Phoenixology

The ashes rise to form the tree.

The tree becomes a seed.

The love and all the tragedies

that define me

become the innocent child

that still lives

inside me.

I woke up last week in the hospital

after being unconscious for five days.

While I slept

I dreamed that I wrestled with God

and that the Goddess and the Sphynx

were holding me.

I woke up

alive

and for that

I am profoundly grateful.

I still don’t

understand

why I have lived so stubbornly

while so many others

I loved

died.

I just do.

Salmon swim upstream

with desperate lust,

or is it rage?

Their only goal to breed

and in so doing

die.

They dance across the waters.

They almost fly.

In the Ramayana

is a passage

where Brahma frees Indra

from his imprisonment on the Isle of Lankha

“not by smashing the prison walls

or dissolving the chains that bound him,

but simply by sending the thought

‘I am free.’

into Indra’s mind.

In that moment

Indra was free.”

I am meditating on the moment

that my self

returned to me.

Last night we watched a biography

of Doris Day on TV.

I wasn’t much interested

until the part

where Doris’ friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS.

I remember that day in San Francisco in 1985

like it was yesterday.

I remembered my lover, Tommy, and all my other friends who died.

I cried for two hours.

Afterwards, I felt a great deal lighter

inside.

The deep blue beauty of my girlfriend’s eyes

and the softness of her heart

embarrass me in my weakness

and inspire me

to try again.

Yesterday is part and parcel

of what makes tomorrow great.

Fly away on your dreams,

but return to plant your seeds.

There is time enough

for waiting;

time to just be.

I am looking at a river

that is flowing inside of me.

I am not swimming upstream any longer.

I am just entering the ocean

inside me.

-9 September 2004

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