The One - Third Movement: Remembering - Song 16: Hunters - Segment I

            THIRD MOVEMENT

REMEMBERING

 

SONG SIXTEEN

HUNTERS

 

I

Now that I am dying 

and all things can be told

I see myself sleeping there

believing I was safe within 

the rainbow coils

 

 

I felt quite self-satisfied for

once again I had crossed over

set my foot upon an unfamiliar path

I had breached another border

there would be no turning back

At that time I thought 

I had come home and closed the door.

I assumed I had been delivered

to the port of destination

            when in fact I had only

            just begun to see the more

 

I looked, then stopped, for the dark child-man

I imagined he had crossed a deeper threshold

returned to his dream-time fires

in some unnamed long ship

 

As it was

I was held close for some length of time

in presumed safety of rainbow splendor.

I kept busy by day, seeing to the work

to relieve my hunger and thirst

By night I lay in pulsing color

            heart rhythmic and thoughts serene

Yet grief crowded on my contentment

            for the teachers who passed within my dreams

And thin gray birds plucked threads out of my crayoned nest

            fading rainbow colors into worry and restlessness

 

Some days when I returned from aimless wandering

and peered into the still dark pool

I imagined more than saw those colors 

and began to wonder if they were there at all.

I remember there was one exact and lucid moment

when something – all things – changed

when the rainbow’s fins shimmered and disappeared

But still I clung to the memory of colored coils

reluctant to release my grip and fall back to tears

 

Soon  after, a dark chaotic force

            pushed its way up from the bottom 

                        of the black-pregnant pool

cracked against me and splayed my colors

            on the palette of the cavern roof

My safe chrysalis splintered beyond reconstruction

and though I clung to decaying walls

I could not deny that I was being birthed 

again from the dark womb of that pool

spit up like regurgitated jelly from the mother’s gut

wet-eared and mewling like any ordinary fool

 

I crawled out to the edges of the faded nest

and looked over the edge to colorless oblivion

unwelcome antithesis to the rainbow’s hues

The void of it made me cold and nauseous but again

            I knew the way was not behind me but straight in

                        

That was not my first journey to such an edge

nor would it be my last

and by then I knew oblivion

                        was as treacherous as an unfaithful lover

            who drives me breathless to the brink

            then pulls me back to make mad love again

 

Neither relief nor torture is found in oblivion’s embrace

            because that imaginary void is both and neither

Still, each time some new and unexpected terror

hounds me breathless and broken to the rim

I want to believe – I ache to trust

the witch-voice of oblivion 

that sings of rest or resolution for the searching one

 

But by then I no longer favored rest or resolution

Instead, a strange attraction for the next adventure

had altered my infallible compass 

from the false reading of imagined safety 

to the pointless spinning near the pole itself

 

So, in the end I abandoned my search for safety 

            discarded the illusion of comfort

            put aside memory and confusion

and simply

            crossed over

            set my feet upon decision

            claimed the border of that new nation

            and since that day, have not turned back