cosmic

Remembering the colours, she approached the stars.

These two hovered dazed before one another,
for one saw the sea feathered, peacock breakered
crests of the other angel’s magnificence, different from his own,
and the other’s eyes flickered with vision of
flame petallings, cream-gold grainfeather glitterings,
the wings of his fellow, and both in immortal danger of dwindling,
of dropping into the remote forms of a lesser being.

But as these angels, the only halted ones
among the many who passed and repassed,
trod air as swimmers tread water, each gazing on the angelic wings of
the other, the intelligence proper to great angels flew into their wings,
the intelligence called intellectual love, which,
understanding the perfection’s of scarlet,
leapt up among blues and greens strong shafted,
and among amber down illumined the sapphire bloom,
so that each angel was iridescent with the strange newly-seen
hues he watched; and their discovering pause
and the speech their silent interchange of perfection was
never became a shrinking to opposites,
and they remained free in the heavenly chasm,
remained angels, but dreaming angels,
each imbued with the mysteries of the other.

---Denise.

~~~

Intellectual love: the two and the one. How do we see ourselves, see ourselves in the right light, without a loving glance. Acceptance and gift. The cosmic world isn't impersonal but full of lights. The need for different, shifting perspectives, for Blake's "double vision", for the shattering of images and for mirrors.

~~~

At dawn you drove home, through wide roads, the flat land stretching out on either side of you like a prairie, the grass like an ankle-high blue flame. Other worlds available in just a sideways look. Like so many other journeys at this time you're reminded of departures and arrivals. The traffic lights glowing with an inward calm as if the early hours were just registering against the constancy of their lives.

Nothing to be seen here, or captured. The outward shine of things still not visible in the form of the day.The act of seeing is only possible through memory. All of what has passed (and maybe all that will pass) is brought to this moment, and colours it. There is no "pure" perception, no individual, unmixed dot of data, but only a dream that we share. And this moment we occupy, returns to the cosmic stream, belongs to the next person waiting behind me. She, with her breath on my neck, already knows what I've forgotten.