Cardinal Points

Astral Life

.:. Astral Life Did I cry out in joy as I climbed, a child two years old exploring the high kitchen breakfront? Did I shout from heaven? So removed am I now, so distant, all that was immediate then is lost. I don't feel the hard wood with my hands, elbows, and knees, don't see the tops of thingsstove with its blue fires, counters with their jars and knives, my mother's startled look, her arms reaching for me. And I've lost what I was after, what drew me upward to the new world of each shelf, its dust and moths and rows of white china plates that faced me and held my face. Did I climb for the moon, the moon which has no body and calls for ours? Did I climb toward the night years later I lay exhausted on a cot in an echoing warehouse loft, unable to unknot and sleep? I stared ahead as behind me in a hundred warehouse windows the bright moon rose. A hundred moons rose and looked down on me, 45 their light filling the loft. Then I left my body. I floated free. In that gray cinderblock room lay my body without me, the eyes open, covers rising and falling with breath, a form I no longer filled. In awe I backed away. And saw there, outside the warehouse windows looking in, another figure. My self again. Again I backed away, and again, from figure after figure, unnumbered selves aligning below me as I moved outward into the night, afraid, uncertain I'd return through each one to myself, that still form in the warehouse. I would become some black moon forever-lightless, unseen, watching. What brought me back? And when I did return, moving forward, dropping through the skies, gathering self after self, was I wrong to stop in my trembling, cold body? Falling from so far, I might have sought the life deep in my breathing and heartbeat. But I did not. I rose and hurried out, away from that room, its windows and its hundred setting moons, never to know how far I might have gone outside or within myself. 46 I might have reached the last star or the first cell, but I could not bear the loss, the lost body left behind for someone to find, to touch, but never again revive. 47 ...