Kundalini Splendor

Nothing

Nothing sings in our bodies
like breath in a flute.
It dwells in the drum.
I hear it now
that slow beat
like when a voice said to the dark,
let there be light,
let there be ocean
and blue fish
born of nothing
and they were there.
I turn back to bed.
The man there is breathing.
I touch him
with hands already owned by another world
Look, they are desert,
they are rust. They have washed the dead.
They have washed the just born.
They are open.
They offer nothing.
Take it.
Take nothing from me.
There is still a little life
left inside this body,
a little wildness here
and mercy
and it is the emptiness
we love, touch, enter in one another
and try to fill.

Linda Hogan


(Modern American Poetry, ed. by J. Coulson, P. Temes, and J. Baldwin)

This lovely poem by Linda Hogan has many Biblical as well as Buddhist echoes. The voice that speaks to the dark, saying
let there be light,
let there be ocean
and blue fish
born of nothing
and they were there

repeats in the first line God's words in the famous Biblical passage. And the references to the palpable realities of ocean and fish "born of nothing" are strongly suggestive of the Buddhist notion of emptiness and form: "emptiness is form, form is emptiness." That is to say, everything that exists comes out of nothing, to which it ultimately returns.

When she says of her hands that they "already belong to another world," she is recognizing that she is approaching death, for no one of us possesses a guarantee of immortality. She is part of what the Buddhists call Samsara, the world of appearance and shifting forms, a world ever in transition. Her hands, so useful in this life, will soon be transformed into desert or rust through the physical body's decay.

At the end of the poem she reminds us of the human need to find comfort in one another, to fill the emptiness within through love and communion. This ending causes us to reflect that often we yearn for love on the human level, as well as divine connection.




(picture from Wikipedia)