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.
3.
Self-Pity by Cecilia Woloch
So few birds I know by name—
bluejay, cardinal, sparrow, crow,
pigeon and pigeon and pigeon again.
This morning I woke to the thump
of soft breast, frantic wings against glass—
female robin, I thought, confused,
mistaking her own reflection
for some other, enemy bird;
launching herself from the limb
of the dying tree outside my window
toward the ghost limb—there; not there.
My sister calls all birds suicidal.
Our mother sits in her big green chair,
too weary, even, to talk on the phone.
All afternoon it’s rained and rained—
all the damp world weeping, so I’ve thought.
Self-pity stinks, my mother says
and says, You should see me naked now.
Her body a map of the broken world
through which I slipped, and my sister, once.
Well, I would eat ash if I thought
it could bring back the dead,
or my own youth, or anyone’s.
Nothing gets done around here, we complain,
but I’ve learned a few trees by heart:
Here is my sycamore, Mother, Sister,
here is the branch I have loved like an arm.
4.
Most Days I Want to Live
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Not all days. But most days
I do. Most days the garden’s
almost enough: little pink flowers
on the sage, even though
the man said we couldn’t eat
it. Not this kind. And I said,
Then, gosh. What’s the point?
The flowers themselves,
I suppose. The rain came
and then the hail came and my love
brought them in. Even tipped
over they look optimistic.
I know it’s too late to envy
the flowers. That century’s
over and done. And hope?
That’s a jinx. But I did set them
right. I patted them a little.
And prayed for myself, which
is embarrassing to admit
in this day and age. But I did it.
Because no one was looking
or listening anyway.
5.
Girl Lithe and Tawnyby Pablo Neruda (tr. W. S. Mervin)
Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that forms
the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds
filled your body with joy, and you luminous eyes
and your mouth that has the smile of water.
A black yearning sun is braided into the strands
of your black mane, when you stretch your arms.
You play with the sun as with a little brook
and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.
Girl lithe and tawny, nothing draws me towards you.
Everything bears me farther away, as though you were noon.
You are the frenzied youth of the bee,
the drunkenness of the wave, the power of the wheat-ear.
My somber heart searches for you, nevertheless,
and I love your joyful body, your slender and flowing voice.
Dark butterfly, sweet and definitive
like the wheat-field and the sun, the poppy and the water.
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