The Literary Review
- Swipe Down
Issue 9 Page 27
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On Meditation and Modernity
I’m going to go to that other place—
the corner place, the sitting place,
a twilight, inner, singular, solemn,
quiet place—awhile.
The ritual’s for maintenance,
not mania, not pride.
Though I doubt that you could come within,
you’re welcome to sit beside:
Should you start feeling peaceful, too,
let my peace feed your own. . . .
The first thing, though, you’ll want to do
is silence that cell phone.
We are different from the animals
We are different from the animals.
We’re very different from the animals.
For they make food for other animals—
or fertilize the soils for plants which then
make food for other animals. We don’t
for we are not like them. We don’t descend
from other animals but other humans,
occasional mutations, love, and time.
And in a million years we’re going to be
a thing that animals cannot conceive
of—animals, nor hominids who don’t
believe we’re different from the animals—
or won’t, until occasional mutations
and time make them, and animals, believe.
How You Know
How do you know there’s love?
I’ll tell you how you know there’s love.
Love is there when turning to each other you turn into each other too.
Think about loving your dog or cat: the frolicking mew or ruff on the ground in a
welter of beast and you; the lift and the purr or the pant blobbing up to your
shoulder; your ear, lapped and drenched with loving goop, if not devoured.
Think of your favorite peanut butter stuck to the ceiling of your mouth so that when
you were asked a question suddenly your voice was the voice of peanut butter
itself: the viscous, delicious, inscrutable ooze you love even to this day.
And think of your love, not of creatures or things, but of doing: hiking, climbing,
jogging, swimming, biking, playing. You become not the trail or the hill or the
road or the pool or the pond or the sea or the game, but hiking, climbing,
jogging, swimming, biking, playing itself. So that in France, you jumped in the
Mediterranean, scaled three alps, and pedaled from château to château to
château. Well, I did, anyway. Substitute what you love to do, you’ll know when
there’s love.
And now that you’ve gotten this far, that we’ve gotten this far together, and you’ve
digested the above—and why else would you have kept on to here?—then I am
where you are, which is here. And part of me, this part of me
is rolling in your mind, and is part of you; the turn to each other has turned us into
ourselves; outward is inward; two are miraculously one.
And there is love.
Rainbows 2
I thought that rainbows had it made
and so thought to become one,
reborn after storms, never sad,
and promising, if not fun,
a brighter future.
A creature
of the sky
with a pot of gold
at my
end, I
would reach a mile
or two
and you
would smile.
But no one in the world can hold
a rainbow. What is more,
a rainbow’s really only vapor,
more ephemeral than paper.
And unlike rainbows, I grow old,
as does a metaphor.
So I’m bringing you this ray
o f c h e e r
to make you feel warm
and, through a waning
refracted light,
now that it’s stopped raining,
think of a clearer clime,
a less tempestuous time,
that might
be
headed your way
one day
after me.
But right
now it’s late afternoon,
and a night
storm
is coming soon—
my
cue
to
d i s a p p e a r .
© Rossella BLUE Mocerino: Paris No. 31
Five Things That Can’t Be Proved
There are Five Things that can’t be proved to be,
cannot be held, be measured, or be seen:
Sleep, Love, Zero-Nothing, All, and In-Between.
You can be stirred from Sleep, and you can see
sleep’s effects, and can feel, under a cover,
a sleeping soul, but can’t, per se, see it.
You can love the world, or just a single lover,
but cannot actually perceive, to wit,
Love.
Nor Zero: Oh, sure, there’s none of some-
thing, but, like Zero, Nothing is a thought,
not a thing. You cannot see what is not.
And you can count all of X, but can’t come
within Infinity of All of All.
Such are the limitations of a soul
trapped by a mind and body.
And of these,
though Sleep might swell, it’s only Love which grows. . .
or glues the distance. . . or binds as it flows. . . .
Love is mysterious, unseen until
life is over, the Everything is Nil,
the mystery revealed: then a soul sees
Love for the first time—though we might except
a trillion lovers, and a handful of
poets, who’ve claimed, at least when they have slept,
to have actually seen what they call Love.
The way they talk at times, I’m loathe to doubt
them. So, between the days, I dream about
the universe’s souls as teeming trees
with one ancestor, possibilities
limitless, and the xylem and phloem
as Love, flowing inside, from root to sky,
invisible until the day we die,
or, In-Between, like blood and bile, which flow
both ways—All ways—at once, take root, and grow.
Grow what? Why, a miracle . . . a soul . . . a poem.