I crave the simple and slight intentional shift of turning sideways into the light, as poet David Whyte would invite. The subtle disappearance between the changing tides and slipping underneath the eternal floating archaic plates. A reaching in for the soft subtle nature of asthenospherian suppleness and the ways she shapes perceptions and moves mountains. The way the tone and texture of water changes just right…there, as I slide over her coolness – knowing the slight shift in cellular structure – the break in the wall of the world, is one to be pondered upon and dwelled in with reverence for the gift of the experiential and expanded knowing inherent in the woven mystery of moving back and forth above her with loving touch and fingertips slipping over her glistening ripples.
To disappear from all else, trusting that in the allowance of such there is deep invitational mystery. And, to want and need it more than breath itself. To turn against the raging tides in order to meet her there – eternal in her open stance and patience. And to slide down….all the way into the depths of darkness trusting the light that envelopes such journeying. And knowing. Knowing that little else matters in the moments of the slipping away of things, but the allowance and the passing down. The fading away. Set to strings and the tides of time. To disappear into the originality of it all.
Tobar Phadraic
Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.
Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.
Walk the green road above the bay
and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you, until you catch,
down on your left, the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadows
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live
.
But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask.
And you remember now, that clear stream
of generosity from which you drank,
how as a child your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to take the blessing of the world.
TOBAR PHADRAIC
In RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press
