In every gathering, in any chance meeting
on the street, there is a shine,
an elegance rising up.
Today, I recognized that that jewel-like beauty
is the presence, our loving confusion,
the glow in which watery clay
gets brighter than fire,
the one we call the Friend.
I begged, “Is there a way into you,
a ladder?”
“Your head is the ladder.
Bring it down under your feet.”
The mind, this globe
of awareness, is a starry universe that when
you push off from it with your foot,
a thousand new roads come clear, as you yourself
do at dawn, sailing through the light.
— Version by Coleman Barks
“Say I am You”
Maypop, 1994
