To invoke the brightness, touch me,

Salvation night,

And juxtapose the sounds

That symbolize

The things in the world,

As if omnipotence

Arranging the stars, nebulae,

Dust, and the gravity of emptiness,

Stretching around elements

Like a silver wire shroud.

All unseeable, the wells

And seas between light

And the singular mouths

That suck and sow it,

Words are metaphoric coils

That can face the black and ochre

Strokes from cave menageries

To their long extinct ghost models.

Rather than the emptiness

Between sound and object,

What is left when the fabric of

Space and time burns down to nothing,

Seek the vivid lotus, nexus where

The well of imagination

Sinks into the actual earth,

The well from which we hear

Faint songs, echoed by

Flame-lit bone instruments

In painted Mahayana rooms.

Wheels topped by bodhisattva faces,

Paint explicating the phases of time,

Beginning to spin under the

Rising bone cacophony,

Cast the sermons out

Like invisible fishing nets,

Cast them out to harvest

Fleeting metaphoric coils

Beneath undisturbable pools

That are the reservoirs of

Neither ecstasy nor suffering,

And yet provide the origin of both.

They cast to catch one of

The nine billion oracular coils:

Names for the prime Divinity,

Swimming as wily, mottled

Scarlet carp [koi], old as the first fish,

And wary of skeleton listings

In the land on earth closest to the sky,

In this blue, shaved, organismic epoch.

(In the next, the living will be quite

Inorganic - wind against the face,

But as substantial as deep river currents,

Wave forms parting these rivers

That feed the undisturbable pools,

Until all goes still, and blue souls

Stand vibrating in black water).

The coiled carp [koi] touch and flicker.

The nets, the music, the evocations

Ritually unroll, and vibrate

With the souls that mysteriously

Form no ripples in the black water.

Wheels throw the newly steaming net,

Freshly woven stanzas from the latest

Jewel-studded and luminous prophet,

All bubbling, twined, chanting coils,

Into the rivers and undisturbable pools.

The sacrificial verse, veiling vision

Of the flame in the void,

Veiling vision of ironically nailed stars,

Has been woven subtly, more tightly,

Than any Vedic masterpiece of past or future.

Yet it, too, is drawn heavily from the pools

Without sign of the desirable scarlet fish.

Tracing fading tracks on the void,

And the inorganic wave forms laughing,

The silent fish are words

Rippling without ripples.

There is no intimation of immortality.

The cast images catch no revelatory words,

And the fire behind the eyes becomes hotter,

And the rattling bones make the stars look bright,

And the reflection that was a young

Face in the rivers will not look back

From the undisturbable pools.