Paracosmist

They say my body was not designed for this world,

so I built a new place to live.

When they’re sleeping, I reach in and enter it, this new world,

mysterious and perfect. It feels like sinking into a golden sea

or becoming song, a plume of lavender smoke.

There is Turkish tile-work and a whispering wall,

underground cisterns lit red from below, silk brocade in the dark.

On the beach, I am cocooned in honey, bare and shell-less.

A mother takes my body and lets the sea eat me alive,

her braid a line of sea-grass, her flesh a resonant warmth

as she feeds me to the dark ocean.

There I discover a new language, but the words are mine.

I think them without thinking.

I’m floating through a glass-still ocean with floating leaves. There are

beautiful creatures swimming in the dim water.

And what is this feeling, this heaviness, these hollows where no sound can escape?

And what is this arch, these columns, these tendrils of fog,

and what is this night, this air, this realm of the unreal?

I am looking down on a tree, its white roots reaching into the sky,

its bark decorated with ribbons of night swirling up from the abyss.

Here there are things not called by names;

here there is nothing but silence. I feel it bubbling in the earth.

There are pulsing galaxies, inscrutable as my own soul.

How much more beautiful this world is, how much more alive!

They say my body can’t possibly go on like this,

and I look down at my empty shell. I will come back,

but for now I will fall into the darkness, the most infinite sea.