The Sense of Being



It is my eye looking away across the night sky
to absorb the giddy dance of autumn stars
whirling around the spiraling arms of Andromeda
that will never see the guiding light
bringing the honey bee home to the blossom,

And my ear following the voiced tracery of notes
weaving in and out of the lines in a Bach chorale
reverberating down the vaults of cathedral nave
that cannot hear the choiring bats teeming up
out of the caves in their explosive dawn at sunset,

And my tongue tasting the slight salt of woman's skin
in the languorous dark after wine and candlelight
and the long savor of the summer feast
that can never know the warm taste of darkness
drawing the hunting coachwhip down her hunger,

And my nose catching the scent of a chill sea wind
as the black-browed albatross crosses and crosses
the ceaseless miles of ship's white churning wake
that is oblivious to the mountain doe's passage
which brings the belling hounds onto the trail,

And my meticulous fingers that can set the spring
governing the second hand's swing over the dial
into its precise place in the time-trickling watch
which cannot thrill to the tuning set of feather's tip
that hovers the kestrel air-stopped above sagebrush,

And if my thought comprehends the stately progress
of the neutron's wave across the great span
of the atom's diameter, I will never know what it is
to feel the winging dove's cling to compass line
nor how freedom blooms up through a spider's molt.

Yet, it matters nothing if the bee sees no stars,
the bat moves through sunsets without my song,
the snake never knows the heady taste of wine,
the dog bays unaware of the sea bird's long glide,
or the kestrel and dove live without machinery,

For each is like the spider in its small splendor,
shedding those things that are no longer needed
by growing into a skin of new capabilities,
finding their world in the bloom of a new day
with those senses uniquely possessed just enough.

Neither does it matter if the light I see is small,
no more than a portion of that which might be seen
if the eye's cells quickened to other radiations,
nor if the ear's response is somehow circumscribed
and my tongue and nose sense but a few things.

For if my fingers and mind can be only attuned
to some limited fragment of this resonant universe,
it is in this way of having and not having
that all are kin, sensing something of the whole,
defined into each alone, living out this one audience.