Essays
Drama
Poetry
Fiction
Non Fiction
Mixed Genre
Interviews
Ephemera
Back Issues Submissions About Us Contact Us Links
BUDDHA, EMPTINESS
by Su Smallen

The entire body of a Buddha is full and rounded,
with no concave surfaces.

Buddha read with interest Bachelard's phenomenology of roundness and was disappointed.  Bachelard doesn't say anything about being round.  "He doesn't get it," Buddha thinks.  Barbie read too, and she listened to Buddha.  Neither of them get it, she thinks.

Yes, time and space curve around and wrap things up so that beginnings are ends and middles, so that all things coexist, dreams equal reality equal dreams;

But the curve isn't always convex.  There is no one round. 

Although round is pleasing to the touch, it is so because of the concavity of our palms, of the dips at our finger joints.  Although round is pleasing to the eye, it is so because of our lenses and the inward bending of light.  Although round is pleasing to our mind, it is so because of the concavities of sulci, as our cerebrum crinkles to consider the phenomenology of roundness, as synapses leap these clefts. 

It is the undercurve of that leap that Bachelard and Buddha lack. 

The Barbies had been laying in a tangle on the floor.  Long after the sun paused warmly over them in its slow swing into the west, long after the house relinquished its vigilance toward edges and forms, a cool spill of moonlight selected the Barbies.  In their night-softened bodies they fit together.  Barbie's hand fit over another Barbie's hand.  Her hand on another's forehead, on a shoulder, a ribcage.  Her hand, her cheek, the small of her back, the arch of her foot, her calf.  What a comfort fitting is, Barbie thought, what a comfort. 

And, she thought, how Buddha, without concave surfaces, will always be unlucky in love, never fitting anyone, guaranteed, as he is, Emptiness.

 

More Poetry