Nights, by the light of whatever would burn:
tallow, tinder and the silken rope
of wick that burns slow, slow
we wove the baskets from the long gold strands
of wheat that were another silk: worm soul
spun the one, yellow seed in the dark soil, the other.
I like to think about the monastery
as I’ m falling asleep, so that it comes
and goes in my mind like a screen saver.
I conjure the lake of the zendo,
rows of dark boats still unless
someone coughs or otherwise
ripples the calm.
I can hear the four AM slipperiness
The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.
A short stick of incense burns
thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine
rising through the old pine of the hours.
Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.
Before the long silence,
the monks make a long soft rustling,
adjusting their robes.
A sycamore on either side
In whose lovely leafage cried
Hushingly the little winds —
Thus was Mary’ s shrine descried.
“Sixteen Hundred and Twenty-Four”
Legended above the door,
“Pray, sweet gracious Lady, pray
For our souls,” — and nothing more.
Builded of rude gray stones and these
Scarred and marred from base to frieze
With the shrapnel’ s pounces — ah,
Fair she braved War’ s gaunt disease:
Oil on limbs,
maybe a rancid smell
as on the chapel’ s
oil-press here,
as on the rough pores
of the unturning stone.
Oil on hair
wreathed in rope
and maybe other scents
unknown to us
poor and rich
and statuettes offering
small breasts with their fingers.
Oil in the sun
the leaves shuddered
when the stranger stopped
and the silence weighed
between the knees.
The coins fell:
‘In the goddess’ s name I summon you...’
When they come
filling the yard with their overheard,
broke-glass catastrophes of voice,
overcrowded party line,
he lets the screen door clap
to see them plume
the settle back to the fence,
aftershocks of crowd and wail.
When they come
he says again he was home at breakfast
radio preacher doing love thy neighbor
and then the bomb,
just ask the wife.
The silence
in the TV's cathode glow
slowly fills with questions
as starlings shutter light
then weigh the lines, voices
Getting the child to bed is awful work,
Committing that rage to sleep that will not sleep.
The lie rots in my throat saying, “O. K.
There is balm in Gilead. Go to bed.
Honey of generation has betrayed us both.”
And truly it is no wild surmise of darkness
Nor Pisgah purview of Canaan drowned in blood
But only my child saying its say in bed.
Strapped to the bed of circumcision lies
My son. This mutilation ties
You to the fathers. They will never let
You forget, or your flesh be enfranchised ever,
Though you pray all your life long.
They set you early on the rack, infect you with a fever
Of remembering. In the marriage bed,
When you are naked, there the sign is red.
There is neither meeting nor mating but the past
Cries that you've been waited for and wed already —
I will not bless this mark upon your body.
For you the hurricane is rising fast;
No animals were harmed in the making of this joyful noise:
A thick, twisted stem from the garden
is the wedding couple's ceremonial ram's horn.
Its substance will not survive one thousand years,
nor will the garden, which is today their temple,
nor will their names, nor their union now announced
with ritual blasts upon the zucchini shofar.
Shall we measure blessings by their duration?
Through the narrow organic channel fuzzily come
the prescribed sustained notes, short notes, rests.
1. Cairo 1326
Koran
2. Syria
3. The Nusayris
4. Mecca
5. Isfahan
6. Delhi
Júgí
7. Calicut
