Linoleum

for Mark Strand There are the few we hear of like Christ, who, with divine grace, made goodness look easy, had a following to draw near, gave up the right things and saw to it that sinners got listened to. Sharpening my failures, I remember the Jains, the gentle swoosh of their brooms on a dirt path trodden by children and goats, each thoughtful step taken in peril of an ant’s life or a fat grub hidden under a stick. In the car-wash, thinking of yogis under a tree plucking hair by hair the head of an initiate, I feel at least elsewhere those able for holiness— its signs and rigors—are at work. Ignominiously, I am here, brushes clamped, soap and water pulsing against my car. (A good sign too, those asylums for old and diseased animals.) My car is clean and no one has had to lift a finger. The dead bugs have been gushed away into a soup of grit and foam—the evidence not subterranean, not streaming along the asphalt in sunlight so dazzling I attend the birth-moment of the word Hosannah! I care about the bugs and not in this life will I do enough towards my own worth in the memory of them. I appreciate the Jains, their atonements for my neglect, though I understand it makes poor farmers of them, and good we all don’t aspire to such purity so there’s somebody heartless enough to plow the spuds. Early on in admiration, I put off knowledge, and so delayed reading about the Jains—not to lose solace. But in the County Library, turning a page, I meet them as the wealthiest moneylenders in Western India. Reading on, I’m encouraged—the list of virtues exceeds vices—just four of those: anger, pride, illusion and greed. The emphasis clearly on striving. I write them down in the corner of a map of Idaho: forbearance, indulgence, straightforwardness, purity, veracity, restraint, freedom from attachment to anything, poverty and chastity. Choosing, getting into the car to get to the supermarket, hearing over engine noise the bright agonies of birds, the radio news with the child nailed into a broom-closet for twenty-four hours by parents who in straightforwardness sacrificed forbearance, I feel a longing for religion, for doctrine swift as a broom to keep the path clear. Later, alone in the kitchen with the groceries, I read the list again. Overwhelmed by the loneliness of the saints, I take up my broom and begin where I stand, with linoleum.