Five Ruby Women
(written after Thursday class)
My hands climb the air slowly on their own.
The canyon floor spread around me,
the pale green trees lacy along the river.
A dense hiss then
a blast of pitting sand folding me before
shooting off like a big air serpent disgusted
by its marbled morsel of me.
And the world halted.
My hands halted.
There was nowhere else.
A silvery kanoun hangs the icicles of plucked tones on a sparse branch.
My heart beat.
The canyon still.
In a room with a red floor five women
with five wombs, five hearts, ten hands
and ten thousand pulses
are still.
A silvery kanoun hangs plucked tones.
Pale green branches eyelash cheeks.
The river of thoughts or no thoughts winds
her water, ruffled by fish, stones, breaths
of five ruby women.
*****
During Dancemeditation my body combines times. The sense of dual realities – not so much recollection – is montage or pentimento. In this poem, the stillness combines all times. During the class, this was so palpable to me. I also felt that there was no particular importance to the specific scenes other than their stillness. I had no urge to analyze the ‘meaning’ of place, or action, or who. The value was ‘stillness’.
Yet there was place. There were occupants. And these aspects were beautiful to me. It was a limpid, awake dream-like perception – not a day-dream or memory. The exactitude of the experience had the detail of Persian miniature, though not particularly visual so much as a full-range awareness. An other-worldly awareness.
Stepping beyond ordinary awareness is an interesting cultivation. These perceptions are not accidental. They aren’t easy to find. Like a coming across a tiny brook with perfect green moss, undisturbed, pure, with a small bird flipping its head in a shaft of light, and you know, never having taken that path before just at that time of day, you might never see that exact scene ever again.
It is so delicate…
