246 Spiritual poems

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for world peace and eternal salvation. — Reuters He started small: fasting here and there, days, then weeks. Once, he stood under a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting for nothing—not even to sleep. It came to him in a dream:You must roll on this earth, spin your heart in rain, desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab any cuts from the day before, and lay prone on the road while his twelve men swept the ground in front of him with sisal brooms. Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man rolling through puddles, past storefronts where children would throw him pieces of butter candy he’d try and catch in his mouth at each rotation. His men swept and sang, swept and sang of jasmine-throated angels and pineapple slices in kulfi cream. He rolled and rolled. Sometimes in his dizzying spins, he thought he heard God. A whisper, but still.

Numanah, Grandfather, grant me the grace of a new song far from this lament of lame words and fossils of a losing game. No more flat pebbles skimmed between the wetness of tongue and thigh and eye again! I never asked to be the son of a stained mattress who contemplated venison stew and knew the shame hidden in grease clouds stuck to the wall behind the woodstove where Grandmother cooked. I only wanted to run far, so far from Indian land. And, God damn it, when I was old enough I did. I loitered in some great halls of ivy and allowed the inquisition of education: electric cattle prods placed lovingly to the lobes of my earth memories. I carried the false spirit force of sadness wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket of a worn, tweed coat. In junkie alleyways I whispered of forgotten arrows in the narrow passages of my own discarded history. Then, when I was old enough I ran back to Indian land. Now I’m thinking of running from here. Pine Ridge, South Dakota February 1988

He walks through a cloud of blue moths — one for each apostle — into a round tower with a peaked chapeau of tiles, the oak door rotted, wasps fierce in the vine, limestone steps hollowed. Rows of nesting boxes dark as the eyes of city whores; pigeons sleeping; a wedge of sun chiseling mica through dusky air. Now the quiet clamor of roosting birds kept for the eggs he candles in the sacristy; for the sweet meat of their breasts and dung dug into the Abbé’s onion beds; for music of a sort: the crooning of forbidden sex, blood bubbling from a man’s cut throat. The boy reaches to their stink, peering at novices working the pump below: their creamy thighs and sleek-dipped heads, their oxter hair and sideways looks; soapy laughter, stiff nipples, wide eyes, and slender hands. Now this back- plumage black as smeared soot; iridescent necks; this underwing down dense with heat and lice and suffocating dark. Their amber eyes stare incuriously as he kills, wringing out last sobs of life, lining them up neat as martyrs cut down from a cross of air.

Who would true Valour see Let him come hither; One here will Constant be, Come Wind, come Weather. There's no Discouragement, Shall make him once Relent, His first avow'd Intent, To be a Pilgrim

"Such a palmer ne'er was seene, Lesse Love himselfe had palmer beene." Never too late. Pilgrim feet, pray whither bound? Pilgrim eyes, pray whither bent? Sandal-shod and travel-gowned, Lo, I seek the way they went Late who passed toward Holy Land. Pilgrim, it was long ago; None remains who saw that band; Grass and forest overgrow Every path their footing wore. Men are wise; they seek no more Roads that lead to Holy Land. Proud his look, as who should say: I shall find where lies the way. Pilgrim, thou art fair of face, Staff and scrip are not for thee; Gentle pilgrim, of thy grace, Leave thy quest, and bide with me. Love shall serve thee, joy shall bless; Thou wert made for tenderness: God's green world is fair and sweet; Not o'er sea and Eastern strand, But where friend and lover meet Lies the way to Holy Land. Low his voice, his lashes wet: One day if God will—not yet. Pilgrim, pardon me and heed. Men of old who took that way Went for fame of goodly deed, Or, if sooth the stories say, Sandalled priest, or knight in selle, Flying each in pain and hate, Harassed by stout fiends of hell, Sought his crime to expiate. Prithee, Pilgrim, go not hence; Clear thy brow, and white thy hand, What shouldst thou with penitence? Wherefore seek to Holy Land? Stern the whisper on his lip: Sin and shame are in my scrip. Pilgrim, pass, since it must be; Take thy staff, and have thy will; Prayer and love shall follow thee; I will watch thee o'er the hill. What thy fortune God doth know; By what paths thy feet must go. Far and dim the distance lies, Yet my spirit prophesies: Not in vigil lone and late, Bowed upon the tropic sand, But within the city gate, In the struggle of the street, Suddenly thine eyes shall meet His whose look is Holy Land. Smiled the pilgrim, sad and sage: Long must be my pilgrimage.

An uphill path, sun-gleams between the showers, Where every beam that broke the leaden sky Lit other hills with fairer ways than ours; Some clustered graves where half our memories lie; And one grim Shadow creeping ever nigh: And this was Life. Wherein we did another's burden seek, The tired feet we helped upon the road, The hand we gave the weary and the weak, The miles we lightened one another's load, When, faint to falling, onward yet we strode: This too was Life. Till, at the upland, as we turned to go Amid fair meadows, dusky in the night, The mists fell back upon the road below; Broke on our tired eyes the western light; The very graves were for a moment bright: And this was Death.

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. The deer are safe now. Their tracks are made of snow. The wind has dragged its branches over their history.

Christ bore what suffering he could and died a young man, but you waited years to learn how to heal. Only when you could did you touch the man whose body blistered for yours. You posted him no news for sixteen terms, then just a signed graduation notice. The letter he wrote that week asked only, Now that your books are closed, can boys come in? At your wedding, you buried the woman you thought you knew inside a stranger’s name. This is how you found yourself: thirty-three, nursing a son. Soon there was another. Your mind had already begun to walk. But you were a mother. Those cribs held you.

Out here in the desert, everything is one thing: the desert. What god but the One God, exotic in his reachless amount casting love over our encampment beside the nervy water of Jordan? John, you have a little gristle when you speak and what’s left of you is the scrape of a year starved on grasshoppers. It is touching to see the basin of your devoted body. A little bit east, whole lambs were smeared on the temple. The city was coiled, white within its walls (violet), its muscles twisting over muscles. The temple, sleek at the top, smiled with music—it might’ve lifted for a second. I was just there. The priests wore such tall hats, heavenly bodies dropped behind their eyes. The mothers of Jerusalem suggested curtains tattering down from the markets that whirred with the songs of bargaining, parting one from the other, laughing home. The dust lifted into the hair of the peaceful citizens and was shaken out. The land was socializing. The invalids were blind as stars; the children plaited their hair in a manner pleasing to mountain lions: the boys; the trumpets bellowed like lonely bulls—they were distressed, despite their red velvet dresses; the widows were wrapping themselves in silk as their sons carried nearby stones outside the city; mules were begging to be beaten with softer sticks; a yellowing vine was making love to a young tree; grape skins were staining the feet of dancers; merchant’s fingers became little bodies which wrapped themselves around each coin; cups of hot tea startled the mouths of the idle; a tangle of serpents tried to choose just one mate; the lit membrane of a sheet hung in a window to dry, itself a heavenly body. I could go on, John, but why leave the sheet? What sermon on hope or virtue can you make that is more convincing than it? Leaving the city was a wrenching kind of death, but lying here by you, John, in rocks and flat dirt—Heaven is unexpected.

Inside the brand-new museum there’s an old synagogue. Inside the synagogue is me. Inside me my heart. Inside my heart a museum. Inside the museum a synagogue, inside it me, inside me my heart, inside my heart a museum