Bardo In Imbolc

Bardo in Imbolc, space between the seasons,
neither beginning nor arriving,
this is your borderless land.
You are the secret in the chrysalis,

formless cytoplasm not yet moth or rainbow,
amuck in peristalsis and thaw, 

squeezing an “I” out of ambiguous weather.
Black to black, from spore to spore,
the leaping tongue of chaos in a gaggle of electrons,
mud-bidden upward by a rosary of echoes,
dense and opalescent as the dumb light that creates you.

How close to God you get depends.
How deeply have you soaked your bodily fluids

into compost and disorder, the glory of death,

dark energy of larvae, the kingdom of the worm?

Through wave and trough of frosted loam
slice silver moon fins, when the plow
has not yet violated the mycelium.
Lost leaves of Winter lie, a vast placenta, cruor
of ancestors teeming with fertile infection,
anointing both babies and flowers in

one chrism of microbes, this, the glory of your death.
If you wish to thrive on Gaia, dip your forehead here.
Your only hope is Presence,

one medicine for the robin and the rat.
Crows will foul the bird bath with the bones of both.
So nibble and peck the suet of your grandmother’s marrow

and hear the unstruck chimes of Imbolc ringing

in their seeds, licorice sweetness of mitochondria,

sparkling stream of silence after the frog croak,

star-spume of quantum vacuum in coyote howl.
Are you not swaddled in a tulip bulb,

the quivering Bodhichitta stillness of a black hole?
Is this not the hour we meet in solitude, a whorl
of stars entangled like a dragon in your vertebrae?

Laniakea, mother of the Milky Way, has come for you.
Pierced by twigs of goldenrod

in the crinkled dream of a cocoon,

you have been chosen to do the ghost dance.
You have fasted and fallen into the unfathomable

silence between thoughts, the voluptuous erotic sea

between “I” and “Am,” your luminous listening

coiled in serpentine Otherness.
Praise the yearning of two petals in one seed.
Praise the mother enfolded in her own egg.
Praise the soul of Darkness born from the womb of Christ.
Praise the zero of amazement, meiosis of one heart
into Lover and Beloved.

Praise the stars that bend over your sleep,

caressing your forehead with intimate distances.
You are the first sparrow singing

in the season just after the dream,

and just before awakening.
You sing to the dead in the Bardo of Imbolc,
that they may live again.
You sing to the living, that they may die
more gracefully this time.

Image: Brigid, Goddess of Imbolc, from the Bee Sisterhood Oracle