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a letter, in verse, to those who might want to come here
When I lived on earth
I knew so many pleasures!
Just opening my eyes was one of them.
The river of sorrow, of course,
was always in danger of flooding,
but four concrete joys come quickly to mind,
to suggest to you the incomparable
life that was available,
when I lived on earth.
1. Paradise
Paradise is the name
for the time before the Fall —
not the one of theology, but
that happend to me
when I was seven or eight,
that separated me,
trapped under its terrible wreckage,
from myself and everyone else.
Paradise is the world, perfect and ever-new,
all clocks smashed or never invented —
getting up every day to play,
and nothing was wrong or could be wrong
because the humdrum angels had not yet arrived,
and we played enchanted until the far horizon of the day,
then waited safely in our nests
for another forever tomorrow to play again,
and even a billboard advertising cigarettes
would take me to an exotic world
with date palms and camels and pyramids,
because I couldn't read.
2. The Light
The Light is the glint of Paradise
that remains, no matter what,
somewhere in my field of vision
wherever I am — the angel of the Present,
rendering every landscape holy,
every room a shrine,
letting me know the shape of Perfection
that is latent in every moment of every day,
and my human work,
to sculpt that Perfection to fruition
from the raw materials of time and space
with the tough yet vulnerable
hands of my heart.
That Light is Being
and nothing I can do
can ever improve upon it or change it,
and that fact renders all effort
impossible from the start,
but it also makes me an artist,
a child of Don Quixote,
whose every breath is to unwrap
that Beauty from a mere glint
until it manifests
in the very composition of matter
of the work at hand.
It is the legacy of the Paradise of childhood,
all that is left of the Risen World
to reconstitute Heaven from,
and even if the black
cloud of despair had engulfed my world
and I were lying in a shadowed bed
or walking a last mile on death row,
the Light, that glint,
would be there behind the cloud,
smiling, winking.
3. Women
And yes, I told you I would speak
of the beauty of women
when I lived on earth,
and I got to walk the earthly streets
and sit in cafes
and observe these creatures
coming and going,
and the geometry of their forms
and the way it was augmented
and counterpointed by their attire
were a miracle and a revelation to my mind
that in 5 decades I was never quite able to assimilate
without the whole thing new again
next time I walked out
amid the parade of humanity.
Columbus steering his water-course
over the outrageously rounded earth
could not have known a new world
more stunning than the one I find
in a world peopled by women,
and that golden ratio, too,
is the perfection of the Light
and a reconstitution of Paradise,
4. The Infinite Possibility
and the last thing I wanted to tell you
about when I lived on earth
is how all things are possible
and there are no limits
to what can be erased
of misfortune and misery,
and what bliss,
what indescribable Bliss remains,
and how Existence itself
is a Sun pulsing, mighty its rays,
and we are all part of that Engine of Love,
and when we forget, when we forget...
I don't know how we forget,
there are yet mysteries I don't understand,
but when the bricks of the city
and the windows of our souls
grow black with the grime of life,
and our inner eye sees but the residue
of friction, disappointment and failure
and the seeming impossibility of our dreams
and even, sometimes, of living a normal, ordinary day
I tell you,
it can all be erased
as if it never was, and what is left
is the Original Shining!
I want to tell you this to give you hope
no matter where you're reading this.
Though you'll have to experience it yourself,
I can give you two clues where to look:
the heart, the spiritual
muscle of the heart,
when it works overtime in prayer,
can move the universe
and bring God close;
And there were beings,
when I lived on earth —
a very, very few,
and mostly very quiet —
who could look at you
and vaporize your sorrow
in that glance.
CODA:
This is what I wanted you to know
about when I lived on earth,
in case you're contemplating coming here,
or in case you're here and have forgotten,
like we all forget.
And everything else —
the taste of coffee or hot bread,
the vision of sunrise,
the sharp stab of a cold day,
the expanse of the sea —
these too are reminders of the Light and Paradise,
and of the Infinite Possibility
that were here,
that I loved,
when I lived on earth.
copyright 2006 by Max Reif
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