three

Mid-Sentence at Year's Endfor Mary Shultz

, or those pleasing days, merely seeinglight, city winter lightslicingdiagonalsacross old bricks,windows reflectingpatterned circles recallinggobos.(Think: Walkingwith a friend, speakingof one artist's long ago, ear-splitting incisions into what had beenabandoned.)

Other days replaystings, loops unspooling, some,framed and frozen.(Note: Box turtle,dead, flies occupyingits eye sockets likeaugmented molecules,or, a brother, wide openeyes uncomprehending,ending nesting withinthat word, his future,abandoned.)

Years ripby, speedof motorcycles perforatingsilence, impudent, or snow falling-fallingdown air shaft,rustling subtleas a tutu's, bringingone out of time intomaking, into nature,into small words'broad meanings.(See: end art you)

Numbered observations,divisible by opinions:Favorite food.Worst movie.Funniest joke, reclaimed(like abandoned buildings)by memory's charged sensorium:footfalls; front porch; sandbar;watching, being, staying with.(Feel: "He died young," we go onsaying.)All kinds of days,opaque, or,box turtle = light

Holy

Why, I wonder, do rippedmen or denims count as high fashion? I guess taut flesh over absteaches us to admireperseverance, but so dopeople on crutches.

Choosing holes in clothes?My lovely babyalpaca shawl—now ruinedby telltale, see-through spotsmade by diligent, egg-laying moths—speaks neitherbespoke nor slang, onlyof carelessness in allowingthe care and feeding of insects.I dearly preferred it before it got eaten.

Then what does it meanwhen thirsty cotton costs more for what is not there than what is? A way to savewater? Certainly nota way to save cash. I find their gashed persistence a minus in more than missing fabric. Does the sweatshopworker—making millionsof them for pennies, and all mannerof outlets—also wonder? Might that person, hunched over, loveto own something new and whole,straight up?

Does faux povertyobviate hunger, via mind-numbing, ear-thwacking machines, stich-by-stich?Do I sound like that ersatz journalist—Fox's former fox in U.S.A.'s henhouse—still fouling the air elsewhere, asking obvious rhetorical questions, able to petition the already initiated in what it means to stopthinking?

That thought is far worse than nits or pricks in soft wool, damaged,at worst, by less-than-glam Lepidoptera: dun-colored,unbeautiful, unwitting, unableto rip away what embraces me hardestwhen cold evenings or insights arrive. Not sacred, just irksome, theseempty spaces. No real harm. Keep me warm.

Bad Bodhisattva

1.Hard enough to be in the shower, when I am in the shower, to worryre: citing or thinking, Dharma.This very argot, incipient figures kept drywhile water runs, move outside, like clumpsof coke become adjacent lines—minda razor's edge, dull or sharp.

2.I am intentionally bereft.My equanimity grew thornyas my doubts simply grew. BadBodhisattva. I saw that I wanted.We all want. I wanted the world beyondthe formal sangha. Have never done wellin prescribed groups.

3.Can you be a lapsed Buddhist?Erstwhile Bodhisattva? The vowssay, "No," and in some ways,serving others suits me. I had a former sister-in-law who'd been a Catholic nun. My renunciation wasn't a torment,just a slow and gentle sinking, though sitting still, still floats.

4. I stopped studying the precepts.Already lived most, screwed up others. Adultery. Somethingadults do. Intoxication? You bet.

5. Living by conditions set by menof wisdom. I think about this. Have my doubts about theirinterpreters. Have yet to find the man'svoice, speaking in parables and admonitions I should follow, as I do those lines laid down by poets: the truly grand humblers.

6.Some number of poetswhose poems I admire practice the practice.Also, many cloying poems I detest. Judgment, judgment.Bad Bodhisattva.

7.Mindfulness. One of the wordsof the day. One can be mindfulbuilding a poem or a bomb. Here, once upon always, is intention.

8.Paying attention. Already the purview of writing a poem. If it speaks, and you do notlisten, it will disappear,carried off by a monkeynattering, chattering, laughingall the way, saying, "Yes. You will hang about," and "No, no thank you, not yet," to nirvana.

Elena Alexander is a poet and a writer.