The Unborn Call Me

 

The Unborn call me.
Come! they sing.
"How shall I come?"
Follow this breath.

Walk barefoot in the night
until you find a mushroom,
the toe of Dionysius
buried upside-down
where He suckles
the planetary teat of loam.

"But I am no God,
where shall I find that nipple?"
Return on this inhalation
to the center of every proton
in your body.
The milk of the underworld
is black and sweet.
And the jolt of arriving
right here! right here!
in your own flesh
is the electric flower
of the universe.
All this wonder is embodied
in the croak of a frog.

The Ancestors call me
from the bruise of dawn.
It is the first day.
Come! they sing.
"How shall I come?"
Follow this exhalation.

Now I hear angels of stone,
air, water and fire.
Come, they sing,
fall into your diaphragm,
your abdomen, your loin.
Sink into the blossom
of annihilation
through the gravity
of breathing.
All this bewilderment
is the ferment of ribosomes
in the eye of a salamander.

Somewhere even deeper
inside me than I am,
stars extinguished
long before their light has
reached this world
whisper my electrons
out of emptiness.
Galaxies whose magnetism
whirls the sun in my sacrum
call me to taste the timeless
respiration that evaporates
the dream of distances.
Come!
"How shall I come?"
Ascend on your descent.

This is why I drown the moon
in a dark forest pool
where the soul cannot go.
Cloaked in a mirage
of pure awareness,
my rind rots and ripens again.
The ocean of my juice,
pressed from fragrant neurons,
tastes like the silence
between thoughts.
Within my darkness is the fire
of the bliss storm,
eternal chaos.

"What is the essence of that nectar?"
Birth in reverse.
Call it death
if you have a mind to.
Come here every morning
and sunset.
"How?"
Follow a silken thread of oxygen
up your spine.

Endure the instantaneous.
Stay.
Embrace the pain
of your hollow places
and be whole.
Gather the sheaves
of numbness
from your marrow.
Harvest the barley of tears.

This is how I crushed
the berries of unbearable disappointment
to an umber chrism
the color of skin,
anointed the breasts and thighs
of the planet,
behind and inside her ears,
which were tiny mollusks,
ringing with the unstruck Wordless
sound of God.
Now I can only tell you,
"Bathe in the secret musk
of what you already are."

Chalk mandala by Caryn Babaian, high school science teacher