Maria Berardi, “Pagan

Pagan

Maria Berardi

“I didn’t come here of my own accord and I can’t leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.” Rumi, “The Tavern”

1. When I am happiest, just myself, happiest, knowing full well the failure of that word,

is alone in the forest, careening unevenly on not-young knees in the early-spring landscape,

the over-long grasses of last summer’s wet reign hunched flat, licked by months of snow, licked like a foal just born, disheveled and barely formed.

The air has the first hint of something like petrichor, the first clue that the trees are alive, the rocks are alive, the dirt itself teems with its million lives awakening in quiet riot.

So much life barely sensed –I do not have the equipment to fathom it (all the colors my eyes cannot perceive!) I barely have the sense to sense it –

and this happiness of being part of this, this forest that does not need me, this happiness of being,

unnecessary being, tilts and spills over to the greatest longing, the most human love of the unhuman,

pain of being separate in the middle of being part of –basically being in love with the world

The Opiate, Winter Vol. 24 that does not love –or that loves with a love that is harrowing to even approach.

that careening longing is for a faraway god, the one who needs altars the one who needs buildings.

There is a clue there, the shape the space but what is the absence, is there an absence?

Who is looking, who asks the question? What is the noticing, who is the noticer?

Who is driving this vehicle of limbs careening? Is finding all this sacred the thing that is sacred?

The longing is for the world to be more in the midst of its actual abundance.

This world’s great vividness sparks a burning for some eternal real. Wise men have called this longing, joy. Wise men have called the longed-for, Heaven, God.

Maybe this, just myth. Maybe culture, maybe meme.

Maybe vestige, not needed. Maybe empty is just open.