In Deep.

[Guest guest]

All our hearts are drowning pools. What is carried

unnoticed for an age as a teardrop, will submerge you

slowly as a sleek and languorous flood that baptizes you into

the art of sacred custody, of loves divining. There are

others ways to drown, but this is the way of those who insist

on swimming head above water until waterlogged.

Gradually you become too, in deep, to be outside of this

depth of yourself, and give up the ghost of that life-raft of

deceits you have clung to.

 

While treading water, a shark attack kills you swiftly with a

terrible love. While playing the saint, a divine rogue

disarms you with his truth. While pausing to be lost for a

moment, you are found to be long drowned and loving it.

For this ‘too deep’ awakening, you have to sleep with the

fishes for a while, and become bait for the hooks of

fisherman’s tales, so that the depth of this drowning can

overwhelm you completely with the seep of stealth.

Suddenly you are out of any depth, and out of the locker

of those dead mariners that fell wistful into dreams of

drowning yet lingered on to complain of pleurisy.

 

Yes, the heart is a drowning pool, and we the attendants of

the wave machines, and bath chairs of the wavering invalids

of our souls consent. How like a heron is the heart, still and

fatally watchful for the least sign of our aquatic failing, to

float or flee no longer. How like a shaft of quicksilver in the

night. The pierce of a dart that un-dams the dike of

desiring, as this flooding that runs deep, too deep for

helpless rescue. Yet how insinuated and latent its mounting

surge, until the waters break and there is no bruise of care,

but only your head and hair floating in this world. How like

a heart engulfing, this drowning from loves deep welling.

 

Accept the pain of this longing,

as a thirsty desert accepts rain.

Do not try to be anything

but this free falling Love.

Sometimes, the heart,

is a tear drop

searching for an eye

to cry in.

 

Every now and then,

when a river becomes tasteless,

or its soul too dried up

to move on of its own.

It will come to the waterfall,

and say:

Catch me when I die.

 

love

 

eric

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2002. Eric Ashford.