There, and Offset a Couple of Centimeters

Walk for overlooked refuge
Seeking motionless being
One like every place at every time.
And in meaninglessness
It balances the caterwauling of civilization.
It balances what inertia insists.
It balances tomorrow's threat with the calm of eternity,
and anonymous existence.

This balance isn't death and it is not life.
It appears a moment after wings escape your hand.
It is in the shadow of the momentous,
in the piss-humid alley near the spactacular entrance hall.
It's the blue you yourself initiate after staring at yellow.
It's an inch to the right from the entrance of the bullet that killed Jack Kennedy.
It's a dropped voter's ballot that was never marked.
Its emptiness absorbs every boast.
It is the measure of importance and unimportance.
It is a bas-relief on a wall that has never elicited a face of the holy virgin.

Thoughts, hearth, country, globe, systemless scattering of suns.
Any unnoticed space the size of my hand.
The pressure in the forest never cocking an ear.
I remember that I sensed my late mother's presence in a place she'd never visited.
This rush of meaning into a vacuum without gesture.
Unaffected by the measure of one man's knife to the throat of another.
Unaffected by the desperately won identity of the primary causes,
Even the sound of a breeze through your hair excludes this place from your contemplation.
This is the place without chains and values,
This is the place that allows us to know love,
This is the place that is the senseless and uncaring measure of our achievement,
This is the place that is the other, and allows us grace.