Meditation Denying Everything

Because it is a pearly evening I am sitting in the window reading a book I have read before. Branches emphasize their heft and sway over their shadows. Some kind of extra firmament, an ear over the earth's ear, extra, as language is to prayer. Narratives of elsewhere: in the eye inside my eye that vision makes when you tell it to when you shut your eyes so hard they hurt you get more vista and less twist of road, and then you're looking at a valley you named yourself and irrigated yourself, full of bitterroot, magnolia in the clefts of rock, sage, at last a harvest, a desert that belongs to you— The trick to renunciation is starting now. The secret of detachment is having already given up, a transcript of speech whose cadences are lost, the human need for a body to fill in all your body's deficiencies, those clefts and dents already given up, the narrative of a life completely altered in the retrospect that knowledge brings and so discredited the point of memory utterly lost. That piece of land has always been suitable for a house. That nest has never been ready for eight baby birds who, top-heavy, frightened their own branch and home and scared themselves completely and remarkably away. Do you hear that? It's the wind negotiating the spine of one leaf it cannot decide whether to raise a fragment of an inch. Duncan writes as a reader struggles with a strong sentence, I struggle at certain unmistakable times with what's furtive and most right. When people marry they finish their names. I am still listening for mine to begin. My spine wants a bicycle to order its work, a red bicycle, a hill into a heart of a city that holds something I want. The pattern of the air around that leaf is like someone tracing my ribcage with his index finger and then walking away. Who can blame us for wanting other worlds, but shall we take them, or let them come to us? Is the spirit just an ear more like a mouth that bites the air and turns it into blood? A voice in the next room goes to sleep. Sleep moves in the branches of the oak become a rootless mass unsung by skeleton or name or height. My friend who says she does not believe in Paradise believes in rest: I believe that, or more likely I like to think of her, the way she held my name in her small mouth, as she held her own name. I like to think of anyone who on a night like this would reach towards my ribcage and trace it delicately and walk away.