Spindrift

Blown off the peak, spun around and floating down the leeward side

Formed into lacy drifts with so many others like me that I will never know

Assuming crystalline forms in that weightless moment

Smoothed into curved shapes by the gusty winds that followed

Sublimely whirling in the vortex behind that giant ocean swell

Falling back fully aerated with life’s sustaining oxygen

A surface mist that waxes prismatically from the slanting rays of the sun

I am falling snow or roiling sea at different times

Spindrift whirling in the vacuum of the power of the wind

And those dancing with me all rotate at slightly different angles

The heartbeat of the storm is mirrored by our dizzying procession

We are cast into phantasmal castles and drift across every pathway

At times we appear to panic like a school of frightened fireflies

With a pause in the wind we fall in separate patterns, independently

This quiet beauty a chaotic byproduct of the sublime organization of the storm

And my appreciation but a simple outcome of my accidental self-perception

Fractal Messenger

Filling the great galactic clusters with stars accounted for, but uncounted

Leaving copious evidence of this same message at the subatomic level

Unknowable and forever far outside any organic experiences

Saying more than we can ever grasp in the gurgling of each tiny creek

Incredibly obvious everywhere we look yet nowhere to be seen

Not alive as in our poor understanding nor dead as we can only witness

Talking to us without a voice in channels outside our senses

Caching the entire mystery complete in uncountable, infinitesimal clues

Bearing not the slightest resemblance to the deities of our childish fairytale afterlives

Hidden from us by our subconscious projections of ourselves upon it

Comporting in timescales and distances far beyond our imaginations

Wholly too ignorant to take part in scholarly debate with clever theologians

Filtering every bit of information through each raindrop in every rainbow

Revealing all its secrets in the moss that grows on the striations of a boulder

Utterly mute in terms of commandments, calls to belief and tests of faith

Dripping all wisdom from every icicle hanging in the late winter sunlight

Blasting forth all knowledge in each burst of radiation from every neutron star

Reciting not a single line of internal dialogs along with our personal saviors

Encrypting the entire message in each of an infinity of absolutely random packets

Perfectly reflected in my limitless ignorance and our greatest discoveries

Neither far away nor inside us, not with us, but never leaving us alone

Expressing everything we know in the change marked by our final breath

Showing its entirety in each brief twinkling of the firmament above

Invisible but for the endless forms of its shadows, echoes and reflections

Inscribing the full message in patterns on the birds, the reptiles and the fish

Completely occupying all the borders of each one of our zen-like contradictions

As indifferent to new life as to the struggles which lead inevitably to death

Playing the same countless variations with raindrops as falling leaves

Dancing briefly in morning sunlight, peeping out from under dark clouds

Simply as likely to grant an unearned forgiveness as to punish unfairly

Deeply underpinning our endless and hopeless but inescapable struggles

Forming foreground and background, past, present and future

Blind witness without memory, testifying only in insoluble riddles

 

Radiating uncountable variations of perfection on this infinitesimally small world

As dense in empty space as in those songs that fill our entire hearts

Outlining a paradox whose purpose we can never approach deciphering

Neither concerned with cause nor aware of outcomes

Transforming hellish nuclear fission into warm winter sunlight

Source of no dogma but reflected in the maths we see underlying the cosmos

Bombarding from every direction with signals which travel unnoticed through us

Discerning each tiny peep in the vast white noise which fades back into entropy

Reabsorbing each droplet of consciousness without a conscious thought

Creating the music with the silence between the notes

Emitting fractal miracles regardless of magnification, size or distance

Incapable of any jealousy and unable to demand a fraction of our tiny faith

Possessed of no knowledge but without any questions

Filling the time and space outside of our universe

Making not a single promise to either sinner or sufferer

Backdrop to the background radiation of the Big Bang

Forever ungraspable but simultaneously inescapable

Undisturbed by the faint noise with which we try to hide it

Offering no consolation, bereft of mercy and unable to forgive

Totally accepting, endlessly patient and tolerant without comprehension

Filling everywhere to capacity with a mindless, insensate wisdom

Always within us but never really with us

Dancing with the shadows of the flickering firelight on the cave wall

Caring as much for our lives as shiny drops of dew on one tiny blade of grass

Grinning behind quantum dice as the clockwork universe unfolds

Unaware of our contemplations as part of itself

Holding men as responsible for their actions as it does the flowing rivers

I Left All These Tiny Ripples

Everything I do ripples outward, far beyond what I will ever see
Nowhere I have gone merely to look upon was unchanged by my coming

All the things I touch are altered in ways that I can never even notice

In turn, no one I have so much as spoken to did not change me just a bit

All the ways I tried to fix things keep changing other things as well

All the stuff you do interacts in unseen ways with all the things that I once did

Every time I replace one item I displace something else

When these two parts fit together that other one over there turns out to be a little short

Like a spaceman, stuff gets away from me and starts an existence all of its own

No one walks without their footprints changing the ocean even as it erases them

Anything I handle manipulates me with forces that I cannot see or feel

Tiny life I crushed unconsciously in my passing allowed other forms to prosper

Nothing that I toss aside has not left its ongoing trace before it more or less disappears

Every step I take turns the earth beneath my feet just the smallest fraction

A wake spreads out around me as I move through the infinite chop of others

Whenever I feel like I’m thinking for myself, it always comes from what they taught me

All their unseen co-operation make possible my rugged independence and self-reliance

Asking nothing from anyone, I still depend entirely upon others to simply live and breathe

I leave a little bit from everywhere I’ve ever been everywhere I go

Turns out my voice is but one little peep in a small frog chorus on a tiny pond

Influences my actions set in motion are continually reduced but never completely reach nothing

The sum of all my actions declines forever but only marginally reaches zero

Things others said so long ago that I never quite heard still guide me along this road

No one that has ever lived has not affected me in many ways

There is this melody in my head that is all the songs that they are ever singing

My happiness and contentment is somehow based in part upon their sadness and their suffering

Although I have no past before this life, it seems it has always lead up to this

Nothing I can imagine can ever come from outside what any of us has known

You can see me in one instant’s snapshot of the vast family tree formed by the life force

Every moment of the present I exchange a bit of my future into my disappearing past

Everything I do is very small yet so much more than what I can remember

I would be traveling in circles but time has converted them to rippling spirals

Though we make identical journeys, I cross your footprints heading the other way

I can even calculate the proportion of the sun’s energy that is falling upon my fingertip

Setting this thing in place I turn around and bump another which falls, out-of-reach, once again