Is a corner glimpse inside the Eye worth the word to speak about it?
Is knowing as human knows worth a poem to write about it?
For I am afraid I belittle the insight if I linger too long, draw
perimeters around it, squeeze it between walls, build
a fortress to encase it. There is no special reason, except
sometimes the Ego, wishing to perpetuate its single-minded
legacy, pulls it together in one fat lumpy prize. It begs a legitimate
question, this Ego: Is there a beyond beyond? When mother comes—
as she surely does, neither sailing nor soaring nor gliding nor floating—
when mother comes as one party to the dead, I know her presence
like palpable waves breaking on shore, as tough rind I am now
breaking into. Every anniversary she sticks around, sometimes
for a week, sometimes for two months, sometimes for a day.
I see her. Not like a flute’s high voice or guitar strings singing or
a stream’s vocalizations over rocks, but as mother risen among
the living. She is my mother, still—that reality as I am still her
daughter. But even this awareness—my mother’s gesture toward
the living, her transient status among us—resonates beyond
a diurnal turning, I do not diminish my own participation in her
return. She is my guarantee to parlay her gift into future investments.
Her beyond comes to me, just as the Eye reflects intermittent
patterns of my own disbelief, hoping I am more than particles
I cannot see, do not feel pulling me apart, radicalizing my own
particle smasher. In supposing I am merely variegated compositions
of subatomic quarks—those most elementary of particles—will
they know my own existence as an up-down charm, maybe a little
strange from top to bottom? I am not relieved of my duties because
of a glimpse. It is a covert shot in the dark, a mandala dream—
a persistent hope. Still, my mother is of that crowd. At least
I know her when she comes. I recognize her journey beyond beyond.
Now, I am sitting on this mound of earth, watching the doves kissing
on the wires above, gravity working its pleasure however much
the quarks bash my inner self. But someday, beyond the Milky Way
I will meet Mother. There is no franchise there. No hedging on a
transcendent leash. But never mind. Everyone has a religious bent.
