Little Elegy
Oh how he loved his cup
and now he’s dirt
under the pine trees
–Li PoA moment of silence at Soup Kitchen
for our saint of the quick grip, faking
a side stitch to hide the bottle under his coat,
for his taped shoes and worm-eaten watch cap,
that clarifying fish pier scent, raw-grained
and terrifying smell of the skids,
how little it takes to wake up over a grate,
half-dissolved in shadow and mist–
half-dissolved, but still blissed out, bantering
with buddies, flailing on icy streets,
then catching hold of a lamppost and nodding
to it, to the sky, the glittery walk,
to a passing taillight, an old belief,
foolish or fearless, that everything’s sacred,
and now he’s gone.
(--poem by Betsy Sholl “Little Elegy” is from Late Psalm (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).That grate is not far in the dream from which I wake shivering.
For me, that there's something "out there" and that I'm here no longer meant anything, because every time I thought there was something out there, it turns into inevitably something opposed to me. Something I have to define myself against, whether that's God, or whether that's a Christian, or whether that's a Muslim, or whether that's a Buddhist. And that's not my experience.
My genuine experience of life is that there is nothing "out there." This is all there is. And when you see the seamlessness of it all, that's what I mean by "God." Every tradition has that. Every morning, three times a day since I'm five or six years old, I've been saying, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." Right? It's one of our few creedal statements, the Shema. Three times a day, since I'm six years old.
If you ask what 9/11 really did, it made me understand the truth of that. The truth of that, "Everything is one." Not that there's some guy hanging out there who has it all together, who we call "One," but that it is all one. We all know it deep down. We've all had those experiences. whether it's looking at our child in a crib or whether it's looking at our lover or looking at a mountaintop, or looking at a sunset. Right? We've all had those experiences. And we recognize, "Whoa. I'm much more connected here."
That's what those firemen had. They recognized; they didn't have time to think about it, right? Because actually, if you think about it, you begin to create separations. They didn't think about it. All they knew is we're absolutely connected. We're absolutely connected to the 86th floor. Well, that's where God is. That's not where God is. God isn't anywhere. That's what we mean when we say God. ...
(--from, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, PBS interview, Rabbi Irwin Kula, winter 2002)Words take on so much more when they are deeply felt.
Stones: Stones are very slow stories with secret memories of fire inside. If you just put a stone on a table it becomes an altar, and a temple appears around it.
(—John Tarrant, in Meet the Blue Dragon, Lion’s Roar, 31july19)Dont make anything out of it.