He’s a silence that moves among us,
along rows of men patients
or wrings out drab ravelled blankets
with a partner he never speaks to,
in the scent of wood-ash lye.
Gray-faced, a slim young heron, he’s
hunched
in wings of silence over
a tea mug and sawdust cookies,
alone in a channel of sun
between lines of drying sheets on the
roof.
He’s adolescent raw
at ankle and red wrist-bone,
earnest and Irish, ashamed
of his body. That traitor’s become
a sinister foreigner with
an anarchist penis, an umbrella
in a wind storm, leading him
to no brave new world but a land
of flesh, where one false move
will detonate him straight to hell.
His mouth full of cookies, he sits
unsmiling over his tea.
I try to draw him out,
ask, "Are you ill?" He shrinks,
a salted snail, at the word
diarrhea and shifts me quickly
to the spirit,
says people here,
just ordinary people
have a better grasp of the soul
than his family priest in Chicago.
I enumerate the symptoms
or giardia — diarrhea, cramps, gas
— suggest
he go to a clinic but don’t explain
that Hindus disbelieve in the soul
and have another cookie.
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There
is no good without its attendant evil
"If the number of the poor is
reduced
we'll lose our jobs." Sister Nirmala,
Mother Teresa’s successor.
It's a sort of deal:
On one side God controls
the bank, owns apple blossom Heaven
and Hell’s in-the-red embers;
while on the other, there’s
an international, blue and
white wimpled corporation.
In the account between is the currency
of the poor:
In yellow flowered gowns —
unnamed but numbered — they’ll wear
any
God’s amulet who'll help.
Deposits toward salvation may be made:
Circle death with beads of prayer:
sleep on concrete:
hold a patient’s foot as
another cuts away the rotted skin
repeating sternly, "Be
still. Be still," to the deposit
who’s flinching from the pain.
An increase in currency is always desirable:
Orphans and gaunt children of malnourished
parents,
the cash flow of life,
are the commodity of salvation.
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