445 Religion poems

These people have watched me grieve and celebrate and doubt and come back that's what a church is not the building the watching the coming back

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 of sleeping bags as people turn over in their bunks. The ancient bells. When I was first falling in love with Zen, I burned incense called Kyonishiki, “Kyoto Autumn Leaves,” made by the Shoyeido Incense Company, Kyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like earnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine a consciousness ignorant of me. I just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs for some rice to hold it upright in its bowl, which had been empty for a while, a raku bowl with two fingerprints in the clay. It calls up the monastery gate, the massive door demanding I recommit myself in the moments of both its opening and its closing, its weight now mine, I wanted to know what I was, and thought I could find the truth where the floor hurts the knee. I understand no one I consider to be religious. I have no idea what’s meant when someone says they’ve been intimate with a higher power. I seem to have been born without a god receptor. I have fervor but seem to lack even the basic instincts of the many seekers, mostly men, I knew in the monastery, sitting zazen all night, wearing their robes to near-rags boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread, smoothed over their laps and tucked under, unmoving in the long silence, the field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled, field of sentient beings turned toward candles, flowers, the Buddha gleaming like a vivid little sports car from his niche. What is the mind that precedes any sense we could possibly have of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance? I thought that the divestiture of self could be likened to the divestiture of words, but I was wrong. It’s not the same work. One’s a transparency and one’s an emptiness. Kyonishiki.... Today I’m painting what Mom calls no-colors, grays and browns, evergreens: what’s left of the woods when autumn’s come and gone. And though he died, Dad’s here, still forgetting he’s no longer married to Annie, that his own mother is dead, that he no longer owns a car. I told them not to make any trouble or I’d send them both home. Surprise half inch of snow. What good are words? And what about birches in moonlight, Russell handing me the year’s first chanterelle— Shouldn’t God feel like that? I aspire to “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” as Elizabeth Bishop put it. So who shall I say I am? I’m a prism, an expressive temporary sentience, a pinecone falling. I can hear my teacher saying,No. That misses it.

You can read almost anything about angels, how they bite off the heads first, copulate with tigers, tortured Miles Davis until he stuck a mute in his trumpet to torture them back. The pornographic magazines ported into the redwoods. The sweetened breath of the starving. The prize livestock rolls over on her larval young, the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs of the clockworks. I would have a black bra hanging from the shower rod. I would have you up against the refrigerator with its magnets for insurance agents and oyster bars. Miracles, ripped thumbnails, everything a piece of something else, archangelic, shadow-clawed, the frolicking despair of repeating decimals because it never comes out even. Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm, the impurities of darkness sometimes called stars. Mostly the world is assignations, divorces conducted between rooftops. Forever and forever the checkbook unbalanced, the beautiful bodies bent back like paper clips, the discharged blandishing cardboard signs by the exits. Coppers and silvers and radiant traces, gold flecks from our last brush, brushfires. Always they’re espousing accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow not in the aimed-for heart but throat that has the say. There are no transitions, only falls.

While that my soul repairs to her devotion, Here I intomb my flesh, that it betimes May take acquaintance of this heap of dust; To which the blast of death's incessant motion, Fed with the exhalation of our crimes, Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust My body to this school, that it may learn To spell his elements, and find his birth Written in dusty heraldry and lines ; Which dissolution sure doth best discern, Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth. These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs, To sever the good fellowship of dust, And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them, When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust? Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat, And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know, That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below, How tame these ashes are, how free from lust, That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

I’ve expanded like the swollen door in summer to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder in the cry of the magpie that I am still capable of inflicting pain at this distance. Like a painting, our talk is dense with description, half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered with a patina over time. When she came into my life I didn’t hesitate. Or is that only how it seems now, looking back? Or is that only how you accuse me, looking back? Long ago, this desert was an inland sea. In the mountains you can still find shells. It’s these strange divagations I’ve come to love: midday sun on pink escarpments; dusk on gray sandstone; toe-and-finger holes along the three hundred and fifty-seven foot climb to Acoma Pueblo, where the spirit of the dead hovers about its earthly home four days, before the prayer sticks drive it away. Today all good Jews collect their crimes like old clothes to be washed and given to the poor. I remember how my father held his father around the shoulders as they walked to the old synagogue in Philadelphia. "We're almost there, Pop," he said. "A few more blocks." I want to tell you that we, too, are almost there, for someone has mapped this autumn field with meaning, and any day October brooding in me, will open to reveal our names—inscribed or absent — among the dry thistles and spent weeds.

