Ambedo— n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details . . . which lead to a dawning awareness of the fragility of life . . . —The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Ambedo
I am a boy, my brain’s transfixed,
not seized like a spent engine
whose cams are suddenly stopped —no,
more fluid than that, gentler, smoother,
touched by grace,
………………………….. nothing is stopped,
it goes on, but with a languid intensity,
caught in a peculiar freedom,
dreamlike, but not a dream,
and not melancholic,
………………………….. emphatically not,
but a new real, a joy! in which
everything has slowed to that still point
in which attention is the only rule,
in which the veins of this leaf
have become the sole objects
in the universe, their reaches from
the singular backbone of this leaf,
their extensions on both sides
along the length of a spine,
regular as ladder rungs,
fine and delicate as angel hair,
their branchings of branchings tinier still,
like fractals, like new thoughts, as if
………………………….. this is the only meaning,
the one meaning afloat in a chlorophyl sea
still as the space between breaths,
an emerald ocean in deep space as if this instant
is all that is
Jim Culleny, 9/1/22