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Anna Adams

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At last I have come in out of the cold
and, as a Muslim leaves his shoes outside,
just so I’ve left my pride.
But it is not so much that I have entered
as that a roof, like evening’s violet shadow
has slid over my life.
Unwittingly I must have touched some button;
or someone else has touched it. Wise young Keats
to Bailey, said “The dreams of gods are real.”
We all move in one mind within that shell
pierced by the stars, seen, but, as they were
by innocent humanity, as eyes.

There have been other waymarks as I trod
the ridge between sheer cliffs of unbelief.
Meister Eckhardt’s saying that a man
can be impregnated by nothingness,
thus conceiving god; for god is easy
compared to unimaginable Nothing.
I’ve been like flying paper in a gale,
that says There is no wind: I cannot see it.
A sheet of plastic nesting in high trees
that says – I flew up here all on my own;
or market cartons tumbling down the streets
saying – I cartwheel by my own volition.

Mind is invisible as oxygen –
our staple food.
Mind is our vast elastic home.
Because we never see its great façade
we think there is no house, no mother hen
that shelters all her chicks beneath her wings
and keeps them from the buzzard and the hawk.
She is the house that always has existed:
the house of many mansions, where we live
without a fixed address; where we are schooled
by the great winds that go about their courses
and agitate and educate the dust.

 

Page(s) 138-139

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