FALLING, FALLING
(Opening)
Just a crack,
Just a sliver of light
And the words pour through….
A flock of birds
Noisy, impossible to number,
Impossible to fix the eye
On just one……
A sudden rush,
A pattern, a form
Turning in the clear sky,
Then gone
To the fine horizon…..
——-
(Dream)
It would take (about)
Twenty minutes
To fall to earth
From the furthest, quietest, coldest
Edge of atmosphere,
Where air wisps into void.
Those who know
Say, once acceleration becomes steady
It feels like motionless floating
Watching the round world
In peace,
Glorious and free
Until the horizon begins to close,
To contract,
To speed, simultanteously,
Inwards and outwards
And gravity once more
Becomes velocity….
But if we were not to collide,
If, somehow, on our frozen descent
Matter, mind, breath
Attenuated,
If translucence of the air,
(Somehow),
Replaced the bounded blood,
The nestled organs,
The pumping familiarity,
The jealous identity of flesh…
And we passed through,
Still falling,
Still joyously falling,
The first jolt
Of rock and dirt…
Down in warming,
Dark silence,
New worlds –
Not death-dulled dust,
But a new, rich, atmosphere,
Savoured.
Layers of dance,
Dreams of fire taking form,
Vast equators,
Equations, interactions,
Slidings, scales tipped,
Scales iridescent,
Lands, oceans, airs,
A transparency.
Falling,
Still falling,
As if floating,
As if free,
Then,
(and this is the wonder),
Then it would be,
Give or take,
Two more days,
Two more full days
Of falling
Down towards the heart pull,
(Core and cord),
Of the planet
Before the centre were reached
Before the golden,
Singing, spinning hub,
Before the ringing small sun,
The raison d’etre,
The opening question,
( little human),
Galahad before the Graal, perhaps,
Or simply
A coming home,
An end of falling,
A stillness,
Enfolded,
Matter to matter,
The round simplicity
Of the sound ‘home’.
——
(End Matter)
——-
simonhlilly 
This has a very personal meaning for me… I’ve been picking up lots of syncs with a friend who, although she was a world class sky diver (http://www.makeithappen.com/wis/bios/loncasty.html), died in a parachuting accident on 18 April 2003… thank you for bringing it ‘home’.
We are, and always remain connected. Coincidence, simply the indication that this is so. The dream of the eternal soul, the onflowing personality, a small cry, a bigger ignorance, against the vast throb of cosmic life.
This description of falling is too real.
What have you been up to lately?
I think this motif gies back a long way- I was writing of similar things at the back of Eng.Lit classes at school, based on some of William Blake’s images from ‘Book of Los’ , I think. Wonder if I can dig that out?….. A mixture of Relativity and metaphysical manifestation if I recall….
Recently some inane advert on the telly reminded me of something in a documentary on the geology of the Earth: to give a sense of scale, and exploring the edge where Earthly meets space at the top of the atmospheric levels, about 50 miles up. That from here it would take about half an hour to fall to the ground, but it would take another day ( I thought I remembered), to reach the centre of the planet. Never being certain of numbers, I looked up the radius of the Earth ( god google), and divided by the average rate of descent, which by my bad maths comes to two days falling to the centre of the earth. Whatever the sums, one day or two, it still brings a useful perpective to our existence…
So, no, I haven’t been parachuting or astronauting or travelling in vertically challenging distances… Simply a gang of hoodlum words bounced around my head and ai managed to clooect some of them and put them down as this piece…
Though I have been somewhat struggling with a series of musical compositions on the planets for what seems like forever…..
Well done, then, the grounding of those hoodlums.
Any luck yet with the sphering of the musics?
This is perfectly titled.
The words just fall down the page, and keep falling, and falling.
So good to see your writing again. Never fails to excite.
Thank you. Sometimes it is just the opportunity to put down the words as they flow. Like with my music, the best often just emerges and I forget how it came about…
The previous night this was just one branch of a tree of chant, but everything else submerged into the depths again like a whale singing to itself. Maybe that will climb to sunlight again sometime, maybe not….
To have eayes and ears that wait encouragingly, though, is a great thing.
The music projects clamber on. The planets I am composing for someone else so I have to take into consideration their purpose and tastes, and this makes it much more difficult. My own style would be more edgy, spacious and scary ( though sometimes comes out romantic and sweet). My compositions tend not to be consciously narrative, but listeners will always interpret them in one way or another as pictures and stories -a mental habit of many, I think: ” make sense of” rather than simply “experience”.
After a while, a piece of writing, a composition, a creation, comes to exist as a being itself, whether it is dreadfully flawed or near perfect. Changing it, changes what it is, sometimes seems disrespectful……