The Taoist Troubadour

From your fertile hair
like a sacred meadow
left for God's use,
where the white heifers
of spring graze,
from the flowering laburnum of your hips,
from the ocean of your heart
and the snow of your soul,
I rise up in contemplation
of the universal power
of the ungraspable Tao,
this power that Lao tzu
named Dou
and which is the Mother of all things,
the Progenitress of the myriads of trillions
of beings in bloom,
who populate the worlds
born of Its Dream,
Its impalpable Dream, the origin of
all palpable matter!


How, then, could I,
leaving you,
you, a being of flesh and blood, of viscera
and veins,
yes, how could I
go from your vulnerable body,
to throw myself into the conquest
of eternal Being,
which is by definition beyond the senses,
which is invulnerable above all things,
which has no specific quality,
which is the Source of all qualities?


No doubt there's a Great Mystery here
which only a mystic
can claim to penetrate!


But, if I am such a mystic,
why do I need
the aid of the flesh
when I am in an act of contemplation?


It's because I am a troubadour in love
and in love one cannot tell
the divine from the human,
the sacred from the profane,
for they are inextricably bound
the one to the other
and form mere creases,
hardly perceptible,
in the fabric of that Essence of essences
which is the Tao,
which appeared before the Earth
was torn from the Heavens,
before Heaven itself
was unfurled,
which existed before any multiplicity,
any particularity!


Yet, I, who have not yet reached beyond the stage
of being suckled by my Mother, Nature
and who has remained a small child,
I see every contradiction as mere appearances
every opposition as an illusion!


Only the Tao is not an illusion,
only the way that leads there
is not a fiction,
a way which passes for me,
through sensual delight!


That is why I can state without doubt
that I contain everything within myself,
man and woman,
morning and evening,
day and night!

FROM THE COLLECTION OF POEMS "VEHICULE DE DIAMANT"
28.02.08.

PUBLISHED BY ENCRES VIVES - JANUARY 2008