On Why the Soul Makes This World and This Life of Ours More Complicated

 

Frontiers are peculiar places,

whether in Ostrov or in Fort Kent,

that call for another set of eyes

than those that heave and bristle

in the middle of the hive.

 

For on those borderland edges

all that is keeps its other

tucked close underneath what claims,

“This is it and basta.”

 

And even Dan, one of the two

most wondrous students of mine

from that small place by the St. John River,

whose very name used to be a trope

for “utmost extremity” in the Levant,

was perturbed by how much otherness

the soul herself makes us taste

 

when all one wants is to have it

at last—all simple, neat, and straight—

and so, in sheer exasperation,

he once said:

 

“I know nothing of these other languages.

Why won’t my soul speak to me

in plain, current English?

I don’t understand

why she makes everything

more complex than it has to be!”

 

And yet he himself could read Greek letters

as easily as his own alphabet

without ever being taught

what that ancient language says,

 

and yet himself was—by his soul’s design—

a true psychopomp, who was asked

to smuggle, or, to be more correct,

to help the select dead move

from this to the other world

 

and realize, once entered,

that other ineffable state.

 

And thus, as he put it:

 

“We are being visited

by sights and sounds

beyond what the extant mind

may ever remember …

 

even though I have always sensed

the presence where I have lived

even when darkness abounded,

whether within or without,

 

made of shadows and so black

that they parted the dark itself.

 

But then I remembered

I worked what mortals would call ‘death,’

and that not to obey someone with such clout

is never taken lightly—but what is, in truth,

ever at stake

 

is how one holds to

that power and presence

ever abiding there in the deepest heart,

with all her wisdom, all her sublime calm,

 

the ‘Aino-Mora,’ ‘The Sole One,’

from the mirror’s unseen back.

 

Or was she—is she—all the way from Japan,

perhaps, and hence a ‘Love Field,’

or ‘The Love’s Own Sound,’

or a trace of a fading palimpsest

that used to spell Harmonia

but then lost its ‘H’?”

 

And so the surface and the depth,

like two mirror-cut sides,

always tied and yet apart,

our souls and even our art

try to tally and bring in line,

as if ignorance and wisdom

could ever match and become one.

 

But if the presence decides

to grant us, once, its breath of grace,

then, on occasion, a marvel,

a divine marvel, may reach out.