Liffey Side Reel

Verse 1 Walking home late, the streetlights doing their slow bend around the corner of a night that doesn’t quite end where the night used to end. Something in the chest that I keep calling mine. Something that won’t rest the way rest used to work. I sit down on the curb. The curb is cold. The cold is a word. The word is a verb pretending to be a thing. I pretend to be a thing. We have that in common, the word and me. The ring of a phone in someone’s pocket two blocks down. A dog. A door. The small sounds of the town arranging themselves around a center that is not there. I keep looking for the center. The looking is the where. Verse 2 I had a teacher once who would not answer questions. He would only ask one back. Not as a lesson, not as a method — as the thing itself, the only thing he had to give. Whatever I brought him, he would bring it back as a question about who was bringing it. I hated him for years. Then I started doing it to myself. Walking, eating, lying in bed at night — who is walking, who is eating, who is the light on inside this body looking out through these eyes. And the looking would turn. And the turning was the surprise that there was nothing on the other side of the turn. Just more turning. Just the turning learning to learn that the learner was the turning in a quieter form. Verse 3 You can do this for a while before it starts to bite. At first it feels like progress. At first it feels like sight. You catch the thinker thinking and you feel a little free. You catch the catcher catching and you feel a little me that is bigger than the thinker, watching from above. And the watcher feels like home. And the home feels like love. And you settle into watching. And the watching is the trap. Because the watcher is the thinker wearing a different cap. The hand that holds the lantern is the dark the lantern lit. The one who notices the noticing is the noticing of it arranged into a noticer. Every refuge that you build is built by what was fleeing. Every silence that you’ve stilled is stilled by what was speaking. The speaker becomes still and calls the stillness peace. The stillness is the will of the speaker to continue under quieter conditions. Verse 4 So you go subtler. You drop the watcher. You rest in pure awareness. Pure. Untouched. The space in which the noise of being aware is. And for a while this works. And for a while you think you’ve found it. And then one night you notice that the pure has a sound around it, a faint hum of someone keeping it pure, a faint hand holding the open hand open, a faint stand beneath the no-stand, and the noticing of the faint is the same someone in the room, painted as the paint on the wall of the room he is in. There is no wall he is not in. There is no him that is not the wall. And every deeper you go is a deeper he has been waiting for you in, dressed as the place you have not yet been. Verse 5 This is the part that does not have a way out. Not because the way is hard. Because the one in doubt about the way is the way pretending to be lost. The seeking is the sought. The cost of the search is paid by the search to the search. The pew is the church is the prayer is the lurch of the praying toward a god who is the praying turned around. Every ground beneath the ground is more ground. Every floor falls through to a floor that falls through. The falling is the floor. The floor is what fell. You are the falling looking for somewhere to land that is not more falling. There is no land. The hand that would catch you is the falling shaped like a hand. Verse 6 I am not telling you this to take something from you. There is nothing to take. There is no one I am speaking to in the way I have been speaking. The you I keep addressing is a fold in the addressing, a wrinkle the speaking is pressing into the cloth of itself to have a someone to speak to. And the I that has been speaking is the same wrinkle, made two by the grammar of a sentence that needed a subject and an object to move. There is no subject. There is no object. There is the moving. And the moving is not happening to anyone. And the not-happening-to-anyone is not a sad thing. The sun is still up there doing what it does. The dog is still barking. The curb is still cold. The chest is still doing its aching. Verse 7 I am still sitting on the curb. The night is still long. Nothing has been resolved. Nothing has gone wrong. The looking for the center has not found a center yet. It will not. The not-finding is not a debt that will be paid by finding later. There is no later in which the finder will arrive and be the greater fact than the looking was. The looking is the fact. The looking is what there is. The looking does not lack a looker because the looker was always the looking arranged into the appearance of a someone doing the looking. And now I get up. And the getting up happens. And the walking happens. And no one is walking. And no one is talking. And the talking continues. And the night contin