Metatron
The gods’ hammers strike your eardrums. The vibrations shiver you from sky to earth. Your roots spread, gather voices into your trunk, where blue and green meet to create the symphony of the planets and the song of the worms, the whole Whitman universe rotating to the pulse of your sap as it rises and falls.
Is it enough for me to crawl along the verticals of your dodecahedron like an ant in Wonderland? Is each point an epiphany or a decision? Is it enough to take the hands of other ants and sing the world into and out of existence with Coca-Cola and nepenthe?
Look. A boy with blond curls sits at a desk and watches a clock. His leg kicks the ticking rhythm against his chair. His fingers curl around that which creates the Word in thick letters on lined school paper. Every pencil is carved from your wood.
My cat plays with string theory. Time wrinkles. Sometimes it works itself into knots. The boy is a man now. He tunes his cello to your hum. You vibrate his notes up to the gods and out into the world. You write the lyrics in the sunrise.
Now the boy is a baby, pink against his mother’s nipple. Teleology is an illusion. The song neither starts nor stops, rises nor falls, but moves through the mother’s breast, through the tree that is you, through the power lines that draw us together, through the soil that spreads across the earth and greets every footstep.
Metatron, you write sorrow as well as joy. You write the cacophony of airplanes slamming into twin towers. You gather hunger and fear like a bouquet and hand it to the gods. But you are no hanging tree. You balance, unencumbered, between earth and sky. You hold stillness in your heart. The boy holds acorns in his hands.
I cling to the dodecahedron and trace the pattern that vibrates around me. I no longer try to find where you end and the perfect forms begin or where perfection melts into pain. Edges are an illusion.
The song is real.
