Luke Grecki
My confusion falls flat
as it exits my mouth.
His questions live and pulse
toward an unseen center.
Where is your life?
Where is your practice?
I squint and laugh,
I feel like a child trying
to hold something too big
for his hands.
The room grows now
and drops into still water.
There are no problems,
there is just the light
from my old knots burning.
Heavy with gratitude,
I walk into the hallway.
Bowing toward the door
my confusion rises like grass.
The cold horizon is full of birds
that move with some strange knowledge.
We grasp at beginnings,
our fingers outstretched,
our lungs gasping for air.
We are servants of mystery,
our feet carry us through cracks in earth
toward a home without a name.
I remember a childhood of sun and stitches,
playing in parking lots
until a voice called through our kitchen window.
Those days are receding,
an iceberg melting into the warming waters
of a distant ocean.
I fear I will remember only
the shapes of the past.
I fear I will forget to remember
voices that were once as familiar
as the house I grew up in.
A hand in the dark
moves over my hand,
waking life from the
abyss of sleep.
Some tender wave rises
from the grid of streets and fences,
a tightrope walk between
thought and breath.
The cage doors are open to the wind.
Underground wires sit white hot with electricity.
Rainwater silently floods the house,
carrying with it our pencils and rulers.
Our dams are dreams,
we shake with fear at the mountain rivers
surging inside ourselves.
The cat’s tail moves like a brush,
writing sweet nothings
in a calligrapher’s hand.
She closes her eyes in a sunbeam,
she dives off a table
into the swirling Persian rug.
At rest she is as still as stone,
small breaths rising and falling
as she naps on a window.
The next moment she gallops
after me in the hallway,
her white paws pounding on tile.
It is enough to move one to trust a natural spontaneity,
the gates open to a garden of action.
Though I cannot have the grace of a cat’s gait,
I may be able to find my words
standing on the banks,
fishing in life’s breaking waves.
We braid our lives together,
breathing between walls of time
as we walk down gilded stairs
into the mansion of the heart.
I look back at your questioning eyes with wonder,
all the travels of the soul
folded in your hands.
How many hours have we spent
circling some ancient ruin while
light floods an open field?
The braid holds our fear caged in rags,
welcomed into the burning hearth.
And we hold each other
in the world’s eddies,
we dance at the edge
of some unknown history,
our eyes as still as glass.
The same songs litter the horizon.
People chase fragments of light
like cats, not knowing their origin.
Winter is turning back now,
running scared after having seen
it’s thin shadow.
I am thawing into soil,
grass growing from my ears.
My body is not foreign
to sun or moon,
it is the sum of a sprawling calculation
that is more a bramble than
a glass bead.
Even when the hallway doors unlock
rooms filled with wildflowers
I can still smell death.
The dishes are dirty.
The cats are hungry.
There are ten thousand things to meet.
Where is the man who will put his suitcase down?
Where are the logs to kindle fire tonight?
The winds blow strong on Christmas Eve.
I feel we are circling something,
a cavernous moment
put to organ music.
The cats stand in the dimming light,
breathing little breaths,
and everything is still
for one simmering moment.
Then the dust blows in,
and my eyes go dark.
Breathe deep of
this wilting world,
watch as death becomes ripe
in the eyes of the living.
The corners pulse with change
as our months disappear into seasons,
as we forget our truths
in the ocean waves.
To repeat ourselves
is our curse and our joy,
to grow wheat again
where wheat has died,
to cry where tears have fallen,
to open doors heavy with memory.
Start again,
kiss your shadow
as the sun rises like grass.
When night comes like lightning
I watch until it pools like rain.
I listen while it
flows in the cracks,
filtering through the soil
and seeping into bedrock.
The darkness is complete
when my mind turns black,
muted under dark water.
I let the dark climb like ivy
up the walls of my being,
the night flora feeding
on a growing silence.
Awake, I wonder.
How many species live
in the caverns of the heart?