CANTO 12 Imagine how

 

Imagine how my heart must sink

as Turtle drops the mystic truck through bedrock,

down diamond pipe to magma flow,

matter no barrier to my tranced system.

Trailing permafrost and obsidian, I orbit

a nickel-iron core of invincible pain.

Faces in yellow olivine show pain

more than this pilgrim can bear. I sink

into mesosphere as my orbit

decays. Above me serpentine, liquid bedrock,

forces great plates where rift systems

thrive; but at such cost! that molten flow

embodies the First Noble Truth. The flow

is rivers of beings laboring in pain,

makers and victims of faceless systems.

Dachau, My Lai, suburbia, in the broad sink

of magma swirl, no hope of bedrock;

they long for rebirth in their endless orbit!

I claw and I scream for that comfortable orbit,

middle-earth and middle-class, congenial flow

of consumer goods and good books, bedrock

leisure of the unknown citizen, flight from pain

I get in my tent, afraid it all might sink,

cushioned by professionally managed systems.

Farther down the vortex of burning systems

plunges Diamond T’s molten decaying orbit,

past the holocaust, thermonuclear sink,

to the IRON CORE where the dead, yet living, flow

to beg a golden ring, screaming in pain,

begging rebirth, far below bedrock.

Now I learn the hardest substance, bedrock

of truth, Diamond Sutra above systems,

and turn to the Law that overturns pain.

For this was I freed from mundane orbit,

for this yearning spirits ceaselessly flow,

the Law where Being and Non-Being both sink.

Then Turtle, from the bedrock of its Bodhi orbit,

throws the ring from which all systems flow

to me: a chance for life, for growth, for pain to sink.