Hearing the Ocean Inland

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 8/9/07, Ananda Loka 3, India

The Hibiscus are primly aligned on either side
Of the long, straight, pink-stone walkways,
And each makes little, yellow, high-toned squeaks,
As we walk by them, like little girls, excited
By there own prettiness. That’s how it is here,
Gnats trying to perch on our astonished eyelashes,
Large-leafed grasses growing in starry spirals
Under the domes of hundred-year-old mangos.
A whole conspiracy of smiles and other
Sensory fruits, plumped and piled everywhere
For the feast of the spirit, so that we partake
Continuously, from a place of just enough
Emptiness, so that our satiation never dulls us.
The brain, that frantic chatterer, is lulled, al last,
Into drowsy, rocking silence, like a boat adrift
On pellucid turquoise waters, whose only
Motion is a series of undulations,
Timed perfectly to the rhythms of our hearts.
That’s how it is here, in the pulse-chamber,
Where the conspiracy is born, moment to moment,
Soft hump, by hump, by hump, among the Hibiscus,
Under the domes of the mangos, swept through
The spirals of billions of human grasses,
And spun through this song, which turns in nacreous tunnels,
Like the turns that form the fabulous Nautilus Shell.

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