Hanging On By Letting Go

Memoirs of the great gifts : the miracles of kindness,
geode midnights: the universe a cave of stars
securely filled
with Eros, photosynthesis, the unimaginable

delight of light, of warmth of any kind,
body peace, dawn thrill, sweet death
when you need it. Miracles of kindness,
of someone knowing what you need to hear

and saying it for nothing,
knowing what you need to have and opening a way
for you to have it without a price,
taking fears apart for someone young and handing her

a free day with nothing to do but live all out, safe
as finding
crane-haven woodlands out of sight, like lovers’ grace,
a truth with no opposite, getting what you want
in a world that doesn’t want you.

Such joys, we know,
are once only,
one after one after one.
If you have them

as you would a breath,
if you are them,
one after one,
you are them forever.

All past
is infinite in us
and beyond perception,
like reality, always there,
remembered or not,
what has happened
is who we are. And we are
once only, one after one after one,
never less
than once.

The past has no past
when it was not. For us,
it’s the hanging on
now, one now after another,
loyal to the duty
to fill up now,
each now around us,
with astonishments of joy,
letting go

of precarious horrors
dark fogs of dread, cutting
the puppet strings
of crippling, ancient habits.

Each moment lost
to a fierce supposing, is
an inner dumb show
of hate or want,

a death of now
buried alive
in mind scree clacking,
running off at imagination where you are
in complete control

if you only knew it, free
to make an inner world,
any world you please — a badger’s den
with a full larder and a good library,

Better
some delusions than the phony
absolutes of fear dolled up as truth.

Every time we look ahead
through frames of expectation,
what is
evaporates before
it can become us. Better some delusions
than others, better a world of toast and jam,
than a world of the black Marias of the mind.
Death is an empty pool
in which to gaze and walk away.

Get over
death.
The crafts of surviving
through to the end
— an acrobat’s
tricks of fact;
falling just doesn’t work,
isn’t worth the thrill,
stay in the air, juggling your chances
letting go, catching on
then falling to a lower rung
it’s always better than a fatal thud,
sky writing hope with your body,
words just come
to live by
when you ask or help,
too far from yourself too fall:’
What do I do now:
“Don’t mind.”
“Be glad.” “Be free.”
“No stress now.”

Acrobats without nets,
angels without wings,
wisdom without
sacred books,

panning for gold
without water, Quixote without
an embarrassment of
astonishment.

The law of not
minding is not
that troubles don’t matter
it’s just that they are

forgettable before
they’re even remembered,
like most blemishes of pain,
most bad days.

The glad, free mind
talks them away. They
have nothing to say
by sly depression anyway.

Not minding is
not ignoring, or denying;
it is not bothering to object because
there is more, so much more

than mere objection
to be had. The hope
of being glad
is to see and be

the totality of what’s
not wrong,
all that’s left
when what you’ve minded not

is no longer on your mind.
That kind gladness
is forever ready
never to be denied; it’s only

misplaced for as long
as you forget the acrobat’s
best trick, even flying
through the air with the greatest of ease

thanks always works
on the slippery trapeze.
The truth of being free
is to peel off the impulse

to predict, all scripts
are hot molasses, simmering
fly traps, all tar baby supposings.
Set out of that fiery skin,
hang on to the air,
let go, free fall
you’ll catch yourself.

The gift
of no stress now,
being always one
now at a time

not denying
history or pretending
fate, not living

in the never
never of what
is not, but in the all
that is. That
is the peace that passes

as the only solace. We know
every safety, every kindness,
all delight passes on from the never yet
into the always was, just

as every horror does. What a gift
the great disappearance is, what
a miracle of kindness, not unlike
humor is, cats with long

toes pawing Rachmaninoff,
dancers with magic hair
entwined like
Castro’s vociferous beard with
Einstein’s tangoing hair

moral time warps where Mighty Mouse
is offered Hitler’s hair cream
and declines.
Humor comes from atoms, like windy mornings do,
miracles of gentleness are properties of atoms

like light is a property of suns, like great plans in little books
arise from genius neurons on in the pitch black cosmos of the skull,
oh the genius of the good hand on the back, the call when we think
no call will come, the gift that starts the gift you are
moving into being

are all as much of what the cosmos is
as gravity, black holes, the poisoned maw
of history. Kindness is not anomalous, it is
a climate of imagination
that heals the sores it finds, that wants
geode mornings at the core of every nightmare, every dark
unfathomable disaster of the mind.
It knows what the blue heron means
flying with you as you drive, window height,
barely off the ground,
staying with you, low enough for you to feel
the essence the chances
we call luck. Like light, like wind,
like thought, luck is an operation of the stuff of stars,
always only once, the blue heron eyeing you from the corner of your eye.
You saw it, you marveled, you remembered
it is you.
Aren’t you glad, death wasn’t on your mind, that you weren’t minding tomorrow,
that you opened up to everything else around your aching back, that you weren’t off talking to yourself as if you were some crazy assassin?

© V.B. Price, December 2010

 

(Image derived from photo by James St. John.)