needle that weaves
itself, a tapestry: memories, selves
the gross net of life cast
like a magic carpet ride
glistening like snowflakes
who melt to sheen on the back
of a branch floating down deltas
Mississippi blues kissing
staring down river's abyss
with the pool of the moon
If brilliance were just a second
you'd drift like foam
whipped in a jiff
and going home....
But given time it curls
like a great Fin
up skating from seas
the world's never known
--even idea, let go
You must ; The eighth gate will not hear your bald cry from the world, it will not raise you from the sea. You cannot drown in it, but drift down to the bottom, like a shark without his Fin that the sailors make into soup.
You float down
up from bottom
as primal doubt
to the knowing universe
kindness--cruelly
set things like these rhythmic gates
flinging mud up like a ranging horse
or a whistling grave -- you decide
If you still believe in gates, the ninth gate is beyond gods' sutra
and if real, beyond cold calls of fact, and if false
I'm positive it's beyond the nurturing call of nature
who feeds us best when we are cruel, beyond bliss
living, if real, must (insert self here) then leave
it is cruel conditioning of seasons
that cricket upon returns.
(self-portrait)
