The Desert of the Real

 

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