Allan Dowling
THE NEEDLE POINT OF NOW
When this perishable body ceases
either there is nothing, or a free, transcendent mind.
Who knows? Perhaps we enter it and find
that what we now call evil is not evil,
and good is more than what we now call good.
Life, some say, when it's fully understood,
is the slow swinging over of a needle
from birth, the dark red moment of creation,
thru color-changing thoughts and seasons of sensation,
until the point swings free
in violet death, the time of memory.
The change from prophecy to recollection
is really
all
that action
means. From night to night
the road's from perfect black
into white, and back:
midnight is motionless eternity.
Let's listen to it; it will tell us how
that lonely star which rides
above the sunset like a crystal vial,
is nothing but the needle point of Now
putting each tick behind it on the dial.
Look up and watch that star.
It
parts the air,
and leaves no track behind that we can see,
but of the path it travels, all was there
before its journey started, and will be
after its motion ceases. Every instant
of our long lives is in the grip of thought,
as if each close-linked image, one by one,
were thrown by the blazing sun
and firmly caught
and fixed forever in the glacier's heart
