Man Living on the Rock
Alone. Non-existent. Ephemeral.
I am empty like my closest family, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars,
the Meteors... Everyday I watch them rise and fall, rise and fall.
I am frozen on a desolate rock ringing through the cosmos like
a blind bird flying at night amid blinking fireflies.
I have a block body, a bit too symmetrical and perfect. I have
a hole etched through my round head, barely thin enough to hold
a thought. My Creator scraped away my knowing, I would never
know another warm soul. How does "warm to the touch" feel?
I pray for rain sometimes, so I can watch the cornstalks grow from
season to season and to feel the coolest raindrops falling on
my body's outline. When the whirlwinds blow the rain off me,
they are only sad hints. I've heard of coffee and hints of cinnamon
and mints added to it, like shapes in the fog, or shapes in mist.
Shhhh . . . listen and look for the tiger's breath.
A
Vietnamese monk once said to me--
He knew me as something
real and holy.
I don't even remember my birth and immortality is not me. Time
on this rock is a tornado's sweep, cruel and unforgiving. For there
is no love here like there is no end. Time is not relative, it's more
like where the sky and earth meet. No, it's where they meet in
a forest. No, it's an oak tree in the forest where a leaf is
being chewed by a little deer. It's not the deer but the eyelid
and the glassy vision, which is round.
It's round.
I meet many people each sunrise. They touch me and smile
sometimes, sometimes they wonder about me like they would
about some petrified dinosaur egg. They really never see me,
they leave without ever touching the loneliness. I once overheard
two Navajos from the nearby reservation sitting in their red truck
talking. One talked about a beautiful dark-eyed Navajo girl
he'd met at a '49 last night.
"Did
you ask about her clans?"
"Nope,
just fun" said the lucky one with a sly voice.
I thought
to be young and alive, and to feel the flesh
would feel like a drop of water touching my thirsty lips . . . sex
for me is only chalk dust, not the creamy marshmellow feeling they
laughed about.
I
eavesdropped for a few more
minutes before they left without ever noticing me, listening
to them. But the one sly Navajo did say something I'll never forget.
"Don't
ever waste a wish."
I made a wish.
I wished for love, for purpose, and I wished a vandal
would chisel me off this earth, Because that for me is
death, or because that for me is life, my wish.So tell me how a man should live?
Here I am, I am next to you;
A petroglyph on a rock.© 1998 by Hershman John.
All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted
without the express permission of the author
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