The East

"Follow your bliss" said the eastern sun, and it sounded more sweet than the dying words of some antique bodhisattva; deeper even than my tongue could reach - as sticky and light as a life of ease, brushed by the endless mountain air.

The weightless days counted themselves as they passed from the sun that gives life to the silver sleep-taker. Over and over again, the same circle that plainly careened back and forth in its living and dying dance of birth after birth - that wing-fluttered dance of a dying sun passed through my soul and over my eyes over and over again and again. There was nothing to see - for bliss sounded so clear that these days passing by a small pock-marked earth seemed empty air to my open mouth and tongue that could taste only death and release.

Oh, I followed my bliss like an open wound 'til the day-to-day trudge across seam-sown hills seemed more lost than alive, like a bird on a wire whose crystal eyes betray its dead desire. On the last day, these will sink into the sea.

As I turned my mind west, I heard from the rising sun only this: "all finding is stillness."

The countless same-seeming days passed and passed, still. My eyes opened and closed and opened, still. My thirst grew, as my mind grew still through the endless pains of an empty nothing turning over and over and over before my dull eyes.

And you passed as you said “I have seen dying suns. I have felt endless falling through numberless nights on some sky-struck star. I have run and have run and have felt no pain. I have drowned and breathed air again and again. I have seen things, such things that burst forth from my eyes like cold blooms at sunrise.”

I found you with my mind and we waited. I watched you dance naked in firelight, and we waited. I woke you from smiling sleep to see the moon, and we waited, and I watched.

The days were endless. The dance was endless. The rhythmic moving of still feet over the same seam-sown hills lasted like life piled on life.

Until one night, you slept beneath a roof of trees and I found peace beneath a single star and the moon. Rain fell, and I fell in its smooth, silken arms. Through the water-air, I watched you, and I could have died in your crystal eyes, but I woke to the breathless undulation of hills and their end in the cracking waves.

Wishing only to drown and to not breathe again, I followed my bliss like an open wound. I ran, and I ran, and I felt my heart burst through my head like a blood-blooming flower until at the end, all earth was made of soft sand.

Deeply I fell beneath the cracking waves and shattered like a newborn star.