I Stand In The Doorway
Sometimes when you say goodbye you know it’s goodbye for keeps. You touch your lips to her cheek, or you squeeze his hand & walk off. What else can you do? Out on the street, the light has never been so intense, so luminous, so intolerably bright. But mostly we don’t know when it’s that final goodbye. Who would have thought that perfectly casual “Hey, Steve, take care” would be the last? Years later someone mentions that Greg is living in Spain or Rebecca got married in Ecuador or Don is in Shreveport. Or you hear through the grapevine that Kenny has died, someone you once loved, someone with whom you spent endless hours laughing back in those feverish days on that other coast, in that other life. One morning you turn the page of the Union-Tribune, & among the obits there’s a picture of Larry, from the old coalition, & you read that small notice beneath it, & your heart stops. One afternoon, at Dennis’s bookshop up on Girard, some guy you don’t quite remember starts shaking your hand & tells you that Susan died of stomach cancer five years ago now. “I wasn’t sure that you knew.” & in fact you didn’t know. & Eliot, swallowed by time. Was that the last goodbye, there in the narrow hallway of that sixth-floor walk-up of mine, all those decades ago? Eliot grinning that edgy, cherubic grin & turning to leave, & me with my hand on the tarnished knob of that door, watching him make his way down the stairs in the dusty, fluorescent semidark of that place fifty years back, that door which hasn’t yet quite shut for good.
A Note Concerning My Military Career
After I’d sent the Army my letter of resignation, two beefy Intelligence types showed up at my place in the Fillmore with a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder, & without mincing words I tore into America’s despicable agenda: the circle of hell reserved for our savage carpet-bombing campaign against the people of Vietnam & the puppet state the U.S. was trying to force down their throats. Which was why, I explained, I wouldn’t put on their fucking uniform ever again & why, if I had to fight, it would be for the other side. Quiet, courteous, polite, they sat there listening to my ferocious rant till, after two hours, I asked what exactly it was they needed to know, & one of them said they had really been sent to find out if I was planning to shoot President Johnson, or do something else of that sort, & I laughed & said no, & we shook hands & they packed up & left. But a month later, when the Army sent me the transcript to sign & return, I brought it instead to a young San Francisco attorney whose family firm did pro bono work for resisters, & Josh Callihan read that whole eighteen- page harangue & looked up & told me how much he liked what I’d said, & when I asked him what to do next, he advised me to get the hell out of town as fast as I could. Which I did. I ran for my life & for the lives of all those they were trying to get me to kill, & of nothing I’ve done in this world have I ever been prouder. Listen, if you’re reading this poem & you’re young or desperate enough to think of enlisting, or have already been suckered in, understand that all those self-righteous fairy tales about freedom & peace are meant to convince young men & women like you to massacre, city by city & village by village, America’s villain du jour, adding, every few years, another small state that stepped out of line to its necklace of skulls. & for those of you who will march to your own graves in so doing, the powers that sent you will bow their heads & present to your folks the flag that was draped on the box they carted you home in. Friend, find any way that you can to resist or escape. If you have to run for your life, for chrissake, run for your life.
Mount Baldy
Up before dawn to meditate all day with a saffron-robed Thai Theravada Buddhist monk who explains the incomprehensible dharma in all but incomprehensible English, then jabs a finger in the air & nods triumphantly, & at the bell, propped upon my purple zafu in half lotus, I set grimly to the task of reining in the hyperactive & incorrigible mind, that screaming brat who’s flying up & down the supermarket aisles, flinging from the shelves everything in sight. I liked Mount Baldy & the zendo there, & Theravada mindfulness practice, & that grinning sensei with his fractured English. & I liked as well that shapely, dark, lubricious fellow meditator three zafus down: her lovely face & arched, cross-legged body. Lust, longing, random fragmentary thoughts & drowsy bits of memories & momentary bouts of wakeful consciousness & sudden bursts of joy: one moment quiet ecstasy & utter peace, the next the wish this weekend-long retreat were long since over with. My back felt stiff, my knees ached. Then Sunday, after lunch, with an hour’s freedom for myself, I wandered off alone & scrambled up a nearby hill & found a perfect rock to sit upon & looked around, unburdened & relaxed, amazed by everything: those few spare pines, the sky’s soul-wrenching blue, & at my feet a tribe of ants systematically upending grains of sand, & far away that winding strip of highway with its antlike string of trucks & cars, & then I saw her: in a clearing some fifty-odd feet below where I was perched, that gorgeous raven-haired young meditator, that seductive bodhisattva, wielding a long crescent sword & practicing her katas, cutting thru desire, the hundred thousand permutations of the wobbling mind — wonder, pleasure, dreams, desires, & memories. I simply watch & let them be: they, too, luminous, transparent, perfectly apparent, perfectly themselves. That all things rise, abide, are changed, & pass away. Mindfulness practice at the zendo at Mount Baldy, six thousand feet above the sea. Exquisite world of craving & delusion.
