Danse Libre

"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

There are no portals to the infinite
the unmeasurable, the source, the one,
the unmanifest, pure being, the end,

I am sorry to report. There is none.
You and I can't go there, or can't come back,
the same. What we so avidly discuss

as if it were a state to be attained,
a good goal, only exists without us,
that which has no speck of us within it,

and what's odder, we've defined it that way.
Deep sleep, the divine, stillness and silence,
the timeless, are the names we say to unsay,

namers in awe of the unnameable,
are beams of photons we fire to outline
the vertiginous edge of emptiness

so we can feel the black hole's hunger defined
by our illustrations, as if the end
of all our traveling were to disappear

into our knowing what's around the bend.
We want what's not us to want us in it,
but there are no portals to what isn't.