You Are Modes of the Stuff If Made Solely from the Stuff

Let's workshop this poem about how, if everything originates from a single source, we are already as close to this divine essence as we ever can be

scent of the day: Opus VII (Reckless Leather), by Amouage. A spicey vegetal oriental with leathery warmth and smokey darkness that walks the gourmand line between savory and repulsive, Opus VII opens with a bitter impression of cumin and various toasted seeds (licoricey fennel and caraway, maplely fenugreek, citrus-mint cardamom, nutty nutmeg) blended into a pees-and-carrots pablum (galbanum) that has taken on a rosey-metallic edge in part from pink pepper—briny ambergris not only salting the dish with the help of musky ambroxan, but also clarifying where this might be taking place: inside the leather cabin of an ocean yacht where the smoke of burning incense (cypriol-dipped sandalwood, olibanum-coated agarwood) intermingles with the costus scent of fingers that have been scratching scalp oily from weeks at sea.

---

You Are Modes of the Stuff If Made Solely from the Stuff 

That silent nook of detachment beneath 
the noisy whitewater of thoughts, watching 
the mind’s white foam churn by as you focus in 
on the breath (until even that is forgotten)—
sitting here, whether a Sims character or not,
we come no nearer to reality’s base code
than we come, despite the mystic’s cliché
(“back to the essence”), nearer to God at death.

If base-code reality, the essence, God (whatever) 
is the sole wellspring of everything, all of us—
amoeba, astronaut—are always already as near
as we can get (without becoming that to which,
if we did become, we would not be near): nearer 
than the brown of the walnut is to the walnut—
as near as the brown would be if its brown were
ultimately the authorship of the walnut alone.

---