Stumbling tumble

In the pit of deepest night, the figure of the pieta bides with us. This maternal endurance and reverie denies time, death, and the obvious truth that life is broken; it appears through the women bathing and perfuming the dead Jesus, through the women in a trailer home, massaging the body of a dead boy so they can bend the limbs, and clean and dress him. Nothing is being made there, but love is being maintained and that is enough; it will have to be enough. From this compassion out of the bottom of hell, everything else will be born.

-Roshi John Tarrant, from "The Light Inside The Dark"

Not desperate nor confident, down to the lower platform to wait with the westerly travelers. I go off on an half empty train at evening rush. Not knowing where I'll stop, not sure how it matters where that will be.

A slow stumble without a sprawl, I stop at the line which leaves me a spot. Tumbling, the memories fall through the door behind me. Old tiles the size of silver dollars, black paint and absinthe. The lines of heads and the bunches too. Spectre-like, a ghostly half presence as they come and go through the door into the isles, silhouettes against the windows onto the busy streets; I see them from my stool on the inside line. Young and purposeful about everything and nothing at all and everything again. "Innocence, consciously or not, longs for experience, longs to be different from itself." It goes so we might know it.

Down, am I still going down in this dark place? Must we go all the way before we can rise? Drifting, sideways moves. That's how it must seem from the outside: like I'm waiting to die, feeling alone. Yes, but no. There is a bent to this dark drift, at the end of the cone an opening up and out into a familiar place.

Not desperate nor confident, down to the toxic platform to wait with the easterly travelers. I go off on an evening rush half empty. Not knowing where I'll arrive, not sure how it matters where that will be.