I am a circle. My perimeter moves in any direction—up, down, sideways, forward. My center is the center everywhere, for I gather the world around me where I happen to be. It is alarming how quickly I climb your khaki pantleg, then scurry over the grass you brush me to, climb up a tree though I seem to have no head for direction, hurrying and standing still at the same time. One of me is as good as a thousand, for I meet myself coming back in passages through time, matter and anti-matter, monads and mirrors. Though I move I am still here and here and here and here, my scurrying legs the mere static of time in the brilliance of being.
I appear to have no eyes, no ears, no mouth. I am a single thought surrounding itself, a singular idea, an eye staring at the inside of the universe, a pinpoint of light which holds within itself the history of the Big Bang and the revolving archangels of the Deity, the Pleistocene and Waterloo and the Grammy Awards, a singularity indeed from which all flows and circles on itself.
I am brown as a bun and a cushion button, my legs thin as hairs. Where I am, I hold all down for a moment, then move on invisible in the grass until I am again crawling up your arm as if desperate with a message, as if to climb the air were no great feat on invisible threads of light to give some intelligence of earth to the sun.
A small Martian robot, a space module, a moving camera. a heat-measuring spectroscope gathering the information of surfaces, computing it and sending it back as I touch everything lightly, a measuring up and radioing of it to a transcendent network— my legs like the hair of Einstein or the mad scientist's or the movies where brains with beaks take over and siphon everyone up until matter shrivels and everything is just an empty sleeve and earth spins away as a colossal thought into the abyss of thought around it and there is a vague hosannahing of antennae and a chorus of small green blips but gigantic thunders of imagination and a pure gold dawn when matter reappears.
I am the careless aunt whose hair strays over a face pregnant with black-eyed susans and fresh currant-berries with babies and poems that flew away in the garden and a smile that dreams another world into being. I am what didn't get tucked up when you were a child and made a wonderful mess in the mud under the cooking sun, the grass bleeding into your elbows and knees and the mud on your chin, the small pebbles lined up and glittering in a row, your own sweet breath as you moved things and saw them in a riot of newness.
I am a hot-cross bun on legs, there for the eating, whose bones contain magic like peyote to alter the world. If you bite my center you will never again be content with peripheries or the long wastage of halls and the dim shores of existence on the margin, but catch the single reedy scratch of the sparrow straight through your heart— nor be tired from the hours of waiting and the gray inconsequentials, the violet of unfulfilled yearning, and the fizz of desire, the sad antics of the calculated moment and the paper parapets of weeks and months, but drop into the center revolving slowly pulling the world by you like a sea— a strong swimmer reaching out and pulling all things past, lightly touching all surfaces, taking everything and leaving it as it is, rich with a word you cannot own.
—Robert Siegel is the author of In a Pig's Eye and The Beasts & the Elders.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
