Planting Pink Narcissus Bulbs at the Center of the World

Yesterday I planted pink narcissus
bulbs at the center of the world.
Coring Manahatta earth – facing rock
and root and metropolitan detritus
in which New York City offers fifty-fifty
odds for birth, and otherwise subjecting

myself in the gritty soil to appositely
paid-off toil, I dropped each succulence
of hardened plop into its requisitely
dug-out plot and thought how very not
like me their likely history ahead and
backwards probably has been, will be.

Planting pink narcissus bulbs at
the center of the world, you feel a tug
to plug into the senses of all species
who and which avail themselves of all
the richness of this city that you do.
You wonder if it’s possible to un-constrain

and un-construe and find a way to
leap out of your prison of perceptions
and assumptions and presumptions
and in utter disembodiment discover,
widely, deeply, madly and completely,
at the center of the world, what’s true.

Could I be absolutely featureless
and lack quite any idiosyncratic family
or temperament or frame of reference –
and still register – let data in and
through? I think I'll dare to ache for
consciousness without a point-of-view.


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