A Monk With No God
At three, the garden writes itself in slime—
silver calligraphy across the flagstones
where I pace in my wool habit, sweating.
The moths are frantic priests
hurling their small bodies at the lamp’s false sun,
again, again, a liturgy of burning.
I used to call this Devil’s hour.
Now I know there is no Devil,
only the slug’s blind pull toward rot,
the cartography of appetite
mapped in mucus on the path
where saints once walked to Matins.
The hostas are being eaten.
Something is always eating.
I watch a moth singe its wing-dust on the bulb—
that powdery baptism, useless—
and drop stunned to the stones
where a slug begins its pilgrimage across the corpse.
This is the only honest prayer:
mandibles working in darkness,
the chemical shimmer of a slug’s foot
seeking the soft meat of decay.
No one is listening. No one was ever listening.
The garden teaches me its single lesson—
matter consuming matter,
the world folding into itself
like hands at vespers, purposeless,
perfect. The moths know
what I am only learning:
light is not love. Light is just light,
and we are who burn for.
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