#gary miranda

Spirit, your answers lie

lost somewhere—no, not lost,

misplaced—or placed, rather,

where they belong but where

we have yet to look, like notes

we find between pages of books

years later and half remember, half

forget.

The place we are not does not

exist, we think—and then, going,

find that the world thrives

without us: incredible.

Whole families on the klongs of

Bangkok, brushing their teeth

in the fetid water, flagging

down vegetable boats, existing,

busy.

Who knows what spiked image

you plan to drive into our

hearts today?  What happy

things wait like familiar coats

on the backs of so many chairs?

It is as if, on our one day off,

we had called in sick, this choosing,

these lives that wait for us—here,

there.  Yours, though we call them

Arrowhead; from Listeners at the Breathing Place by Gary Miranda

Why - when we might have been laurel trees, a little darker than all the other greens, with tiny curves at the edge of every leaf like the smiles of a wind - why, then, did we have to be made human, so that denying our destiny, we still long for it?

Certainly not because happiness really exists, that quick gain of an approaching loss. Not to experience wonder or to exercise the heart. The laurel tree could have done all that.

But because just being here matters, because the things of this world, these passing things, seem to need us, to put themselves in our care somehow. Us, the most passing of all. Once for each, just once. Once and no more. And for us too, once. Never again. And yet it seems that this - to have once existed, even if only once, to have been a part of this earth - can never be taken back.

And so we keep going, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it in our simple hands, our already crowded eyes, our dumbfounded hearts. Trying to become it. And yet who do we plan to give it to? True, we'd rather keep it all ourselves, forever. But into that other state what can be taken across. Not the ability to see, which we learn here so slowly, and not anything that's happened here. None of it. And so, the pain. And so, before everything else, the weariness. The long business of love. Only the completely indescribable things.

But later, under the stars - what good would it do anyway, then, to describe these things? For the traveler doesn't bring back from the mountainside to the valley a handful of earth, which would explain nothing to anyone, but rather some acquired word, pure, a blue and yellow gentian. And here we are, perhaps, merely to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jar, fruit tree, window - at most, pillar, tower? but to say them, you understand - to say them in such a way that even the things  themselves never hoped to exist so intensely. Isn't the sly earth's secret purpose, when it urges two lovers on, that all of creation should share in their shudder of ecstasy? A doorsill: the simple way two lovers will wear down the sill of their door a little - they too, beside those who came before and those who will come after...gently.

Here is the time for what you can say, this is its country. Speak and acknowledge. more than ever things are falling away - the things that we live with - and what is replaced is an urge without image. An urge whose crusts will crumble as soon as it grows too large and tries to get out. Between the hammerblows our heart survives - just as the tongue, even between the teeth, still manages to praise.

Praise, but tell the angel about the world, not the indescribable. You can't impress him with your lofty feelings; in the universe, where he feels with far greater feeling, you're just a beginner. So show him some simple thing, something that's fashioned from generation to generation until it becomes really ours, and lives near our hand, and in our eyes. Tell him about the things. He'll stand there amazed, the way you stood beside the rope-maker in Rome or the potter on the Nile. Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours, how even the groan of sorrow decides to become pure form, and serves as a thing or dies in a thing, escaping to the beyond, ecstatic, out of the violin. And these things, that live only in passing, they understand that you praise them. Fleeting, they look to us, the most fleeting, for help. They hope that within our invisible hearts we will change them entirely into - oh endlessly - into us! Whoever we finally are. 

Earth, isn't this what you want, to rise up in us invisible? Isn't it your dream to be someday invisible? Earth! Invisible! If not this change, what do you ask for so urgently? Earth, loved one, I will. Believe me, you don't need any more of your springtimes to win me: one is already more than my blood can take. For as long as I can remember, I've been yours completely. You've always been right, and your most sacred idea is that death is an intimate friend.