really the fundamental question—
though our relationship seemed adversarial, maybe it had to be.
You were my poetic shrink, and I had to walk on my own.
Whatever... What is my stake?
South Texas. Tiny brightly painted houses on cinderblocks.
Old Hidalgo Pumphouse, long white border wall to the south,
the Rio Grande having shifted half a mile to the north after the Brownsville hurricane.
The Virgin of Guadalupe surrounded by bright roses,
beautiful pink and blue, standing on a huge black crescent,
vaquero cherub supporting her feet.
Alvin and Donna, easily in their 'eighties,
drive their van to birding sites all over the country and volunteer as guides,
Alvin asking me to put my foot on the orange metal step stool if it rattled
(they really didn’t want us to get out of the car)—
Alvin worried a sandled man in the grass, side of the road, would get chiggers.
We did get chiggers, big time—Robin and Linda—Jim and I not as bad.
Today, back home, we're quarantining our clothes and suitcases.
Sorry, I was a pain in the ass in class, you called me a trouble-maker.
I'm a talker, I admit, always interjecting
questions mainly,
like What does it mean?
Same as yours: What is my stake
in this presentation, in this landscape?
A poem always has to end with its fingers on its chin,
some reflection on life that makes the hearer say ahhhhhhhhh...—
That’s the self-improvement angle of poetry, not too different from a sermon, I guess,
like one in Canon Chasuble’s unpublished book—What a read!
Finley, Dean, Fleury and I joking on Facebook this morning—two kinds of poets,
hierophantic and non-hierophantic—The Hierophant, a member of the Tarot deck—
my college girlfriend Lizzy Lea choosing my Tarot identity card
the jack of Pentacles, not Wands,
hitting me where it counts. Where it hurts. Still does.
It hurts when I think of the opportunities I've squandered.
How many lives do you get, anyway? The Buddha lived myriad lives,
incarnating as individual Snakes, Rats, Neanderthals—
all of animal evolution in Their genome.
Thank you, Bodhisattva, thank you, my own soul,
for your unfailing persistence (who’s the Hierophant now?)
living all those lives and still wanting nothing more
than nothingness. That's the stake.
To describe and invoke the colors, smells,
the fanged heads of the thousand-headed snake.
Gauche to mention the nothingness supporting them.
