But what is death but a momentary texture
The instant of a garment flung aside
As by nixie in the motel pool
In the flux of glorious sensation
When wormlike we emerge and die
Cast off for good the regimental regalia of personality
Extend our participation in the flux
Of dissipation and collection
In another key another mode
The mixed substance of salt dissolved in ocean
That flux interpenetrated in any case with spacetimelessness
No more to trouble ourselves with the fretful antinomies illusory
As body and soul within and without time and timelessness being and unbeing we and they I and it
Driven hence by the ministry of water
Of which virtue the flower is engendered
That furthermore dissolves substance nearest to a universal solvent
And light that suffuses
The transit of striving energy
In the fluxuous part of the world
The experience of ion alga rodent and redtail hawk
And how much sensation does say a cubic meter
Of seemingly dead matter experience
Well infinite it would seem
And what difference does it make
If even infinite orders of infinity obtain
Considering the possibility of peace
Interpenetrating the overmuch flux
Forget about this non-event non-state of death
When life that is to say motion
Energy passing futurity memory
Movement horizontal vertical infinitely oblique
Ascent descent lateral curving
Crashing careening creeping trudging leaping gesturing
Sneaking cavorting consuming digesting excreting
Photosynthesizing depredating grazing fermenting
Dawdling dithering dallying dilating descending
Mitosis and pitching woo
The hands that grasp the feet that dance
The flagella that drive toward light
Awake and at rest
Striving for nourishment
The qualities of qualities of qualities
Happens happens happens
The composite body no more than a chalk outline
On the scintillating pavement
Soon to wash away with rain
A hard but soluble composite stone
Like a pillar of salt
A petrifaction of that which
Happens happens happens
Each object a passing node in the flux
An ephemeral intersection of ever-wavering vectors
A mineral composite a congeries of other objects
A faceted cubic salt crystal
And all objecthood stands in relation to all subjects
Is a mountain an object
Is an ocean
There’s only one ocean you know on this spherey earth
Topologically speaking
Though there are many coasts
Whereupon the many may behold the serene horizon
The infinite subjects even on our tiny darling passing node of a planet
The darling spherey planet that has nourished us mother that she is
Daughter of infinite grandmothers
Tracing back to the great mother before nature
Outside alongside interpenetrative
Each subject is the center of its universe
A solitary confinement delusional
That is an apex a vertex a point without dimension
That is experience converges on a point of ephemeral intersection
From which all matter recedes shifting red
Pitiably brief in duration
Itself shifting unpredictably
Its indurance a theoretical construct
That our variable experience of time explodes
As sequence duration memory fugitivity frequency and ennui
Rush rest spin dally dawdle dilate
Hurry up and wait
Tempo temporal contemporary extempore contretemps temporize
And scansion arbitrary regulation of rhythm
Subject to surveillance from royal academy and systemic analysis
But the art resides in variation
Thus time a suppositious matter of definition
In ever-fluxous contexts situations circumstances
A glorious release into counterfactuality
Or a fallacious adamantine chain
When we suppose time and space sine qua non
But perception interprets sensation as it flows
Gives it angle attitude aspiration
Hence the Doppler effect a truthful registry
Of an object’s receding
The frequency stable on the moving train
But perceptual pitch detecting motion
To the hearer beside the tracks
All life interacts with life
And let us disclaim together or proclaim
Life mind poem world consciousness organic unity of subject and object
Gift of metaphor meant to keep a lid
On an infinite field of ceaseless change
To render it sufficiently intelligible for us to confer
Too vast to be comprehended
Too dynamic to be defined
Our confined little universe probably but one entry
In an endless dance of musical chairs
As a spume of universes drifts and dissipates
Thus to open that experience before change
All is real
Even the unreal is real
As the goatboy is real
As Tigger is a real tiger
Albeit a toy and an act of fiction
And all products of the imagination are real
As are the assuredly real objects of perception
Product and object more aptly process and event
And surely perception may be hoodwinked
By illusion delusion and deception
Nevertheless real objects obtain
And don’t perform the pompous pyrrhonist charade
You wouldn’t have survived the night of your birth
If people didn’t know stuff
If people couldn’t know stuff
This is a hand
This is another hand
You can sustain the skeptic’s attitude only so far
Or miss out on lunch
Never mind where the hand begins or ends
But the smothering infinity of ignorance
Too is real
A truth but a theoretic truth
When we know enough
To keep the precious babe alive
Through the dark night of its birth
Real things give us what suffices
So long as we learn and teach
Sharing experience which is real
As many real things are wont to do
In pheromone or discourse or mineral nudge
And thus the hominid species enjoy the privilege
Of verbal interaction
Wellspring of understanding
And earnest of the one great poem
The bountiful invitation to confer
For all experience participates in the flux
Not a dome of many-colored glass
Dividing the world in two
But a bioluminescent ocean of infinite wavelengths
Perceptually variable as objects advance or recede
Collect and dissipate
Mingle and separate
That is to say joins in the dance of life
That is to say manifest the one great life
And merciful regularities obtain even in the flux
Such as gravitation dimple in spacetime
Such as the creative drive that aims for equilibrium
Such as that sublime and blessed mood
That grants apprehension of the deep interfusion
On those brief occasions when like little mosquito larvae
Freed momentarily from the regimentation of personality
We tumble upward and breathe the air above our submergence in ego
And thus all must attest I can’t be satisfied
For each subject big or small experiences the world
And drinks it in and hungers for the boon of pleasure
Long may it last
But it lasts but an eyeblink
For the being encased in its notional stout perimeter
But the transcendent world interpenetrates the phenomenal one
And in our fluctuating experience we glimpse transcendence
In facts mathematical and let it be said moral
And how much more might remain unseen
Invisible to gelatinous primate neurology
O living thing thou cell organelle ion
May joy be thy portion for thou art worthy to enjoy peace
To know the rich peace of your taxon one division among many
For the advent of peace shocks to wakefulness
And awareness dawns of the goodness of things
For things are good before we are aware
The oneness before division
Before genus or species
Peace beyond extent
Beyond universes unknown
The innumerable souls
Each a participant in the one life
The fictional the historical the living and the dead
Those we have known and those we only know about
The holy communion of family and friends
Surely we will mourn those who pass and that which passes
For what we have seen we now see no more
No more to feel the lover’s or the mother’s touch
Sorrow not soon soothed
Even the passing of the beloved child
Irreplaceable irrepressible too briefly in our care
Of all losses the hardest
And we are as children in our incapacity
But as children too in our surprising capacities
Only the living suffer sorrow and the disturbance of joy
And hence death is not to be taken lightly
Of a guildsman or a snowflake
Of the leaves that lovely fall
And drift wavering to the ground
Endearing part of the unknown whole
And we have good reasons to grieve their passing
And address the shadow of death with indignation
But the greater world recognizes neither beginning nor ending
And we thus surrender to pleasure while it lasts but briefly
The beloved child’s surprising capacities and endearing incapacities
And the enduring good like perfect circle
The sweetness of reconciliation when we have fallen into conflict
The beauty of truth
The truth of beauty
A universe in a grain of sand
And eternity in an instant