Looking for the gift

But what is the gift?

Are words the gift?

Is it really the apparent eloquence, 

or rather the verbose confusion 

of one's mind, the gift?

Could the gift be, instead, 

this growing suspicion, 

this near certainty that words 

are not to be found, but to be told, 

and not to be sought, but to be lived? 

And where is the gift? 

Is it lost within you and me, 

like a child who plays with a balloon, 

then cries in the same corridor

where he left go of a hand, 

where nobody is looking for him, 

where no one has seen him yet?

Or is the world itself the gift?

Is it the sun blessing you with a robe of warmness

when you step away from a cold shadow, 

into colder winds, without any other merit

than being alive and sentient in your flesh? 

Is it the light that burns and creates all objects 

within your sight? Is it the way it sounds

like countless violins when it reigns upon 

that city in your memory from noon till dusk, 

or like a lonely oboe when the longest shadows

begin to give way to the morning?

Is desire the gift, or is it plenitude?

Is the gift the body sheltered and ravished

by the fire of its nature, by the fever of its yearnings?

Or is the gift its hope that, one night, 

after breaking into the possibly hellish darkness 

of an alley where it has no business being in, 

drunken with despair, hallucinating on self-loathing, 

it will trip on its own feet, dive into a dream of detachment, 

and wake up enlightened, liberated from the joy and misery of sinning?

 

Awareness is the gift. 

Even when left alone by the dead 

or the living who are gone, 

surrounded by music or silence or noise

like an ant or a spider at the foot of a canyon, 

we are fortunate when we sense that we 

are shining, murmuring, falling, flying, 

flowing away from the hands of time.