poem

 Incarnation

And suddenly the present moment seemed to escape abstraction, pinned as it usually is between irretrievable past and unknowable future, became imbued with geometric extension and manifested itself materially as a large room. And in this room was everything I knew, had known, would ever know. Blink your eyes half a millisecond and you’ve been transported to a different realm, a place where everything there had never been seen before. This was the place where all the changing occurred. Where everything happened. The more I stayed with that thought the more the room expanded. Soon it was the size of a concert hall, an underground parking garage, a domed stadium, a vast open plain under a roof of deep blue sky. The notion of an all-inclusive universe. It could be as big as it needed to be and sometimes needlessly small. In order to be there you had to be a changing thing yourself. Which meant that you, right now, considering this wrenching fact, imagining what it will be like, once you have a chance to look back on it and reflect, will never be the one who is there when it all sort of makes sense. Anyway, I was convinced for a while that all this would only ever occur in this very special room. Alas, even this vision began to flicker, as it must, in order to have arisen here. And the walls wobbled and then fell down and the ceiling wisped away like steam. All that remained were the old frustrations. In the end I was able to save the room, but only in miniature. It fits perfectly inside my head. In this diminished room, the only thing that doesn’t change is that everything changes.

6/24/24