Parallax

In the beginning, I knelt before the Queen in a fragrant garden where warm milk flowed endlessly. Every day was filled with laughter as we whistled at storms and white sunsets. Our time seemed eternal despite rapid change. I wanted to know everything she knew. But she did not tell me the eviction was written. One morning while hiding, I cursed her purple throne in a whisper, and the pedestal paradox quietly crashed.

I dreamed of the snows of Olympus and Denali, of mighty hammers and thunderbolts; worshipping glory and conquest, while still pursuing rumors of a pacifist raven stealing the sun. The high priests expelled me for drawing black and white sketches of Hitler and Jesus riding a tandem in circles on an abandoned highway littered with broken mirrors.

I sought to learn what cannot be known, always failing the exams in school. I began to paint with the hallucination of words, as it became clear that not even the scientist could develop a new color for my palette.

In the ancient desert, I danced with the shaman, circling the fire at the eleventh hour, seeking the keys to the doors of long forgotten secrets. I knew the scent of burning sage and myrrh rising from the depths of the kivas, where my unfulfilled prayers were kept.

On a summer afternoon, I found Beauty sitting on a large rock on the Eastern edge of the canyon. It was as close as she would allow me to get. I studied her across the divide. She lifted her veils to show me her face, smiling in a cryptic way that I thought I understood. But in the brush below me, a wolf ambushed a fawn. The gorge filled with the young deer's cries, and the silence afterwards. The mother doe bounded by me in frantic distress. When I looked again, The Goddess was still smiling with a purring tiger lying obeisantly at her feet.

In searching the heavens, I have many times gazed into the abyss, refuting its vision. I have seen sparrows falling on counted grains of sand. On the shore, I have dissected drunken boats, whose glorious treasures were lost in the depths of the ocean. Yet in the end, I have come to understand that when I choose to listen, I may hear the voice I seek more clearly in the senseless questions of a schizophrenic, than I do in the answers provided by the mountain climbing mystics.

I know now what the Queen could not tell me.