I was in a desert.
A cold wind came off it.
I looked upward
As dust swirled all around
As if inside a dream.
There in the sky I received omens
From birds in flight.
I augured their directions, sounds, and kinds,
Their number, their flight patterns, and behavior.
They relayed messages of what I
believed
Were the ancient gods
Foretelling what I thought
Was the future
In the desert of the real.
I had no map.
Like arrows of God,
Harriers pierced the sky.
In the wane of day, I counted five.
In silent spirals from out of the north
They flew in diminishing light
Searching prey.
Then departed, one by one,
Until the last let out a fierce cry above me.
I carried on my pilgrimage
As if inside a dream
To the mountain in the distance,
Certain God or a god was near.
From out of the unknown,
From out of the permanence of eternity,
Adventuring in freedom within the sky,
Driven by the hunger for existence,
In spirals of birth and rebirth
The birds flew then vanished
As dust blew in clouds across
The desert of the real.
I had no map.
Standing now at the foot of the mountain
I performed divination in the dust.
In the palm of my hand
I drew an oracle of the fine, granular powder of earth.
I uncovered many possibilities.
I discerned several probabilities.
But my readings bore nothing definitive
Except the existence of the dust itself
Many vortices, like a maze, formed in my hand
And I entered them
As if inside a dream
In the desert of the real.
I had no map.
With labyrinthine steps
Many possible directions emerged
Inside a maze of many mazes.
A series of galleries opened
Starred with masks.
Row after row, layer upon layer of masks
Arose in the desert of the real.
A superior mirage
Horizontally diffuse, vertically stacked,
Of this maze of masks
Tore through my mind
As if inside a dream.
l witnessed the intense multiplicity of life
In all its boggling grandeur and confusion,
Layer upon layer of distortions,
But at the bottom
That which was concealed, That from which the masks emanated
Never moved yet never rest,
And was naked in its presence
Yet fully dressed.
The further I entered the more I discovered
There was no labyrinth.
It had all been an elaborate mirage.
All modern delusion.
There was only the barren waste
Of the desert of the real
All was wide open.
Only my mind was serpentine,
Only my thoughts
Followed crooked
and narrow passages,
Only they came to dead ends.
There were no puzzling corridors to excogitate.
There was only an even, straight path
That led through the desert of the real.
I had no map.
Only the countenance of eternity
Shone in the late sky,
And I stood before it,
The masks now gone,
Stripped of all illusions
In the desert of the real.
I had no map.
From high above its barren emptiness,
My pilgrimage complete,
I stood upon a summit
As if inside a dream.
There and then, at that moment,
I met God
In the poverty of my spirit.
I was but a mendicant
Reliant on the alms of stars,
An exile standing at the terminus
Of flesh, at the borderland of spirit,
A suppliant provided for by the benefaction
Of stars, and dust and dreams
In the desert of the real.
I had no map
For I required none.
All was God
And eternity,
And with He as my compass
I found my way through
All space and time.
Notes: abacomancy- divination by dust
