Poetry |

“The Holy Embraces the Holy”

The Holy Embraces the Holy

 

1.

That you have nothing to say,

your deep sadness reserves me

as a den reserves a security blanket.

 

That in the mirror I see you.

You were not there.

Your silence was a mask.

I read from it.

 

2.

The studies done so far

have not been good studies. We agree:

more research is needed, more money allocated,

so that we practice what we return to when we say,

don’t judge me. I took LSD once.

 

I experienced no visual or auditory hallucinations.

The drop possibly had no drop in it.

Or maybe the vendor thought to protect my friend,

a young medical doctor then, from herself.

Or she overpaid. Or the hit was a gift.

 

3.

We went hiking. There was a rattlesnake

and I heard what it had to say.

April snow was melting in Zion National Park,

we had no wet or dry suites. I saw two currents meet,

one held off the other: at the interface

God’s face in slo-mo plumes

of dirt and gravel. Then in a self-contained

 

area blinded by a bluff we came across

a woman calling out to “Bob.”

He was her husband, she said.

She could have been Japanese,

had an accent as I have an accent

with certain names. We offered her a few discerning

glances into the woods before my friend whispered

one of Zeno’s paradoxes to me:

which story did we want to see

through on acid?

 

4.

Six months later in Paracas, with the same friend,

before I became the son of the mother who loved me

or loved me not, we visited the national park on the Pacific.

The resort was where stone desert is alive with sea

and no greenery negotiated its life. Mindfully we went about

acquiring more debt: dinner was included,

but we didn’t have enough for lunch or breakfast.

Complimentary tea or coffee with warm bread

and rolls of salted butter was what the Queen said we could eat.

By the third morning, we went for the gratis like it was a jugular.

 

5.

That your sadness was a silence

and your silence no mask.

That you have become epic,

no chronology sustains you.

 

6.

In Paracas I shroomed. No hallucination.

My grip on reality was wicked. The waves

delivered the gust to shore and I summoned

my magic carpet, straddled it like a bike,

my tiptoes on the ground. On the cliffs a fleet

of red condors pulled out their panopticons for the seals

a hundred meters below. The wind was an exalted rubble

off the edge. With their wingspan some condors rose

as if free falling then floated above waiting.

 

7.

Condor Legion: the air

squadron that bombed Guernica.

 

Historians: when they are

“camp followers” of empire.

Poets: when empire’s tragic clowns.

 

8.

For dinner, freshly caught large sea bass

worthy of display for the dining room guests.

We did not tip the waiters, we were not yet

the great doctors of America. The driver,

we tipped. He played our kind of music

on the car radio and took us to a cave

where water cymbals crashed into stone,

and nearby fishermen pitched their rods

along the shore like streetlights.

 

9.

That you have nothing to say.

That your deep sadness is free

to be deeply sad near me,

some of what love is for.

 

10.

The week before, we’d been on the Inca trail to Machu Picchu.

The stuff about altitude sickness is real,

but so is the stuff about coca leaves.

We ascended into mist then frigid rain.

After long rain a full moon

made love to snowcapped mountains

in cloudless indigo.

 

11.

In the Sacred City, I wanted to visit the moon

temple on Huayna Picchu. Time said I had to take the hill

running and hopping

at a comfortable nonstop pace

so that I might make the last bus down

to Aguas Calientes. On my way up I passed

a depleted man sitting on a rock.

His half-life was visible in a plastic water bottle.

On my descent, he was near the top,

a decaying wolf who couldn’t blow a house down.

I stopped to water time.

 

He gulped, said he was French,

asked me where I was from.

 

12.

Did he say “French,” or did I

infer it from the few words he muttered

in his deep state of rapid heart beat

and mediocre oxygen exchange?

 

He asked me first: after I insisted

he’d take an extra gulp from my canteen,

for heart and lungs to turn serene.

I took his question to mean

that he wanted to credit my kindness to a place

when he gets to tell his story.

I gave the credit to Palestine.

 

13.

His face, which had been a theatre of struggle,

went blank. Suddenly he was playing poker

alone. Did I have a face? Could I have passed

for several options, Algerian, Spanish, or could I

have been an Afrikaner?

 

Maybe “Palestine” was the last thing he expected to hear.

Or his face had nothing to do with the word.

Maybe he anticipated “American” first and foremost

because I did say “water.”

 

14.

That in the mirror I pulled up your hands.

A pose you’ve shadowed

all your life isn’t always a pose.

 

That your hands were all water,

all night, light was with us

stabbing us in the back.

 

15.

Years passed for years, and into a patient’s room.

I introduced myself with an apology.

 

For two weeks he’d been a hopeful captive,

subjected to the merry-go-round of doctors.

A dying man with another dead person’s heart

that gave him all it could.

 

In this world, a person is rarely transplanted

more than once. “Yes,”

was the transplanted man’s response,

“you guys are like clowns in a van.”

 

Faceless (as, in fairness,

he was to me) I burst out laughing.

 

16.

A few days and he mentioned endings,

said that a chaplain randomly assigned to his floor

asked him if he wanted to speak about faith.

The chaplain was Muslim, Ali,

 

and the patient was not that kind of Texan.

“If only more Muslims were this nice,

the world would be a better place,”

the transplanted lone-star said to me.

 

Leaning against the wall, hands behind my back,

I nodded in cold agreement.

 

17.

“You’re a, a …” he asked. I nodded yes,

neither one of us uttering the word.

“And you have a sense of humor, too.

The other day you laughed at my joke.”

 

He loved sailing.

 

18.

That you have nothing to say.

From the unrequited to the unconditional

 

to the imaginary. That your sadness

unbuttons my heart, kneads its clowns.

 

That a heart remains a heart in its beyond.

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