Alms for the Reincarnation of Dogen
He stayed the five months or so.
Beneath the tree – really, within
the tree’s embrace – he sat
behind his brown paper walls.
Had people on the sidewalk,
having already become a passing
thought, ceased to be distracting?
Were they nothing but sitting
like the morning dew that glistens
on his fir tree or, had it been
winter when he arrived,
the snowfall encircling his shelter?
The rainfall in April mostly shed
by the hemlock’s sweeping branches
like eaves of the gate at Eihei-ji.
Cardboard walls were kept in place
until late summer by the fir’s low drape.
For morning commuters
in cars and buses, he never lifted a sign:
Homeless with the birds.
If you have seed to bring them,
throw it from your window.
The grass was usually left long.
Another mowing didn’t clear him.
I wanted to sit speechless
with him in that faintly lit space.
Then the lot’s owner had branches
lopped off: the simple enclosure
was exposed like front page photos
after a natural disaster – all,
his intimate interior torn open.
His bedroll, his blue tarp crumpled.
May we all live close to being
strewn like seed and makeshift.
A few shirts, a couple pair of pants,
waiting for the ordinary morning,
had hung from low branches
on wire hangers, the kind you get
off the rack at St. Vincent de Paul.
.
Consumptive
It must suggest the finish of a used thing,
familiar and, at first, unremarkable like a wooden
spoon discolored by the bruise of sauces it stirred,
or the rubbed lip of marble steps penitents
ascend on their knees. A church, if it is holy,
must be laden with shadow, always sought
and unspeakable like the effigy of a saint,
the foot or thigh or breast that pilgrims, walking
more than a hundred miles, dare to touch.
There is no hiding in a place like that.
In Stephansdom, left on a smoke-stained
column that reaches into a vault of darkness,
a handprint after centuries of contact is fallow.
My hand fitted into anonymous others.
A woman was swallowed by shadow as she knelt
before a photograph of St. Therese, forever
a young consumptive. Even a ledge of burning
candles could not steadily expose the galled
stone where she knelt, but they brought close
an undispellable depth. I held my breath,
or the shadow held it for me, as I watched her go.
A place of transit we seek to remain
ourselves within, it sets a damp chill on the skin
like a troubled dream returned to all one’s life.
A holy place must have murk like the mouth
of a ditch that gorges water, the hunched
shoulders my grandmother shooed me away from.
As if she knew my turn was coming,
she stood in the screen door insisting I move on,
and keep some distance I cannot keep now.
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Lawrence Wray teaches high school literature and composition for the Classical Learning Resource Center. His poems can be found in journals such as Poetry Salzburg Review, The Dark Horse, and Presence, as well as Crab Orchard Review, St. Katherine Review, and Coal Hill Review. New work is included in the anthology The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain. Lawrence volunteers at Isaiah’s Kitchen with the community food bank. His first book of poems is called The Wavering Fledge of Light (Wipf & Stock 2023).
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 