246 Spiritual poems

You are Jehovah, and I am a wanderer. Who should have mercy on a wanderer if not Jehovah? You create and I decay. Who should have mercy on the decayed if not the creator? You are the Judge and I the guilty Who should have mercy on the guilty if not the Judge? You are All and I am a particle. Who should have mercy on a particle if not the All? You are the Living One and I am dead. Who should have mercy on the dead if not the Living One? You are the Painter and Potter and I am clay. Who should have mercy on clay if not the Painter and Potter? You are the Fire and I am straw Who should have mercy on straw if not the Fire? You are the Listener and I am the reader. Who should have mercy on the reader if not the Listener? You are the Beginning and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the Beginning? You are the End and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the End?

You who want knowledge, seek the Oneness within. There you will find the clear mirror already waiting.

You who want knowledge, seek the Oneness within There you will find the clear mirror already waiting

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body. Sometimes the way in is a song. But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding, and beauty. To enter stone, be water. To rise through hard earth, be plant desiring sunlight, believing in water. To enter fire, be dry. To enter life, be food.

The way to the river leads past the names of Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges Through the song of the bandage vendor I lay your name by my voice As I go The way to the river leads past the late Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards They play that they are broken glass The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds Call From windows They play that they are old they are putting the horizon Into baskets they are escaping they are Hiding I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars My voice turns to you I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow Windows gallery Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing Sort of poker with somebody’s Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose The rivers one After the other I begin to know where I am I am home Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker Walk on our letters I can tell And the days hang medals between us I have lit our room with a glove of yours be Here I turn To your name and the hour remembers Its one word Now Be here what can we Do for the dead the footsteps full of money I offer you what I have my Poverty To the city of wires I have brought home a handful Of water I walk slowly In front of me they are building the empty Ages I see them reflected not for long Be here I am no longer ashamed of time it is too brief its hands Have no names I have passed it I know Oh Necessity you with the face you with All the faces

Then in the August of my twenty-seventh year, naked except for my seaclogs, I greeted an audience of piers. After my dip, I came up covered in salt and sand: hair tough as an angel’s. Who could disappoint me now among the so-coifed? Disappointing menus for a banquet of twenty-seven. The hostess cannot hear the hotelier, walls blow ope’; lousy with wallets and checkbooks, the air. Naked except for The checks and the monies flapped like birds. I partook of the seasonal activity and caught a check in my hands—to myself from myself— and was caught; I was smart and dumb. I hadn’t been clobbered in such a long time! Now, shoved against the carpeted headrest, I wondered at its cold and slender neck. The nakeder I feel the happier. Camp is over, and the children come out wearing hats; the children are happy for each other, each camp having been maximally appropriate. The ocean grew gritty with proteins. I arose and clomb to the yard with its spigot. It looked up and blinked. Above, kite strings wrote toing and froing was the same motion; tiny sighs above the halls at the county airport; swung on tiny chains; my father swathed me in two handtowels, said nexttime, swim in the sea. A gold thread falls from an eagle’s towel onto the beach. A gold face big as a quarter of the sky looks at us with gold-milk tears in its eyes and the gold girl goes on brushing the countryside with a twig-broom big as a tree. When our competitor finishes third, he approaches the throne with a gold wheel of tillamook.

The white peacock roosting might have been Christ, featherd robe of Osiris, the radiant bird, a sword-flash, percht in the tree and the other,    the fumed-glass slide —were like night and day, the slit of an eye opening in time vertical to the horizon

I have no idea what priests dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun. I have no more sense of what is sacred than a monk might have, sweeping the temple floor, slow gestures of honor to the left, the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing. Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph you look at over and over again, the one of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you did before prayer became necessary, the one with the sinking cathedral in Mexico City rising up behind you and a limping man frozen in time to the right of you, the moment when she touched your bare arm for the first time, her fingers like cool flashes of heaven.

You will leave your home: nothing will hold you. You will wear dresses of gold; skins of silver, copper, and bronze. The sky above you will shift in meaning each time you think you understand. You will spend a lifetime chipping away layers of flesh. The shadow of your scales will always remain. You will be marked by sulphur and salt. You will bathe endlessly in clear streams and fail to rid yourself of that scent. Your feet will never be your own. Stone will be your path. Storms will follow in your wake, destroying all those who take you in. You will desert your children kill your lovers and devour their flesh. You will love no one but the wind and ache of your bones. Neither will love you in return. With age, your hair will grow matted and dull, your skin will gape and hang in long folds, your eyes will cease to shine. But nothing will be enough. The sea will never take you back.

“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.” —Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966 I. Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made myself come.I’m right here!, he’d sputter, blood popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks, goddamn it, I’m right here! By that time, I was in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train slicing through my blood, It was easier to suffer the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership of things? I was sneaking time with my own body. I know I signed something over, but it wasn’t that. II. No matter how I angle this history, it’s weird, so let’s just say Bringing Up Baby was on the telly and suddenly my lips pressing against the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought wow this is strange, what the hell, I’m 30 years old, am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy I had never had it never knew, oh i clamored and lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping and machine-gun diddling their insistent c’mon girl c’mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has rocked she, he who has made she weep with script. But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby, the fur do fly, all gush and kaboom on the wind. III. Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling. As long as there is still skin on the pad of my finger, as long as I’m awake, as long as my (new) husband’s mouth holds out, I am the spinner, the unbridled, the bellowing freak. When I have emptied him, he leans back, coos, edges me along, keeps wondering count. He falls to his knees in front of it, marvels at my yelps and carousing spine, stares unflinching as I bleed spittle unto the pillows. He has married a witness. My body bucks, slave to its selfish engine, and love is the dim miracle of these little deaths, fracturing, speeding for the surface. IV. We know the record. As it taunts us, we have giggled, considered stopwatches, little laboratories. Somewhere beneath the suffering clean, swathed in eyes and silver, she came 134 times in one hour. I imagine wires holding her tight, her throat a rattling window. Searching scrubbed places for her name, I find only reams of numbers. I ask the quietest of them: V. Are we God?