Eric Schwitzgebel
__________________________________________________________________________________________
My Soul Turns to Water
Her gaze dances across the table,
touches my eyes and cheek and eyes again,
she smiles that smile between two people suddenly equals when the roles fall away,
and in that instant beauty bursts out,
spreading across her head,
sliding down her dress and arms,
out onto the table,
sparkling through the ice cubes,
across the plastic seats,
through the whole Mexican-facade restaurant,
out across the airport terminal,
recoloring the flurry of passengers
the imperturbable ceiling lights,
the drinking fountain,
the loose toddler by Gate A41,
the wheelchair and service desk theater,
the bright bright bottle,
and everything is luminous.
The transformation wakes my doubt.
The crease by her nose, deeper on the left,
opens to me as the perfect gully for a tear,
as a microorganism’s wondrous landscape,
as the meeting place of a life’s confluence of disappointments and victory,
our weird tangy salsa the ideal contrast to the real salsa I imagine someday again tasting,
elevating imagined salsa by negation to the highest limits of human aesthetic comprehension,
its sweet bland acidity also now in its own right a whirling attractor of mentality,
and her tired shoulder dips,
an earring blazing above,
where smooth curling beauty meets hair.
The missing passengers,
the postponed flights,
the launching crafts
form the belly of something larger that I only now understand,
all bodies sexual,
all motions the working of infinitely nesting fluid intelligence,
everything a promise,
and I think I see the boundaries of my skin turn to flat paint,
mixing with the surround,
a temporary construction of one of my minds.
Someone is dreaming me –
maybe he shares my name, which I’ve mislaid –
and in a moment I will vanish like a bucket of water hurled into the pond.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside and author most recently of Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press). He has published philosophy and psychology research articles on self-knowledge, skepticism, belief, and the moral behavior of ethics professors, and one science fiction story, “Reinstalling Eden” with R. Scott Bakker in Nature. He blogs at The Splintered Mind.