The Monk Who Quit Smoking
My therapist tells me the story of the man
who tried to become a monk but was denied
at the monastery for smoking cigarettes. He came back,
maybe a year later, vice gone, having quit the whole charade,
& the monk standing at the door offered him a smoke.
My therapist asked me what I thought. I said
it had to be a test or a joke. I didn’t know.
The story ended there. There was no prayer.
I imagine the man trying to become a monk,
in that year of wandering, practicing denial in order
to be accepted. I imagine him below where I sit,
near a 4th floor window overlooking one street
in one city, where already I have counted
63 strangers walking from one beginning of my vision
to its end, learning to refuse by refusing so much —
first the greasy slice of pizza, then the knit pair of gloves,
the fruit stand’s avocados. At the age where memory begins,
I think, a child vaults like a gymnast off a bar
not knowing he needs to stick the landing,
not knowing what a landing is, or how it feels
to be caught by hands or softened mat.
I think one journey of life is the journey home
toward silence. I think another is the refusal of whatever
silence means. I think you don’t have to live that long
to hear the no come out of your mouth, no longer
someone else’s. & so, I imagine that man
in that long year of no’s, learning that even a key
that does not fit in a lock can open the same door.
It must’ve seemed that way when he, finally
relieved of urges, walked past that first monk
& into a house filled with countless others.
How he must’ve seen Brother Bobby, who,
after a lifetime spent betting on dogs hurtling
round a racetrack, gave up both violence & its money,
& found comfort on his knees. Or how Brother Mark
painted his bedroom wall with letters that read
No place looks like home until you learn to call it home.
I guess I could say it’s all a joke, but even if it is
the stars still burn a million miles of light
to tell us we are made of them. It means everything
I have no words to say. It means I saw my mother
giving up to learn to live again. It means you walk
from one room to the next in a house of shadows,
where, if you push the couch one way & stand
in just the right place, you will be the first person
the light has ever touched, in just that spot right there.
I admire the many turns in this fine poem!