Spiritual phenomenology, 3

And finally this phenomenology, one I would call transmigrational. It is a complement to Things You Will Hear, which I posted here on Oct. 12, 2008.

Energies I Followed. Places I Became.

...Then I became two seagulls
Spiralling their sex dance,
In helices,
Three gulls becoming
Fighting for a clam,
And then the flock itself,
A body of many bodies.

I became the moon,
Not more than a crescent,
My face turned down
With tears in my eyes
Like Hamlet's Ophelia
Despair as I follow the sun.
Ribbons fallen from my hair
Into a hundred reflections in a bay,
A red haze along the horizon.

Became a grain of sand
Jostled by the onrush,
A grain of quartz
Abandoned on a sandbar,
A grain of mica
Beneath the froth and hiss.

Become the ripples of a wave
     notes of a chord
In a larger wave
     in a turbulent fugue
In a willless undulation
     silently.

And rising from Ophelia
In an arc across Orion
I will become a great blue phoenix
Looking down on Ertha
As she whirls,
Hands thrown out!
Head thrown back!
In a dizzying spin of despair.
I will rise from her
And watch her drift into the waves.