13th
The Great Patriarchs
This is my song to all the great Patrarchs.
I am in love with their beards and bare domes
shining like cathedrals, lingams.
But none I love as much as the Sat-Guru,
who informs them with radiating spectra
undectable by the gross instruments of Sense.
Like a Tang dynasty mendicant,
I take my time as it comes;
the dried weight of a Sunday afternoon
my only metric.
My mother is concerned, embodying
a symptom shared universally by mothers:
distrust of all things
spontaneous and lacking dental insurance.
She does not understand that I am eligible for a superior Plan:
coverage across ignoble rebirths,
promised vigil by the One-Who-Sits-In-Robes-Of-Light
as I fumble around with the oars
on the boat to the other Shore.
I can imagine the correspondence,
a postcard with a picture of a Saddhu
sitting on an ant-hill covered from
head to foot in a red swarm,
like a lotus unperturbed by its seat of dung.
“Mother I am toothless and covered in ash.
Love me like WS Merwin promised.
Grandmother, our angel at the loom,
is smiling in the light of Abraham.”
I stand rhapsodic and dim-witted
on the wingéd drafts of speech
watching my words be sacrificed to their own novelty
and reborn as praise to the Great Insurer.
