WE WITHIN THE WHEELS: DALIT

At the temple festival the tables went humming under the cabbage, rice, and melons. The summer sun waning. The baldbearded helium balloons dancing grandly among nubile paper lanterns, buddhas bronze/rotund. Ah, the season it was of Experience Superior – the feelings of love and the perceived reciprocity of love, when, past all balance and sense and generational propriety, exuberant amidst the consuming and consumed, we two, lanternballoon-alike, food and Buddha commingled, music and the truth congealed.

That’s why your paradox didn’t register at the time.

And the Children happy as tadpoles aswim in father’s river. And the Children pampered like feathers adrift in mama’s balloon.

Now my beauty r   e   a   c   h   e   s      o     u     t   in search of your moist and hidden cottage. (Remember the crisp sunflowers asmoke unkempt against the steep/&damp scampismelly dirt path. Recall the rose-of-sharon labyrinth oft-credited – before and since – as the soul’s taoWay, eelslick & serpent straight, into the nirvanic heart of notUnbeing.) Your thatched and pointed little house. . . it’s not where last I fingered its locks. The knobs now I’m told are handled some other where.

But even so, blind and blind, my beauty reaches out

reaches                             out

my blind beauty reaches

                           out into cold and empty vacuum.

And the Children pampered like feathers adrift in mama’s balloon, and the Children dappled in shadow ajoy in haughty first light.

Your holy mantra for the season: Iloveyou can’t love you. And the rutting neophyte at your knees picked at the koan’s echoed contradictions. I angled it in the light, squinting along its crosshairs, but the scope just would not focus. Flash powder applied, I tried to freeze it in its frame. But the quiver could never quite gel. Dusted for prints, but no proper whorl ever emerged to point its finger conclusively. “I love you can’t love you.” I parsed the riddle into phonemic meaninglessness but the significance never decoded. Affixed onto the acrylic stage for minutest examination, clarity persistently remained at yet one remove. Until Enlightenment came at last, slowly in a rush. I’d always known you’d go, of course, but not so suddenly. And not so soon. The painful puzzle pieces shuttered into place. And the Children dappled in shadow ajoy in haughty first light, and the Children, dapper as bluejays, agreed in bawdy verdure. I love you can’t love you. Clause the first personal, in classic equipoise with clause two cultural. Subject-clause by predicate controlled, the halving twins yining and yanging about, plusandminus all at once. The treasured self, forbidden/desired, embraced/abhorred.

(My fellow anthropologists, take careful note: her heart’s harsh judgment was conditioned by decades and millennia of micromacroforming. Metaphorically speaking, as such, I am the incest taboo. In those society eyes, I 'm the catamite in the homophobic gymn, the nigger in the genepool, the sheep in the unbleating humanfold. In objective terms, and all in econocultural context of course, her loving me was always the equivalent of fucking the corpse.)

And the Children, dapper as bluejays agreed in bawdy verdure, and all us Children vampiric taters asleep in God’s root cellar.

But the mantramoth, addicted, tethered herself to the tortured flame. The cycle doomed to turn and flutter, return and flutter, and flutter away. Return again, again away, covering and recovering the same old ground, rut after rut after rut again.

And koan’s mystery deepens.

But the Children happy as tadpoles.

--Duane Vorhees