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Enlightenment

Andy Posner 1 min read
Enlightenment
“Wallpaper Zen Spirit 1400x900 edition 2006” by Roberto Zingales, CC BY-ND 2.0

I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
flapping against the sky and recalling that I am sky. Once,
the book well-thumbed and creased and read twice over,
I felt an ant crawl the length of my arm like a nagging
sense that this enlightenment wouldn’t last, that
whether I crushed it or saved it would determine
the course of my life, which I knew to be my one and
only life, and I knew that I would get it wrong, that one
day I would own a house and have a wife and son
and no amount of introspection would clear the crumbs
I hadn’t time to sweep between this and that
priority, that when the ants came looking for food
on Christmas Eve like a parable of how the living world
exists for the living I would set to work with poison
and impatience because the hour was growing late
and we are all made in God’s image, which is to say
we are power-hungry gods, we have things to do,
we can kill without consequence.

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I am a foul weather friend, dear poetry.
I have paid you no mind when spring rains
wash clean the marble statues of gods
and a cheery sun
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nor when awed children skip through museums,
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nor a stranger does another stranger
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nor velvet chocolate cake knocks you dizzy with love,
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There in the back of the closet
of the room that was once my room
and is now a museum to childhood
is a photo, slightly curled with age,
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to catch a ball just out of view;

and there in left field am I, shielding
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its melodies, metal bats ringing on
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Fulfillment

May the road to fulfillment
be long and steep and smeared
with fog, moss-lined, leaf-strewn,
rockslide-prone, oft-closed for repair,
haunted, the darker the better, no sun-
or moon-light, bulbs of streetlights,
if any, smashed, filaments exposed
to the cold like nerves, scarred by
lightning, by overturned freight trucks,
by mudslides left uncleared, the only
life or light that of your high beams,
flickering, weak like a voice shouting
praise at a waterfall, how beautiful,
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