Meditation

Growing old. Your body’s no longer your own. Which is something you always knew. But now it’s what you live. It’s not just the parts you’ve cashed in for a bit more breathing space but the dead possibilities. The celestial sphere turns, it’s the phosphor of imagination, what we see when we close our eyes. But nothing returns.

Nothing returns but the glow of the microscope that turns in the eye, that dizzies us with its aspirations, its liquid dance, its globular script that promises revelations that writhe and turn and flee—sacred reruns in which we turn, never to return.

Never to return is the fate of soldiers with bad luck and travellers waylaid for their passports and their dollars on the way back to the hotel to sit in an air-conditioned lounge, bare arms on the cold, damp leather. You read about it in the paper, the daily insignificance of human beings. “It gives one pause,” you say to yourself, and realize how forgiving are the illusions of language, the subterfuges of metaphor, that allow us to imagine some still point of consciousness around which, if anything moves, it’s only a distant unseen circumference.