numinous: for majnun

as I think of how
his quiet, low voice
now, gone
could fill the room
with deep feeling

(not sentiment
but profoundest inspiration
sharing inmost intimate
circle, that sense of skating
on the edge of understanding
everything)

and how, when he wrote
of his own ending,
I took it as a metaphor, a kind
of salute to the ultimate reality
that self disappears
with time
never allowing to rise into my full
consciousness, never acknowledging
his tenuous grip on earth, the plain fact
of his great age, of living at that edge -

I realize that was what made his presence
so compelling -
not just his humility,
but the largeness of his spirit

his willingness to talk of it
to celebrate life in the face of it
to carry that awareness with him,
live it, use it, build on it:

when we can sing into death,
we will know we have done
something right