victoria's poetry Poet Prose

The Pathless Path

And the monk - 
that graveyard instrument of bone and golden hair - 
laughed like a maestro striking a black bell.

"Begin?" he said,
"As though the soul were simply a corridor,
with arrows nailed into the walls."

Outside, the trees were committing
their annual suicide into autumn,
each leaf a small, burnt scripture,
spiraling through the throat of God.

I desire instruction.
A clean, pristine wound
A staircase hammered into heaven.

Instead, he handed me silence - 
that terrible animal with human eyes.

"Listen," he whispered,
and even the dust obeyed.

The room grew enormous.
The candle performed its yellow autopsy
upon the dark.
Somewhere, invisible clocks
were chewing the ankles of time. 

Then, I saw it:

how the body is only a rented coat
hung briefly upon the nail of breath;

how thought is a swarm of wasps
mistaking its hive for eternity;

how beneath the skull's temple
something starved and holy 
keeps beating its bruised wings
against its own bars.

I had spent years 
dragging my reflection through mirrors, 
calling it a vocation of life.

But the monk opened his hands
as though releasing a bluebird neither living nor dead

and the world split.

Not dramatically.
No choir caroled
No jeweled grand revelation

Only this: 

the unbearable intimacy of everything.

The rain entering the roots 
without assent
The moon trembling inside a puddle of oil.
My grief wearing the face of every stranger walking by.

And, suddenly,
I could not locate myself.

The self I had defended like my kingdom
was smoke stitching itself to smoke.

Even suffering -
a clever actress dragged in widow - black - 
removed her makeup at dawn.

What remained?

Not happiness,
that is too small a word.

Not peace, 
peace still imagines an opposite.

Rather:

a vastness without chattels,
where even God has taken off His face.

The monk touched my forehead. 
His fingers smelled faintly of cedar and graves.

"You ask for a path," he murmured,
"but truth walks only through wilderness.

The river reaches the sea 
precisely because 
it forgets who it is."

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