In the Beginning...

Of memory and dreams and the serpent swallowing its tail

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To begin, I must make a sound of brilliant light

I once believed my first memory was a dream. I was four, and in my dream, my younger brother and I were in the backseat of my mother’s blue Chevy, driving down the red dirt road to her parents’ house in rural New Mexico. Suddenly, an impassable dark chasm opened up and we drove right into it. As we fell into the unending void, my mother pressed the gear shift up from Drive to Park and said, “Well, kids. I guess that’s it.”

In the beginning there was the beginning
and whatever gave birth to the beginning 
simultaneously birthing the end. 

But then it emerged.

A warm day in a house I barely recall in a state far away from where I grew up. I was 2 or 3. Some neighborhood kids in our backyard. My sister, five years older than me, going outside to join them but locking the door behind her so I couldn’t follow. She was afraid my toddling would frighten away the spectacle. I screamed, banging my hands on the door. Through the window I could see

a bush, as though on fire, covered in monarch butterflies.

Always coexistence—interexistence—
out and in and through and of.

Sometimes memory is a flood and you’re standing in a desert slot canyon. There isn’t any rain for miles around, but suddenly you’re swept away, deposited in the sand of a new understanding, the timeline both forward and back utterly altered forever. We have returned but it’s not the same.

An insertion of a happening, conscious life as the warp and subconscious and unconscious as the weft, with random materials and colors making their way into the design. And it’s only in the pause and step back that I discover it there: “Huh. Would you look at that…”

Hindsight. At every moment, we are taking in far more than we can process. Remembering is a déjà vu, another one of these circles within circles that cycle through my life.

It makes me wonder: What is all of this anyway? Who’s the keeper of the files? Did anything I remember really happen? Whose spell am I under? Who (or what) is driving this bus anyway?!

As Robert Anton Wilson said, “Reality is always plural and mutable.”

The day I was born, so was my death.
This poem is already over. I'm not telling you
anything you're not made of anyway.

Each scene, a card in a deck—my husband looking me in the eyes and telling me I’ve always known, my grad school professor critiquing that poem, my mother’s story of weeping so hard at the doctor’s office when her pregnancy with me was confirmed—that deck my life. I’ve seen it shuffled a few times, like a flip book or a dreamy movie montage, one that took me back to my true first memory—what else is there to do but file it away as fact? Some attempt at understanding myself, only to be transcended with the realization that I was never here at all. Just an odd collection of abstract artifacts with a gravity called me, and all the atoms and molecules somehow transmitting this waking dream will someday loosen their grip and dissipate into the nothing of everything.

Something about this, all of this, needed to be lived. Of any other purpose, I am unsure.

Isn't it beautiful—this juncture,
this confluence, the everything at the center
inhalation awaiting your choosing?

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Thank you for being with me together at this coordinate point of time and space. <3