MUONS ARE PASSING THROUGH YOU

This is what is:: You are walking down an empty road
in the middle of the night. The poor moon drips
weak light on you like waxy tallow, and it makes you cold.
Your lover has informed you that your services are
no longer needed and your heart feels like a cancer,
your own soul is like a thorn you have been stabbed with.
Dark hedges line the road and there are voices
whispering within them: they are the voices of the
lost, the damned, the many who will be legion.
And they know your name.

And this is true: You are a stardust person.
Muons are passing through you as you read this.
Cosmic rays are building you up and breaking you down.
Seas are evaporating, gases are freezing into planets,
planets are spinning off into the void.
Hold out your hand and watch the pions dance,
watch your nuclei exchanging forces with the universe,
watch the miracles ebb and flow as endless joy
folds into endless silence and everything is
everywhere all at once and it goes on and on.

And here is more: The infinite is already in you.
It is in you and of you, and it may save you.
But if it saves you, it will give you no choice.
So go down the road. Be death, be stardust, enter
the duality known to the generations who are vanished,
who left behind this double image, but only half
the message, just the instructions for how to begin.


Eleanor Lerman from "Our Post-Soviet
History Unfolds," Sarabande Books 2005