This could be my last report, who knows?
With the same love, unconditioned, and freedom, you have shown me...

MEANING

Fear arrests and
sorrrow’s a melting to rest.

Even rage passes in a flash,
what truth it reveals so obvious,
immediate, there’s no time for
mind or heart to stir.

Only lust confuses me: the spirit’s longing, mind’s
curiosity, body’s need, heart’s desire, all dimensions,
levels, textures passion takes and then takes more
and never quiets down but by exhaustion or
sleep and still is there at awakening to be so vividly
recalled from a strange dream or odd or even familiar smell or
cold or hot shaft of moon- or sun-light.

This may be particular to me.

Or is it life’s own ceaseless restlessness to breed
compulsively endless macro- and micro-diversity—
for death, the purely abstract, the unknown, its partner to consume?

So—a brief moment of empty awareness between those two cunning parents,
as between my own body’s breaths out and in,
is the only true respite in the whole expanding universe?

Yet, if some surd mystery beyond absolutely
meant at all, and so also meant us humans
as we are, doesn’t that mean we’re really
meant, somehow, to become aware of it all: every
detail of the whole event as our very own?

And only then—but if not, and even if, why not now?—
could I just forget, as myself, as dead
already, every seeming tantalizing other—
c o m p l e t e l y — and the surd life itself, finally
appeased, alone, be omniself-aware?

Something or other that cannot speak, yet swallows whole
the ancient bitterness, allows a natural, childlike—baby-like—
smile to blossom so suddenly, just now, on this old, gray-
bearded, weathered and wrinkled face. One more foolish
life vanishes in the love beyond love—needing, wanting,
nothing but itself.

For and from John Sherman,

Yours ever,

Richard

©2006 Richard Sassoon. All rights reserved.