NEAR-LIFE

 

An overwhelming sense of dark white

is what remained for days…

remains still through waking hours…

I did not see swathes, dunes, spirals

or undulating shapes

of its dimensionless immenseness. 

It merely exploded

into an awareness I perceived was not

mine alone.

It was not a tide of smoke,

an earthful of mist, a skyful of flurries

or any measure of anything…

any thing.

It was a presence.

A clockless, textureless Presence.

I drowned in its silence.

I was nestled in its trough

looking into my own eyes that danced

like fractals and making

an object of my mind till I dissolved

into flaming lightness.

The cessation of self has no language.

Yet I was at once an atom

and a universe…

of spirit and stripped of senses.

I was bereft of I, me, myself and mine.

Sphereless.

Spaceless.

Gravityless.

To what was I fused? What held me?

Fear was not a memory;

a pleasurable incertitude suffused

the non-I I was.

I cannot tell how or why I heard the

depths of mountains and 

summits of seas call.

I cannot fathom the shimmering indigo

helix that curved before

my non-vision like an eye.

Or was it my eye?

I came upon no stronghold of perennial

wisdom nor repositories

for treatises on the subtlety of the soul.

Incorporeal, un-bodied,

un-pulled by blood,

I breathed in the airlessness,

breathed in airlessness.

And I discerned…or believe I discerned

the force that moves

unperceived through every realm.

Truth is not a thing of the body, though

it seeks an abode in it.

I never felt nearer breath than in that

immeasurable spell of feeling

held by an absolute light.

And colours burst forth, as the universe

geometricised – forms and frames

emerged, each of such beauty as resists

human articulation.

I assumed the weight of my lungs,

returning to aliveness

with the taste of iron burned into

my throat and a question painted on my

tongue – what does darkness fear?

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: PENTAGRAM OF VENUS

Artist: James Ferguson (1799)

Source: facebook.com