Antipodes

for Patrick

When the world is upside
down around me, I sense
you there on the opposite
side of the sideless globe,
a pinpoint of precisely calibrated
connection, on which the entire
planet is balanced, spinning around
a single plumbline of gravity
connecting your feet to mine,
leaving us rightside up together.

Eyes of Light

If thine eye be single,
thy whole body shall be full of light.
—Matthew 6:22

Looking into the camera lens
I draw my own focus
to a matching single eye
and feel the light rising,
filling, flowing over and out,
to all eyes of light,
where all I’s are one.

Everything I Know

Or: A Solipsist Creates the Universe

When I
was born,
the universe
was small,
vaguely hazy.

As it gradually expanded,
I tracked every change,
eyes, ears missing nothing,
senses etched into memory.

I know everything there is to know,
as clearly evidenced by the fact that
I cannot tell you anything I don’t
know. Is my knowledge accurate? Certainly. Why
would I believe anything that wasn’t true?

But the universe of existent facts continues to expand.
I create new ones every day, fashioning them from
books, from my senses, and occasionally with help from
various people—professors, scientists, etc.—whose work I oversee.
Creation occurs in two stages: first as something to be
known, and then secondarily achieving full manifestation into known reality.

I do not know when this expansion—of reality, of awareness—will end,
and therefore I can tell you for a fact that it will not.