my neigbours the trees

Don't want it to last. Don’t want to hold on to it; this is fleeting grace.  So fragile, it fades away when in contact with air. Entombed in air and freed in air the fragrance of my maddening longing.  Feel blessed by this sense of levity, clairvoyance, blindness, disclosure, vulnerability, this beautiful mortal coil, this dazzling clarity of forgetfulness, the immensity of this desolation, the staggering vastitude of tracelessness, sealessness, seedlessness, homelessness, desperate helplessness.  The raging beauty of death rising above and beyond its own appeal. Life faltering, collapsing into and shattering beyond the abeyance of its own appeal. Beauty of all impossible appeals.  I have come here to this garden to seal the fate of my sleep with the fruits of an awakened soil. These here are my visions of retrieval and loss.  This is the cypress, a solid ally, the white cypress as I call it now. I feel its roots sprouting in my lungs since I smashed the glass separating us. I can hear its leaves rattle in my insides. We belong to the same stuff. Springs passe over us. Springs shape us to their own image. Summers spread out before us the mystery of their shades. Falls recollect the gold that flakes from our visage. We join now migrating winters.  Standing shoulder to shoulder on the sod with only words separating us. Words pretend we have different hues flowing in our veins. Words are sad inventions of barriers, obstacles fearing collapse. Words coax us into the poisonous slumber of their tones. Their sweetest melody is but an ode to separation. We have to transgress the gaping cracks of reality induced by the verb.  Verb, you ravaged womb of all creation. We shall leap over the fault lines of your revelations. To a new beginning, to a new end? We cannot see that far. We do not thirst for unwritten tomorrows. Stars are not asking for our intercession. We do what we can. I teach the cypress to cry in the interval of storms and the cypress teaches me sleeker ways of disappearing with baggage and karma and all into silence.  No more divisions between us. When I speak, my friend the white cypress speaks of a world freed from the sour grip of raging godheads and adulterated paradises and fables of innocence. When I muse, the white cypress unfolds its lush canopy of mutity over my mind. We were destined to meet. We are kindred souls. All admiring and appeased aliens walking gently the bitter path of ancient scars. Descending from one blood-line. Thunders and meteors mingle their course in the sap that feeds our nervures. We glow with the same nimbus when the sky unwraps her constellations.  This is not all. Walls are rapidly falling between me and the medlar. Yesterday she confided to me that never before had she let a man cross over into her inner ring and taste the fruit of her decay. She receives me at a moment of unusual flaw. I did not break into her defence. I let the iron gate give way. We are summoned by the encounter. Simple hearts know when to stand up and when to obey.  I do not know and do not care to know if next spring she will reflower, and she is unmindful of the draught exfoliating my seasons. I do not know if I'll be here to welcome her white blooms again. We are all smouldered by the grace of the same furnace. She took a look at my hidden wounds. She knows not much is left of me. She knows my release has come. She knows the fate of pain has been achieved. She knows that without fire living and dying are meaningless and that sometimes events transform a man into a sirocco that roams through deserts displacing sands on dunes until it renders in the vast open tomb its final breath.  Her whispers tell of her tenderness for my inhuman weakness, for my reckless shedding. She knows I came here without roots. She knows I am but a floating vision holding on to her hours. In her magnanimity she allows me to partake in her reality. She tends me her branches so that I resurface from the pit of oblivion and hold claim to a rank in the light of the day between two nightfalls. She tells me to believe with her that I am here, living and part of the living, living and part of the dead. Who am I to disobey?  In our hands we unpetall the regrets of everlasting winters. We chase the spirits from the garden of good and evil. Spirits blemished by wishes of eternal return. We let that cry coming out of the wilderness subdue our soul. She says she adores the garden even more since last full-moon when I began sleeping beneath her stump. Unmindful of the cold. Unmindful of the damp. Of swarming maggots eating into my side. With her tender leaves she wakes again over my sleep and guides me through the labyrinth of nightmares. Each daybreak she summons and breast-feeds me with the golden milk of aurora deflagrating in her darkest chamber.  She crowns me with light and presents me as her soul-mate to our neighbours both near and far, the palm and olive-trees, and the slanting giant pins shrouded with mist in the hills. The wind does not lord over the whisper of love in our garden as the jasmine releases her balm to soothe the frost-bitten eyes of the dead. Softly. Softly, echoes of crystal begin to stir in the air. Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the dead as they sing now for our consolation.