Prose-Poems
I’m fascinated by the conundrum of how I can use words to speak of what’s beyond words, in how to collapse dualities—dissolving the seer, seeing and seen. That could be in the realm of nature, emotion, psychology or the sacred—depending on the preferred language of the reader/listener. Word meditations, if you like, that take us to a place without tension, a place of peace. So these are my personal explorations; they are partly inspired by the 1200-year-old scripture the VijñānaBhairava Tantra. I enjoy contemplating everyday objects and seemingly mundane events. I’ve been working to capture that moment in time in which I experience a liberation from my sense of limitation. This is a practice and these are the works-in-progress…
In the moment when the body has filled with breath…
In the moment when the body has filled with breath,
that small rest place – that turn to the outbreath – contains absolute peace.
Her breath is a gulp in, a thought I can’t breathe and a gasp out. Her heart is a drum. She tries to remember what that Little Book of Meditation told her to do – there was something on the breath… But her mind gets lost in the familiar panic, and she has to close her eyes.
And then, she sees a small square light; it’s tucked into her throat channel. With each inhale it crashes down the dark shaft of her insides to her heart and with each exhale it hurtles up to the crown of her head. And she realises – by the groaning machinery sort of noise it makes – that, of course, it’s a lift.
The lift distracts her from her tight chest, so she focuses in more. Now she can see its cage of curved gold metal. It must be heavy she thinks but, surprisingly, she barely feels it pass to and fro in her throat – only as much as when a cough sweet goes down and tickly like that too. But then it is very small indeed.
The lift’s mechanism seems increasingly to shudder. And she realises it’s not helping her breathing. I have to come back– calm myself down somehow. But her breathe isn’t a nice place to be at all and her mind won’t stay there.
Anyway, even more bizarre than the very fact of having a lift inside her to begin with, she thinks, are the reflections in the glass sides of it that suggest other things passing by: a sofa and a fine table, a vertical slice of floor; and a man’s face. But no… the man’s pale face is inside the lift! He is pale and wide eyed and wears an expression that might be surprise or sadness or fear. And his mouth is moving. She’s sure this is that man called Leo from the Hotel Bristol in Paris, although she’s no idea how she knows as she’s never seen a picture of him. She learnt about Leo the day her mother took her to tea at the hotel…
Enough! her racing mind orders. But no sooner has she pulled it back to the erratic rise and fall of her chest, than it takes flight again.
The manager showed them the bedroom door that day because the story was remarkable. The room should have been number 106 except that, during the war, the owner, Hippolyte, took down the number to pretend that the room didn’t exist. He did that to hide the hotel architect, a Jewish man. For three whole years, Leo couldn’t leave that room, except in the relative safety of darkness when he paced the corridors.
Come back. Come back. But she can’t.
When next the small man called Leo – in the slightly bigger lift inside the even bigger her – travels downwards, he mutters to himself “This body?” as if it were a question. Maybe the lift actually touches her heart then because she feels pain. As he shoots up to her head, he asks “My God?”, and it makes her feel dizzy. And she’s not even sure if he actually says those things or just thinks them or if, in fact, it is her thinking them for him.
“Death?” he whispers at the next falling of her chest. “Life?” he sighs at the end of the next rising. She thinks he is praying or trying to work something out, and wants to help him. But how do you help a little man who is riding up and down in your throat? And anyway, she doen’t know at all how it feels to be an old man or a Jewish person with Nazis very close by, or an architect who made a beautiful lift. Nor, for that matter, does she know how it feels to be a hotel owner risking his life to hide an old Jewish architect man – although she’s sure it must be very scary indeed.
Leo keeps muttering, and her breath is out of control. She forces her attention back to her body.
The lift – going down now – reflects a picture on a wall, an oriental rug, another vertical slice of floor. It clatters in the shaft of her.
The drum of her heart speeds and speeds; it will hammer itself into oblivion.
And she thinks how the man hurtling up and down in her throat looks as frightened as she feels. Help me! she begs something bigger than herself. And at that moment, she gives up trying to do anything – even to stay alive.
It’s then, quite suddenly, that the lift seems to land beside her heart, and the cranking machinery stops. There is a silence and darkness around Leo; she can barely see him now.
And she can’t hear her heart either; perhaps it has stopped. Perhaps she is dead.
The gold, metal gates of the lift release and open to a dank place – maybe a basement. On the other side stands another man – a more rounded man. The two men look at each other. “Leo” says the rounded man, softly.
