poem is about my journey (at 19) to live and study in a Zen Buddhist monastery. |
[I] I fell into a darkness at the end of the garden of Sundays and ploughed the rows of hours until I had been made ready only to hear that the seasons had been conscripted to die in an alien land and when they were brought back home they were dressed in regimental graves to glorify the myth of heroes suddenly I was facing the terrible metaphysics in the hours so I assassinated my soul and saw my salvation as a future fade away it is always a god who drives the innocent heart to journey on the ocean of its tears from behind curtains the god given to me was a malicious gossip --- suffering both the weight of divine designations and a policy of murder and pillage how difficult it is to say goodbye to dreams to a nation of longings so much a naturalism of place [II] I went out on the blue road to stop dreaming of castles palaces to let the emeralds and diamonds even the gold teeth sink or swim by their own efforts beneath the Caribbean sea the memory of Columbus Cortez and Raleigh ripples with dryness --- my clarity had the feel of canvas as I entered the mouth of a new horizon [III] land rising like a wall holding back the sea a continent alive with flocks of planes chromed magnesium bodies --- stars in the daylight like ribbons unfurled wide concrete roads were woven everywhere: I searched and observed birds painting expressions of life with wings I found a mountain from which is built the shapes of life and discovered we are tigers forged in the furnace of the sun beaten repeatedly with the hammer of the sea our eyes breed an incalculable vision a soft light the brick of our bones and the sound of the voice furious wonder not the energy of slaves Envoy in the vast privacy of solitude my allegiance is to another sky where the flowers are beautiful because of their color This poem was published in Flowers In the Empty House, Watershed Books, 1998. |