From Poetry East, Numbers 84 & 85

THE CLEARING

There was nothing they could do that day

when the world broke through their fences

like some dumb animal

hungry, random, and godless.

There was nothing they could do to stop

the outsider with his wire, nails, and guns

or their daughters dying

among the blood and broken glass

in that small one-room schoolhouse,

the bonnets still hung on pegs in a row,

the gunshots ringing into the bell.

The inert sun hung in the sky lifeless

over the road and line of black buggies –  

black as beetles with hard casket shells – 

driven by fathers with long, blotted beards,

and even when they lowered their daughters

into the same earth worked by their hands,

Death could not take their Gelassenheit,

comfort and compassion freely given

to the outsider’s wife and children.

The world easily understands death,

as it feeds upon it every day,

but not this selfless absolution

or patch of earth where the school stood

before it was torn down in the night,

this empty gap in a peaceful pasture,

earth so unadorned yet with purpose,

where men of darkness and light both walk.

WHY I HATE THE BUDDHA

I guess I can’t hold it against him,

every luxury at his fingertips –

the finest clothes, food, and young women –

every whim satisfied for twenty-nine years.

And it’s not that I’m envious of his marriage – 

one of unparalleled sexual intensity – 

to his cousin and their lewd, ten-year honeymoon

climaxed by rolling out of their silken sheets,

out onto the roof and into the garden below,

all the while obliviously embraced in coitus. 

It’s not that he turned his back on his family,

rejecting his father’s wishes to become king,

or was a deadbeat dad leaving his wife and baby

who would all be trampled to death by elephants.

And you would think what would really get to me

was all that wasted time searching for enlightenment

driven by chronic dissatisfaction –

the Vedic worshipping of gods and planets,

the emaciated ascetic renunciation,

the endless hours of meditating in a thong,

when all he had to do was simply touch the earth

to realize this moment is Nirvana.

It’s not exactly his old age that bugs me,

plump in his eighties surrounded by doting servants.

It was the final night when he slept on his side –

after eating that dreadful meal without complaint,

when the sal trees suddenly burst into bloom

releasing coral flowers and sandalwood – 

and that smile – etched so perfectly, so serene.

RES IPSA LOQUITUR

I love strolling in this cemetery,

this world of the dead so excluded from the other –

the hurried one just outside these peaceful gates – 

down the paved path among the willows

always weeping like the marble angels

perched atop rows of stones chiseled with epitaphs.

I pause and read a few of those who lie beneath – 

glimpses of greatness, summaries of achievements –

no less poignant than Donne’s, “For could the grave his soul comprise,

Earth would be richer than the skies,”

or the simple, “O rare Ben Johnson.”

They all had the same brief handfuls of time,

the same longitudes and latitudes of choice,

each pulled by their own destined tidal force,

each provided with the same canvas to animate.

Did they all reach their destinies?

Did they do all the things they were meant to do?

Did each say all the things that needed to be said?

The air is now full of dusk and it’s time to leave,

and as I return down the paved path I consider   

the time when the hands on my clock disappear,

and the things of mine that will remain:

people I loved, what was said and what wasn’t,

the works completed and all the works left undone.

And what shall my final words be to sum it all up?

Or is an epitaph necessary?

Would not the birdsong, the streaming sky,

and the damp earth below be enough?

The thing speaks for itself.