It was a wonderful day in January.
It was as if the air shivered with newness.
I saw the branches being full of spiderwebs
and sometimes swift shadows like birds in flight.
*
I don't know if it was like that at the place where he took himself
and looked inside to somewhere much darker.
Where, after many days of empty wakefulness, he finally came around
and silently asked where he was and who.
In the infinitude he found his outer shell a thousandfold,
he knew: I am everywhere at once and nowhere at home,
in a thousand times, a thousand bodies, each one aware of its self,
but not inside me – incapable of being me.
And what remained of him when he closed his sharp eyes
and didn't sense any more the ether speaking incessantly to him
reached for emptiness which assumed shape only if he cast it to something
which was emptiness as well and weightless and weak.
And outside the wind blows, and spider's threads are scintillating lightly
and no one asks why this is so, and everyone knows it for beautiful.
I think he sensed that being beautiful means: empty and unequalled,
without home, and will be gone with the wind.
Now, finally – so maybe he thought – I know who I am:
I am the beauty you need and can never really hold.
And because I am like you, yearning for beauty like you are,
and cannot find it in the depths where no one knows me,
I want to be a spider's thread dancing on the wind.
There is no me; maybe that's the truth about me.
And he looked up to where the day was turning towards spring
and floated outward into the infinity of the self.
*
Still the sky is blue and wonderful,
and spiderwebs shiver in the waiting branches.
I know: this is the beauty we look at yearningly
which eludes us and can never be fully understood.
Crystal 23.01.2008