"Misericordia"... long meditation on God knows what... completed three years ago today

La Faba

Castilla y León

Spain

How can we experience the dark nights

of the Other’s subterranean dreams?

We have to travel deeper in time

than the consciousness of our memory,

before our awareness of  the solitude of our naked being,

downward or upward or outward or inward

to that dim, unperceived and unrecorded abode,

where our empathy or our merely human compassion,

constricted, can draw us into that dark and terrible

experience of suffering’s imprint and that secret contrition,

worn as leaden rust-corroded chains on the beat of heart

and muscle, and the thought of mind and the cry of soul;

but we must keep at it again and again

through this smear of time until attempt becomes ritual

of the essence and full form of the human animal,

with all acts of excretions executed and the breathing in

of spirit intact.  Can Sophocles or the unknown Hebrew poet,

who penned the Book of Job from spirit and idea

and narrative and commentary from before word

became recordable unit of sound and concept,

give this to us through word wired to ancient honor

and through the dignity that has made man into man,

who is well too aware of his own animal’s viciousness

and violence toward his fellows on this fellow-ship,  

a round, spherical vessel coursing through the vast void,

who is well too aware of the erasure and restructuring

of words and their renaming that reach even into the soul? 

Yet, in some moments of the uneven flow of time,

even on a wilderness trail nearby that scoops  through

rhododendron thickets and damp moss-lined sinks and drips

and springs and swollen creeks from the thaw of a brief warmth

mid-winter, even though the way of the trail or path is man’s

only impression upon the being of wilderness, there is the sense,

true and certain, of it’s all having been perceived before

by eye and nerve, whose impression remains to be received

by others aware only as humans, and our breathing in and out

catches this connection, of animal to sentience,  to feel, to spirit. 

The holy pantheon of forces pushes the flow of climate and breeze

and the cold and grey frozen fog to which my fellows

awakened this very morning in the great ebb and flow

of the temporal river carrying us afloat through desire and action.

Yes, all this and the river’s record of time’s flex and bend. 

It flows into rock and the interior of all things,

and it carries us  to the unbearable and terrible beauty

of this commiseration and this metanoia.