“Hippolyte” responds Leo. Their eyes are locked and watery.
It’s then that she realises that she can still feel the pulse of her body, and therefore she knows that she lives. It’s just that her breath has landed too. An instant of relief. But what will happen after the pause? Will my heart keep beating?
As she’s thinking this, words begin to fall out of Leo. “All I want to do is make a lift beautiful enough…that works well enough…to thank you…to show you how grateful I am. But you hear it? I can’t even do that.” He searches Hippolyte’s face. “Why do you risk your life for me?”. The me is a squeak.
Hippolyte seems not to be able to speak but then he does. “Because it’s how I remember, despite everything, that there is still goodness in this world.”
She doesn’t know if it’s those words hanging in the air, or the fact that Leo’s hand goes to his heart, but whichever it is it causes her to remember the verse in the Little Book of Meditation. In the moment when the body has filled with breath, that small rest place – that turn to the outbreath – contains absolute peace.
Her breath releases. In her relief, she barely notices the lift gates close, and the men share the smallest smile through the golden bars. As the lift – smooth and quiet – travels upwards again, her outbreath flows like an ocean, and she rides it. She feels herself rising rising, breathing breathing, emptying emptying, lightening lightening.
She glimpses Leo’s face; his eyes are cast downwards, and he still has his hand on his heart. The small smile quivers on his lips. Reflections dance in his face: the reflected glass and gold mirrors and ornate curved metal work of the lift; the furniture: a sofa and a fine table, a vertical slice of floor, a picture on a wall and an oriental rug then another vertical slice of floor, a dark place like a basement. The round face of Hippolyte; the dark shaft of her insides, her pulsing red heart, the shaft of her throat, the roof of her that must be the crown of her head. And then, weirdly, she also sees reflected: the silhouette of her body shape sitting, legs out, on the floor infront of the sitting room window; her child’s face; she’s breathing freely.
There are so many reflections that the little man in the lift is overtaken by them. Ripples dissolve him into light. And because she is inside him (or is it because he is inside her?) they dissolve her too. She knows, too, that she’s still there – paradoxical she would think if she knew that word – but all she can see is ripples of light, and all she feels is peace.
Egg Moon
"One may cast one’s gaze on an area free of trees, mountains, walls, and so on; when the mental state dissolves into [that open field], then arises the state of being in which mental-emotional churning is feeble or absent.”
—VijñānaBhairava Tantra (Verse 60) trans. Christopher Wallis
13th February 2023. Snowed in. Puivert, Aude, France
As everyday, i walk the line. Even before it’s winter dark, the egg moon is rising and the cold air is fizzing. If i fix my gaze on the boundary of path shedding to field, i fence my heart and prevent myself breaking apart.
i lift my eyes and see the moon snag on a roof tile. It spills white over the village. A secret world emerges—the redstart, the woodpecker, even the hawk. All of us that are shape-bound marvel at the sparkling sky. Even the crumbling wall keens, ‘Take me now!’ as it is thickened and completed, and the tree pants ‘Raise me up!’ as it is made beautiful.
But snow is careering every which way now—obliteration on its mind. The woodpecker rakes at vanishing surfaces and chases down any dark places that remain. He agitates in a fear of loss. My boundary is splintering white and shifting in my vision and my heart is a-flurry. When there is no place for my eye to cling, what will contain the hurt? And, will i even remain?
The bird, in a fluster, flies. But there’s still the crack he found… There’s still the crack… White dust is blowing; it’s filling that small scar. And then, the snow shifts sharply, and it is erased.
My eye has nothing, nothing, and my heart is roaring beyond pain. i’m waiting to shatter; i’m expecting to cease to be. But it isn’t happening.
Instead, the cry—how can i explain it?—it’s opening into…expanding until…dissolving upon…a brilliance, sheer. And i’m beginning—without ever needing to start—to be. And to Be. And to BE. I am Being. I am. I.
Then there’s laughter—squeals of it. i shrink back into my body-line. The snow has eased; it is world wiped clean. Children, and some adults who remember, are running on the stainless plane. These world-makers conjure up a head, a torso, a dog, a castle, planets. They giggle one to the other, ‘What else can i magic you up?’
Abracadabra; i’ve heard the call now. i hold my small self lightly and know: we are only ever our formlessness, in play, delighting in the recognition of ourselves.
