Gnosis

Out of time you called me into these days of sitting on desk chairs in poorly lit rooms, rubbing my thumb on hot tea mugs to self-soothe. You sung me up from dust and I snack on late night oatmeal. Why am I anxious? Have mercy, I am trying to understand how it happened. Take me back, before the moment my memory begins, to that holy city in which we all first played. There you reared my desires like lion cubs in your Inner Chambers, you taught the wild blood its route in the maze of my veins, but something always goes awry, doesn’t it? As you raised the walls around my mind, a shadow slipped in with me. Surely it did. Ah, then you sent me forth, and now I am a student, twenty nine years old, living in Brooklyn, New York. How can it be? I feel ashamed. I gaze at bodegas on street corners, bikes chained to black iron fences, with eyes that really look out from the Absolute. Is it true that the hand that once held Saturn long ago caressed my face? Of course I know that love is the only way to apprehend love; I know that nothing exists but ecstasy and delight. But it makes no difference. I eat steamed broccoli and keep my whole family listed neatly in the contacts on my phone. Is this how you meant it? You must give me more than I have so that I can have what I have. You must point your long gentle finger through these darkening evenings. A Manhattan skyline seen from a rooftop, a worthless novel found on a bench: I want to wake, but I want to wake exactly into this. Maybe it will take years. Maybe even beyond the span of my life. But surely it is impossible to come too late to the ultimate moment. Surely that moment is even now pressing towards me through this tunnel of thought I’ve set like a drill into the stony heart of the everyday. Am I already feeling it? It prickles, like in the old days when you would feather my nose with angel wings to make me sneeze into life. As I walk through the park, as I nestle into the bole of an oak, it prickles. But not ever quite enough.