Shall I Sell The Sky?

This world is a marketplace. But what can I sell? The morning air, a distant mountain, clouds perishing over the meadow, a thistle of silver and amethyst?

 

My God is the buzz of honeybees around late August lavender. What price would you pay for that consciousness? My Lord is blackness between stars. Do I get a commission if you invest in this imperishable emptiness? My Guru is the way pure space becomes nectar when you pause for a sip of this moment. Shall I distill and bottle it for you?

 

How shall I put a price on wonder, or the color green? Offer you the sea breeze or evening mist in an on-line seminar? How much do I charge for the scent of pines, lupine blues in an alpine valley, the pearl of a pasque flower? Shall I teach you to inhale?

 

Friend, we were billionaires the moment we got baptized in the river of birth, bathing in a legacy of talismans, the wealth of our ancestors, heirloom microbes from the jungles of hope.

 

Who paid for our bones, so lavishly packaged in chestnut, carnelian, umber and wheat gold, flesh zesty as a persimmon? The cost is all in the recipe that only our grandmothers knew. Who set sapphires in the sockets of our eyes, anointed our crowns with the smell of mushrooms?

 

This body is more to me than trillions of dollar bills, all those zeros without a One you buy with your credit card. What would you offer for my little toe? The knuckle on my ring finger, crippled by a drunken punch? The wrinkles of my birthright grin?

 

Your dividends are sleepless nights. Bitcoin won't feed you, it tastes like electric steel. Can you pour the wine of Christ through fiber optic cables? The soil is not yours.

 

Shall I sell you the sky in breath-sized vials? Will you purchase a jigger of rain in the cup of an Autumn rose? Why don't you buy the spiderweb in my garden, ravel it back up into a spool of starlight? Do you remember how?

 

And what would you give for the grandeur in my open palm, the weightless empyrean of the Milky Way? Through the softest beam of sunrise, on the first day in September, a cedar waxwing’s whistle is no less than a thread of diamonds. Not for sale.