To Transcend Experience

It’s the phrase a reviewer

Deploys to praise a singer,

Charming and impossible

For the obvious reason

No one can experience

Transcending experience.

We could joke death transcends it,

But that’s unnecessary.

There’s a lovely thought in there,

Part of why there’s talk at all,

Storytelling’s worthwhile part,

To exceed the boundaries

Of one’s own experience,

Embodied experience,

To stir memory’s campfire

Under the stars so sparks fly

And embers come back to life,

Fall, gall, gash gold vermilion.

Impossible but vivid

When done well, the gift of thought

Is to generate the sense

Of a lived experience

That your body never lives,

A haunting experience.

It’s not truly transcendent,

But it’s disorienting,

And somehow its spookiness

Is rooted in survival

And the ancient tournaments

Fixing pulse to attention

Then attention to meaning,

Meaning the transcendent voice,

Meaning, which means transcendence,

Not the voice of the people,

A people, or of a kind

Of person—the voice of words,

Voice of cricket legs, frogs’ throats,

And leaves quaking on branches,

Built to hold on, not to cry,

Built from ancestors doing

Ancestor-becoming things—

That’s this voice you now hear sing.