I am not afraid of dying.
For I left my body on a blanket
and rode the rolling drum
to the cave of Luna, the dragonfly spirit.
She took me curving through redwoods
to the cliff's edge between this world and the next.
"Say goodbye to Tracey," she said, holding my hand.
"Bye," I whispered, stepping away, "I liked her."
Behind me then, stood the dragonfly lady and my ego,
waving to me in unison.
Laughing, I jumped off the precipice without looking back.
Borne on the wings of a white heron
away from the earth,
I soared past breaking waves and breaching whales,
red-rock canyons and ice-white glaciers.
Dropped into a surging mountain river,
I became the water, smoothing around boulders,
tumbling in on myself, swirling into eddies.
I knew only propulsion and purl,
the swift softness of unyielding progression.
Soon, lifted by invisible hands,
I was flung past crumbling cooling towers
and leafless black trees toward a music
not of the earth--like bells and wind chimes,
harpsichords and flutes playing themselves
in harmony with no maestro or musicians.
The melody lured me, and other souls, closer
toward its core, until we all became the notes.
A single drumbeat, a year there.
Gyrating white light and rainbow colors, like rhythm to a dance.
All pulsations inside the nebulous union I had become.
No thought, only feeling.
No feeling but love.
And so I returned reluctantly at the drummer's call-back
to finish what was not yet done--
the pleasures of hands and skin and beating heart,
the struggle of seeing this life through.
My journey back was harsh and jarring.
I crashed into my ego like a speeding car,
and we skidded together back into the body.
I came to consciousness coughing for breath,
disoriented, and clutching fists to my mouth
as I sobbed.
Now, months later, back in the body
fully, I like the fit.
I make love and languish in warm moonlit ponds,
eat thick, dripping fruit,
stretch to the corners of the feather bed,
and breathe in the sweet mold of fallen leaves.
But there are those times
when the body is not enough,
when I hear the rustle of heron wings
and the distant beating of drums.
Then my forehead throbs with
the weight of the spirit
which longs to grow large again
in that place beyond the shore.
All poems copyrighted by the author, Tracey Besmark 1997©