June 2, 2004

Tower of Truth

The terrors of the white page are manifest
As its illusory flat white face collapses inward,
Regressing toward unconditioned freedom.
The freedom, not of language and grammar, but of its violation,
The knowing violation of not knowing what it means,
But a throwing of itself into the unmentionable--
Sensing that fall as consciousness,
Falling, looking backward, waiting as it falls
For those few glimpses of the trajectory's arc:
A formula for the future, barely a haze,
A line whisping in the distance,
Which it has followed only by leaving it behind.
Might clarity, the glimpse, leave its path on the page?
No, not clarity, not consciousness, not knowing,
But the path, the way, the course traveled,
And not the same course, but the course,
Its clarity, of course.

In preparation: the white page.

Who would read such a falling without falling?
Except as judgment, as standard,
As viewed from the Tower of Truth?
That's the mistake,
The truth in the myth.
We have been cast out of that high place;
We fall, and looking backward strain our eyes,
Searching every receding distance to mark our course,
But the tower vanished in the distance long,
Oh so long ago, and now,
Now the truth of the fall is only the arc of the course,
And another kind of clarity.

In preparation: the white page.

Falling,
I care not to see where
My fascination draws me backward.
I would grab hold,
Secure that which has just passed
Beyond my grasp.
But, how foolish,
To tumble like a baby from its crib
And reach for the ceiling.
Boom...on the floor.

But here no floor,
just the time to think
the time of the fall
with no floor but death
and that no floor at all
but the last thought slipping
through the grasp
of one falling
falling forever through
that last thought gone
unrecognized
waiting for the next
which will not be....
no longer a course
a way of tracing the arc of the fall....
only the fall itself
the purity of death
the solidity
the floor of absence
an end to retrospection.

In preparation: the white page.

rri