BECAUSE IT IS MY DEN OF STARS

by Carmen Sorrenti

I’m walking to the end of the harbor in the dark. The waves drag in and out heavily across the pebbles, white foam splits on the rock face. I catch the smells of my hometown, saline, pine, artemisia, mermaid moss and sea urchin, night moisture. A voice shouts clearance as the explosions start and I expect they’ll bring the mountain down around me. I notice now that it’s desolate, everyone is indoors; they must have known. I missed the warning and am walking out on the perilous path in my familiar place. As the booms accelerate I turn from water and rush to shelter in the back alleys I knew as a child. I find an open door and close myself in the old shop where a young stranger observes me. His gaze, this place, the vibration - my brain wakes brightly within the dream.

I float up backwards. Under the low ceiling, faint blue coming through the window, I glide across the room as I ask my torch bearing guide to take me to the true source of healing. I liked the line, thanks Tenzin - I stole it and now as I glide across, I implant it inside the psychic atoms of this realm. The true source of healing. Suddenly I’m suspended in space facing a point of light I know to be inside my head. Up close. I long to enter it, merge perception, tap into its make up… not observe from the outside of its glow. Crystallization, calcination, stratification work against me. I shut my eyes within the dreaming.

Sometimes I am a hawk and this is the magnetic ball that indicates true north. Sometimes this is my den of stars. Sometimes I hear plants here, our dimethyltryptamine transmitting each to each. It knows where all the trees stand, how they sway, how black poplar scents the air in the kingdoms of ambrosia. Sometimes it is lynx eye. Sometimes this is Hekate’s crossroads that lets me in and out of the milky bone mosaic I call home. This pineal portal, bear cave, secret purple lair – this kundalini snake head; a sage’s whirl, vibrating the spiraling in and out and through. So go ahead, consume yourself with song that resonates up through fine architecture and hits this source cup like a bell. Every God, the old, the new, the foreign, does anoint within it.