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c. Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Weigh me the fire; or canst thou find A way to measure out the wind? Distinguish all those floods that are Mixed in that wat’ry theater, And taste thou them as saltless there, As in their channel first they were. Tell me the people that do keep Within the kingdoms of the deep; Or fetch me back that cloud again, Beshivered into seeds of rain. Tell me the motes, dust, sands, and spears Of corn, when summer shakes his ears; Show me that world of stars, and whence They noiseless spill their influence. This if thou canst; then show me Him That rides the glorious cherubim.

To Him who is feared a Crown will I bring. Thrice Holy each day acclaim Him my King; At altars, ye mighty, proclaim loud His praise, And multitudes too may whisper His lays. Ye angels, ye men, whose good deeds He records— Sing, He is One, His is good, our yoke is the Lord’s! Praise Him trembling to-day, His mercy is wide— Ye who fear for His wrath—it doth not abide! Ye seraphim, high above storm clouds may sing; Men and angels make music, th’ All-seeing is king. As ye open your lips, at His Name they shall cease— Transgression and sin—in their place shall be peace; And thrice shall the Shophar re-echo your song On mountain and altar to whom both belong.

How struck I was by that face, years ago, in the church mural: Eve, being led by Christ through the broken gates of Hell. She’s been nominated for the position of Featured Saint on the Icon of Belief, up against the dark horse candidate— me: fever-ridden and delirious, a child in Vellore, unfolding the packet around my neck that I was ordered not to open. Inside, a folk cure, painted delicately in saffron. Letters that I could not read. Why I feel qualified for the position based on letters I could not read amounts to this: Neither you nor I can pronounce the difference between the broken gates and the forbidden letters. So what reason do we need to believe in icons or saints? How might we otherwise remember— without an image to fasten in that lonely place— the rock on which a Prophet flung himself into fever? Without an icon or church, spell “gates of Hell.” Spell “those years ago unfolding.” Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read. Spell “fling yourself skyward.” Spell “fever.”

No wise man ever wished to be younger. — Swift 1 Down the long library each marble bust shines unregarded through a shower of dust where a grim ghost paces for exercise in wet weather: nausea, gout, ‘some days I hardly think it worth my time to rise’. Not even the love of friends can quite appease the vertigo, sore ears and inner voices; deep-draughted rain clouds, a rock lost in space, yahoos triumphant in the marketplace, the isle is full of intolerable noises. 2 Go with the flow; no, going against the grain he sits in his rocking chair with a migraine, a light in the church all day till evensong, the sort of day in which a man might hang. No riding out to bubbling stream and weir, to the moist meadow and white belvedere; on tattling club and coffee house a pox, a confederacy of dunces and mohocks — scholars and saints be d-mn’d, slaves to a hard reign and our own miniature self-regard. 3 We emerge from hibernation to ghetto-blasters much better than our old Sony transistors, consensual media, permanent celebration, share options, electronic animation, wave motion of site-specific daffodils, closed-circuit video in the new hotels; for Niamh and Oisín have come to earth once more with blinding breastplate and tempestuous hair, new festive orthodoxy and ironic icon, their faces lit up like the Book of Kells. 4 Defrosting the goose-skin on Bridget’s daughters spring sunlight sparkles among parking meters, wizards on stilts, witches on circus bikes, jokers and jugglers, twitching plastic snakes, pop music of what happens, throbbing skies, star wars, designer genes, sword sorceries. We’ve no nostalgia for the patristic croziers, fridges and tumble-dryers of former years, rain-spattered cameras in O’Connell St., the sound mikes buffeted by wind and sleet — 5 but this is your birthday and I want to recall a first-floor balcony under a shower of hail where our own rowdy crowd stood to review post-Christian gays cavorting up Fifth Avenue, wise-cracking dialogue as quick and dry as that in The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye; for we too had our season in Tír na nÓg, a Sacred Heart girl and a Protestant rogue, chill sunshine warming us to the very bone, our whole existence one erogenous zone. 6 I could resign these structures and devices, these fancy flourishes and funny voices to a post-literate, audio-visual realm of uncial fluorescence, song and film, as curious symptoms of a weird transition before we opted to be slaves of fashion — for now, whatever the ancestral dream, we give ourselves to a vast corporate scheme where our true wit is devalued once again, our solitude known only to the rain. 7 The one reality is the perpetual flow, chaos of complex systems. Each generation does what it must; middle age and misanthropy, like famine and religion, make poor copy, and even the present vanishes like snow off a rope, frost off a ditch, ice in the sun — so back to the desktop and the drawing board, prismatic natural light, slow-moving cloud, the waves far-thundering in a life of their own, a young woman hitching a lift on a country road.