Self-Portrait While Meditating on the Nature of Existence
by David Hernandez
How amazing—the fact of this bronze morning
lighting up my seafoam kitchen, post-dream, post-cereal,
one milk drop buried in my beard. Look how
chaos looks inside the bowl, the water churning
under the faucet, a frenzy of bubbles, which pop
up and bob and pop. Does it not seem the same to you,
being and been? I hear my beloved stir in the bedroom,
the bedsheet’s sigh. Listen from the hall her sips of air,
if a nightmare breaks the rhythm of her breathing.
Then I’m back to the bright kitchen, an ecstatic sun
blasting the front door’s frosted glass tangerine.
All is flying and whirling without beginning
or end, without language severing that from this—
wren from heavens from clouds from rain from grass
blade from the wayward ant that bends by increments
the slender leaf she quickly ascends like an acrobat.
Everything in the universe is one thing and eternal—
so my cereal bowl, now full with water in the sink,
is also empty in the cupboard. This from that—
be through with it. Be done with how an hourglass
splits present to future and past. When I copycat
wind or water, the way they glide onward, if my own
mind simulates their grace, time extinguishes.
Now go with all—with lava crust and waterfall,
with cosmic dust and snow pea, with lily and sassafras,
with slow and fast river-leaves riding a current,
as riverbank trees unpin their gold hands, spinning
downward to join leaves already rafting along
like a procession of fire, and mesmerizes like fire itself
if you gaze long enough to sense the idea of yourself
disappear, reappear as everything, as mindful
as any breeze, this new you-less you, this perfect
emptiness before the monolith your Self chiseled for you
reassembles back to myth. Even your skin knows it
cannot stay and so rescinds itself through apoptosis,
each second cells rush off to kill themselves,
billions a day leap from the shelf of flesh. We are
every leaf fallen or still green and sunlit,
still on the ground or drawn forward by water.
David Hernandez’s most recent collection of poems, Hello I Must Be Going, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s also been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry and two Pushcart Prizes.