Aeviternity

Without the possibility of illusion [time]
there is no condition for enlightenment [eternity].
--- Dr. Allan W. Anderson

Over a grassy knoll at the edge of a scarp,
some scraggly, wind-swept oaks, clumps of scrub,
and a small outcrop of granite,
two people standing facing the dying light-
he with pocketed hands, and she, to his left,
with her arm looped through his.
Memory will linger like half-gone light,
a slivered moon and the punctual star,
where the rock stood, under their feet, heavy
with lichen, pocked from rain,
earth's unremitting face given to sky.
I will tell you now that these people
could be us, you and me, held here
in this memory-place, between two worlds,
where earth and air, light and dark, form a line.
A cold ellipse of water-worn rock
lies hard cupped in your palm,
takes your warmth. You sit
with stone and soon cannot tell
where its cold and your warmth begin.
And so you wonder where
skin ends, pebble begins.
I feel that this is our longing: to be stone.
And more: rock is burdened with unknown beauty.
It was as though the stone, the grass, the twisted oaks,
all oppressed by their beauty, nearly killed by beauty,
and by some trick of earth's labor-
cold wind, scattered star, sweet rotted-leaf-
conjured us to give them all relief of their beauty-burden.
And so, here we stand, smiling,
naming the things that make us smile,
embracing stone with the sound stone,
embracing oak with the sound oak.
And as we repeat these things to each other,
the world lightens, the world surrenders to us
stone, oak and grass, cold wind and rotted-leaf,
which come to reside within us, are at home within us,
and know the touch of one outstretched hand meeting another,
the one-face facing itself.

---- Poem by James Milner