WHO IS A
TEACHER IN THIS WORLD
1
What is useful in this world of words
and who is a teacher in this dark world?
The word as catapult, cure, as clarity-pill,
swallowed among verbal debris
to rebalance the teetering heart.
The word stood-by, person and words used
indivisible. That a fine finger of some
slight flight point out of
and to what
eternally is true. A reverberation, clang
of recognition, more light in the corner there
of a generally muddy landscape,
shaped sound making nonsense of the scum useless
and letting rise to the top
pure gold.
The straight exchange.
2
Who is a teacher on this earth
but he upon whom
all this earth depends
like water beads hanging from a willow bough
after spring rain.
Little does matter know sometimes how truly
immaterial is its origin,
little does it let on, sitting in its harsh metallic light
in the Americana kitchen, how windswept is its
chute from Elsewhere into various
stuttered still frames ticking
forward, to be here.
All of this serpentine uncoiling from light,
this world with all its “tragic” flaws
only a mild interference.
3
Over the great mountain ranges
into the great and lesser ages of rapid transmission
of thought and its attendant
equilibrium, carrying the milk jug
full
around the marketplace and returning it
full to its point of origin, not one
single milk-bead droplet spilled,
this precise calm equipoise, which links up
age after age along Himalayas of absolutely
hair-raising social upheavals, in this
traffic jam world of all the cars trying with
chromium brute strength
to make it through the tunnel to the
sunlight on the other side
at once,
this teaching flows.
4
Who does this teaching reach
if not with every breath of them
each fish drowsily swishing in the lagoon
and each peregrine falcon diving sleek as Horus
over a field of Egyptian wheat,
each man or woman, wild or small child of us
who dreams or merely sleeps,
inhabiting the pool of speech dimensions
exchanging glances,
each gene exactly interlinked, each genetic
code decoded and the message
held in animate suspension
in each person alive, passed like a tray of delicacies
down the long banquet table of history,
to each Prince, each chimneysweep, car-hop,
millionaire, oil magnet, flop or failure
awake as the mantis cocking its head in the air
with its beady eyes open,
to each speck of life aswirl or still
this teaching
binds.
5
And what is this teaching
if not
to meet Divine Reality now,
for after death there will be nothing
but meeting,
Luminous planarian, amoebic light, scintillant
universe in a cell, light-spray out from the
material cascade, rush of things and lives and experiences
through time/space with nothing but
acceleration at an even speed going
everywhere at once, this
unchangeable nature, magnetism attracting the
inevitable mechanism to itself, this
solid, fluid, evanescent, transparent, tactile,
untouchable, singable, sizeable, totally silent
surrounding that surrounds us down to the core
of our interiors,
a nowhere that looks at a somewhere
and a somewhere that looks right back,
this knowing we are not alone
when the lights are out
and we lie alone in our beds,
or stand by the head of our beds in dawn light
gazing at the silver mist
as time rides droplet by droplet by
and we ride in it, mist in a mist
over unsolid earth below us,
face it, naked, grateful, acknowledge its
greatness, superior knowledge, fate in its
decisive decree, see it
working in minute particulars for our
benefit, lifting the veil to let us see
at once its
Totality.
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