For my sister Mary Catherine
In some of the Middle
Eastern religions at around the time of Jesus,
the soul was thought to be marooned in the world,
their kindred traveling on to another universe,
leaving them to rot on a foreign shore,
weeping in the alien corn.
The trick is somehow to to escape from here,
past the archons, the guardians, who wait
beside the door that will close when you die
(as Kafka says at the end of The Trial).
One afternoon in the ‘70’s in a Boulder Colorado parking lot,
my sister and I encountered a crying woman
who seemed to be patting some invisible creature on the head.
She accepted our offer of a ride home
and told us her address,
but couldn't tell us how to drive there.
She kept talking about her little rats –
or brats – always escaping from their boxes,
driving her batty.
She also talked about a rigid, menacing God.
I asked if He were one of the little rats.
She said, God is a little rat Who got very big.
Then she’d switch into a Russian-accented character,
explaining she’d been dropped off on earth from a space ship
commanded by someone named Malamud,
who was supposed to come back for her but she hadn’t heard from him –
which surprised and alarmed her, because
this alien world was full of booby traps,
and if she fell into a booby trap and died,
the entire universe would vanish
with Malamud and the space ship in it.
The stupidity of Malamud’s failure astounded her.
I finally found her address on a filling station map,
so we could drive her home.
An oldish man met her at the door
and thanked us.
Earlier, I had heard my roommate Eldon talking about meeting a crazy woman named
Margaret.
She was “just crazy,” he said.
I think this woman was Crazy Margaret.
