Leitmotif

At the cafe, the waiter takes my order
before I even open my mouth. At a nearby

table, two women are talking, their heads
close together; one of them is weeping

quietly. Are you all right,
her friend says. The other nods.

For a long time I could not tell what
was real and what was a lie: variations.

Once I was afraid of the world and its
long hands, its love of bones. There is

no cure for the oldest of afflictions: burning
in the cold with the desire to be consumed.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Against certainty.

Ripple

In the mailbox, under its film of sticky
green and yellow pollen, a letter arrives
bearing a postmark: Stettener Str. 7,
Oberstotzingen, Germany. It is a letter
that has found its way after almost decades
of silence and not-knowing, from the Buddha’s
former student 30 years ago— Here is the card
with the same angled handwriting she remembers
from exams he wrote on Kafka and Kant, Chekov,
Rilke; and here is a photo of him now, surgeon,
married, four kids. What joy to hear from you,
he writes— How I have thought of who I am and what
I try to be, of where I am at home; and how that’s made
of friends and colleagues, acquaintances, relations
—circles from which I draw my hope and strength.

And yes, the Buddha agrees: more’s the wonder
one can go years without knowing what has happened
to someone, then close the gap. Once she knew him
as a young man: adrift in a country not his own,
learning a tongue made of sounds he did not fully grasp.
One moment ago there was only a suitcase of years
filled with change after change. Now, there is
a return address, a phone number; stories
of lives lived with and among others.

The Buddha wanders into the wilderness

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

that is the downtown mall, and enters
a cookery store to look for an inexpensive
dutch oven wherein he might attempt to recreate
his mother’s boeuf bourguignon recipe, slow-
simmered and rich with the flavor of beef
braised in red wine, caramelized onions,
garlic, bacon, mushrooms, and a bouquet
garni. Looking through a shelf of enamel-
glazed French cast iron casseroles and
surreptitiously fingering the three-digit
price tags, he is hailed by a sales clerk
with a bountiful head of curls. Her name
tag reads “Artemis,” and she offers
little paper cup samples of flavored coffee
brewed from individual pods dropped in a chrome-
fitted machine vaguely resembling a tabletop
silo. He restrains himself from asking
where her hunting dogs are, and her fierce
handmaidens; and how it has come to pass
that she has wound up in this sad position
instead of calling the shots in the glade,
ordering a wall of bristling spears raised
around the sacred pool in which she bathes…
Instead he bows and takes the proffered sip,
thanks her, and decides: rather than meat,
he will have something raw and fresh
for dinner— perhaps a salad of greens
with slices of crisp, tart fruit;
nothing animal that might have writhed
in the agony of the chase before the kill.

Co-exist

They took the animals
out with a noose—
a mother and her two
babies. We heard them
first two weeks ago,
scrabbling atop
the shingled roof.
They made their way
through the rotted
floorboards of the shed,
where they made paper
shavings out of old
magazines we’d stacked
in boxes. In the early
hours, from the kitchen
window, I’ve seen crows
come to the branches
of the sycamore.
A mole burrows across
the property line, and
the nearby crop
of dandelions gets
sidewinded. Out
one day plotting
where we might set
a rain-collecting barrel
and a pebble walk, we sense
eyes looking us over
from the leafy underbelly
of the hedges.