I don’t know much about resurrection,
but this evening I’ve awakened in the baths
at Esalen. I’m lying on my back: face,
chest, arms, and legs shrouded with cloth,
as if wrapped in the trappings of the dead,
just the distant bell of the broken ocean
and my own ashen fear I’ve been left
alone and forgotten, the way as a boy
I’d awaken from dreams of coffins
or dead-leaf tree roots unable to open
my eyes or move my body, my arms and legs
strictured by a dream-fabricated death,
the way you were forgotten once you’d vanished
into the guzzle and burn of Wild Turkey,
the shell of your body wandering the streets
like a locust-encrusted Old Testament prophet.
When you reappeared at our table, as if rising
from the dead or returning from forty years
in the desert, we celebrated with cranberries,
yams, and sparkling cider. How were we to know
how soon you’d vanish again? In the cemetery,
as the last vibration of bells sounded the Angelus
at noon, we opened a crate of white pigeons.
They circled the acres of plots and urns,
embedded monuments and rolling lawns,
as if each bird were a lost and forgotten fragment
of the life you once lived. This Esalen evening
I open my eyes as light slips under the pall
covering my face. My oiled and massaged body
rises into a world of naked human beings,
silent in the mist, slick with the hot springs
of the baths, the beauty of each limb, each
wrist and ankle, almost more than I can bear.
This poem appears in Golden Fish / Dark Pond
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