Clairvoyance
By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 7/8/08
Unseasonable lightning-strike fires
Have prowled, uncontrolled, through our mountains
For more than two weeks, and high pressure
Inversions have made our cities infernal
Vapor chambers. Now, along the elevation
Of a crowded freeway, we see a row of exhausted
Eucalyptus, and we wonder what sort of sad,
Human fatuity has prevented us from feeling
The profound grief of vegetation.
Without reproach, the trees, their drought-stricken
Branches rising and falling only to the wheezing
Of car exhaust, tell us of the signals that occur
Just before our social conditioning perverts
Our sense perceptions. Here, the conspiracies
Of the periphery, freed from all false premises,
All masking of sight or touch or taste or smell or sound,
Complete their trajectories through a magical
Phase-space of random advances and non-random
Feedback. For the first time, perhaps, we can sense
Beyond sensing, how the spastic movements
Of head and upper body, rhythmic and periodic,
Of certain autistic children, have paralleled
The movements of these trees and of the humps
And hollows of hillsides denuded by fire.
From this chaos, something complex and gigantic
Is taking shape. This Master takes hold of us,
And through the immense power of his active will,
He thrusts the padding of the bombasted
Intellect outside of itself, and confronts us
With the disinterested instinct of branching —
Branching in trees, in fires, in nerves. Suddenly,
We are ravaged by a new mode of consciousness
Called “Naked,” where we at last attain,
Even in this obscuring smokiness,
To the pellucid immobility of compassion.
