first published in Delicious Laughter. Maypop Books, 1990.
You're a wild Ocean-Duck
that has been raised with
chickens!
Your true mother lived on the Ocean,
but your nurse was a
domestic land-bird.
Your deepest soul-instincts are toward the Ocean.
Whatever
land-moves you have
you learned from your nurse, the hen.
It's time now to
join the ducks!
Your nurse will warn you about saltwater,
but don't listen!
The Ocean's your home,
not that stinking henhouse.
You are a King, a son of Adam, who can tread water,
as well
as the ground. Angels don't walk the earth,
and animals don't swim in the
spiritual Ocean.
You're a man or a woman.
You do both. You stumble along, and
you soar
in great circles through the sky.
We are waterbirds, my son.
The Ocean knows our language and
hears us,
and replies. The sea is our Solomon.
Walk into that, and let the David-Water
make us lovely
chain-mail with its ripples.
The Ocean is always around us, but sometimes
through vanity
and forgetfulness we get seasick.
As thunder sometimes gives a thirsty man
a headache, when he
forgets it's bringing rain.
He keeps hoping for something from the dry
creek-bed.
Don't look to secondary causes!
Once an ascetic lived far out in the desert,
and pilgrims
would come to marvel at him.
Enraptured, he stood on sand hot enough
to make water boil,
yet in the desert wind
he was cool and moist
as though in a freshly
watered garden.
His bare feet seemed wrapped in silk
and his body in a
breeze.
The pilgrims waited. Finally he came back
from his absorbed
state to be one of them,
very bright and
alive.
Water
was trickling
fro his face and garments
as though from
ablutions.
"Where
did it come from?"
they asked. He pointed
upward.
"But
does it come
whenever you want it to? With no well and no rope!
Tell us
more about
this."
The
ascetic prayed,
"Answer these pilgrims' questions, You Who
brought space
into view from non-spatiality.
Let these pilgrims see where their
sustaining
comes
from."
In
the middle of that a cloud appeared,
a big elephant of a cloud,
that began
to spray down trunkfuls
of rainwater, flooding the ditches and hollows.
The pilgrims opened their waterskins
and let them be
filled.
One group immediately cut the cords of doubt
and were
freed.
Another
group let their faith
begin to grow slowly.
And
a third segment
of the pilgrims were sour and skeptical
before they came,
and sour and
skeptical
afterwards.
And
that's the end of that story!
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Modern Languages / Anthropology 3043: Folklore &
Myth. |
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