Uroborus

Christina Fernandez, Lavandaria #8, 2002, Copyright Christina Fernandez, courtesy of Gallery Luisotti.

By Gillian Cummings

Starkness: in the dogwood a robin’s nest

the bottom of which has become unwoven from the top

 

so that, looking up, you saw a frayed O

and through it the dusk color of sky

 

before a night when it would snow.  It made you think

of the shadowed ceiling of a church and white

 

candles burning and what it feels like when the body

is trying to teach the mind stillness.  There is an O

 

in Buddhist calligraphy that has the quality of being

finished and unfinished, as if endings and beginnings

 

only brush each other lightly, or as if a break

runs through perfection making it more

 

luminous.  The dragon swallowing its tail

in alchemical texts is similar but not the same.

 

Seeing the nest, you paused, then walked down the path

to the laundry room where your clothes had stopped

 

tumbling in rough circles.  You wanted to remember

how your life had come to this point, but you couldn’t

 

so you folded.  The brief heat of dried cloth.

The solace taken, in winter, from something worn,

 

warmed, freshened.  The open space at the center.

The gesture.  The open space that surrounds.

 

***

 

Gillian Cummings is a member of the Empty Hand Zen Center, and would like to thank the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation for their generosity in providing her a grant, with which she was able to write this poem.  

Tremendous gratitude is expressed towards Christina Fernandez, whose  photograph accompanies Gillian's poem.  An exhibition of her work, "residue/residuo," is currently on view at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles.