The Nuns Are Sleeping On Graves With Their Pagan Lovers
The nuns are sleeping on graves with their pagan lovers.
The black walnut trees have shed their leaves
half way between feathers and scales
like arboreal dinosaurs that are learning to fly.
And the branches of the staghorn sumac
that went up in flames like the rest of the greenwood
now look like the ribs of a snake blanched in the ashes.
I tell the hard rocks chiselled down to the lake
as if they were animate, sapient, sentient life forms
I know just how they feel
when they're dreaming of Carrara marble
and someone steps on them
like a skull of a common cornerstone
you can take for granted, but the birds,
why is it always the birds that are the first
to be alert to things like this, tell me
not to deprive them of their extinction.
So I'm prone to keeping my words to myself
when I'm on a backwoods pilgrimage alone
with too many death masks hiding the face of the moon.
Half the abandoned roads I've walked through life
have turned back in upon themselves
like an ingrown hair of a noose
in a claustrophic cul de sac,
like a thread of the mindstream
trying to close the eyelid of a needle that's dead.
But the other half of the labyrinth
on the dark side of seeing led me into clearings
in the middle of nowhere I ever expected to be startled by stars
that set my heart racing with mystic terror as if a partridge
just exploded out of the bushes in front of me
and enlightenment came to me for an hour or two
with such force of clarity I was breathing light not air.
And I didn't become one with everything.
How can anyone say they're one with everything
without resorting to the past tense the moment they say it?
I stood my ground beside unity like zero
because nothingness is the only way
of comprehending one without being excluded by it
like the exception that puts the lie to the whole,
and I amplified its immensity tenfold.
Ask any silo. There's no limit to what you can hold
when you're empty compared to what you can
when you're full. Even on upgraded hobby farms
where the wheat and the corn are stored
in more ample, lightning proof Euclidean storage spaces,
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poem by Patrick White
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