The Garden of Ataraxia

The word today is as it was

Beyond the scale of our experience,

A thousand years upon us:

“Noise”.

And simple noise we shall create

Within the confines of this sleepy town

With magpies preaching up and down

The stillness of the tinker toys.

The harder that I concentrate,

The tape rewinding, congregate

The rumbling, rumbling, penetrate

The bricks laid out by men of iron will

With new contraptions sucking diesel

While the brake deploys.

That magpie out in front now

As some residential Порфи́рий

Who listens sensibly behind the door

To sense the convict in the room

And aims to cry out, “Man! Wilt thou not wait?”

Where did the sacred hour go?

A form

Upon the wall:

Tin pines and a black bear

Secluded in between the brambles,

Lumbering behind her young

To cut off predators along the pass.

“But, Mother,” Little Bear Cub cries,

“Won’t winter come again quite soon,

And must we then relieve ourselves

Of terrors, burdens of the gun,

By sleeping it all off, and not to run

To battle ‘gainst the firing of the moon?”

“Hush, darling,” Mama Bear whispers,

Still bringing up the rear

And coaxing Little Bear Cub to their den.

“As often as we go with men,

We return less than one;

What wisp of warmth we keep depends

Upon the deed that’s done.

If ever frightened through it all,

Remember what I’ve said:

As often as the snow may fall,

The sun will rise again.”

What profit is there in a longer life

When we amend so little of ourselves?

I see such fruit in monasteries:

The apple for the eye that sees beauty;

The peach in kinship between enemies;

The pear brings wisdom, insight, reveries;

And berries picked for hope and charity.

No nobler notion there:

ὁ κῆπος της άταραξιας.

And everywhere we blink

We see this notion spread.

Observe a colony of mustard seeds

That birthed in single blossom,

Weaned uranium obscurity

Until the lightning razed their garden,

Scattering the seedlings

Hither

Thither

To the farthest corners of the universe.

Where they rested,

There they took up courage

And they grew.

How then, one afternoon,

A seedling, after waking,

Found it had no root,

No field to call its home

And no insight of origin.

And so it came to be in pilgrimage,

Of decades at a time;

All through its wanderings,

The seedling found a binding sense

Of all its brothers and its sisters

Somehow; 

Though they came to be

Around the single interval of time,

Some still babbled, cozy infants,

Others colder, wiser, than the mountain peaks.

And so the seedling looked upon its form

And found itself within a newfound garden.

At long last.

It planted roots and grew

To reach Orion’s Belt

No longer fearing orphanage,

A modicum of mere infinity:

ὁ κῆπος της άταραξιας.

What could I say

In blank response -

To tell me nothing, naught at all, is possible

Save for what happens presently?

A goldfish may perceive your living room

To be the vast expanse of ocean

Simply that it sits outside its scope.

For such is knowledge of our destiny: 

That everything is known

According not to innate self

But through divine capacity of One Who Knows.

I think I think too much

Check the beginnings; once thou might’st have cured,

But now ‘tis past thy skill, too long hath it endured.

The shaking just begun.

The wooden coaster dropped

Deep down into the dark

Deep caverns of my heart

And came back into sight

Once more into the light.

The wheeling up and down

Disturbs my stomach more

Than youthful fortitude that once upheld me. 

Rivals whizzing by beside me

Flashing their approval

But of what?

The tracks ahead of me

Or of the tracks ahead of them?

Perhaps they do not see their end,

As I cannot see mine.

The lighthouse guides them on.

The green light blinks to life.

ὁ κῆπος της άταραξιας

The end.

And back in line I go.