Distant

Picking great big juicy raspberries from the bushes near Leroy’s garden,
I was just about to put one in my mouth when Lao Tzu came out of the woods.
He was wearing a long white robe, precisely as I have always pictured him,
Except his hair was short – very short. He actually had a buzz cut.


As usual, when picking raspberries or doing other things of small moment,


My mind was wandering, and I was thinking of the answers to life’s big questions.


Lao Tzu knew this; or he knew that he did not know what I wasn’t thinking;
or I was thinking out loud.
Either way, he came very softly to my side, and Dmitri, my son, asked if he wanted a hug.
L. T. nodded; it seemed he didn’t want to waste much energy in unnecessary speech.
Dmitri jumped into his arms. Lao Tzu seemed very tired – gaunt and pale, and his buzz cut wasn’t making him look any younger. I was afraid his old arms might break off while he stood there. Dmitri was getting so big.
I was still holding the raspberry in my hand, and wanted to go back to thinking my big wandering thoughts, so I said, “What are you doing here?”
“Chuang Tzu won our last game of mah jong, so I had to come.”
“And?”
“I have a message for you.”
“And?”


“It goes like this:


Do not love so hard the distant dreamers

Jesus, Hillel, Mohammed, Plotinus, Siddharta, Plato, Rumi, Derrida,


All those who breath out drownbreathing hopefire blasts of
“THIS IS THE ANSWER
this great burdening mystery I press beneath all else,
these, my arcana¹ (“longius et volvens fatorum arcana movebo²”),
I press beneath the exploratory rage of my groan.”


Because when spring trickles then surges out over the myriad moribunda
Over which, like a darkness haunting the face of the deep, a voice has been moaning
“It’s all gone to the dogs, to ruin, and we can’t
blame any of the immortal blessed gods, Cyrnus.
It’s human violence, graft, and insolence
have cast us from success to misery³”


the green leaf issues forth. The water – murky, cold, and fast –
softens the thawing stretch of earth-flesh – a rut, a ravine – scabbed with leaves and rocks,
and children riven with restless joy, ignorant of the source,
smell the push of buds and the release of roots.
When adults remember the mystery of that smell wafting over this land where
you and I, body and mind, spread out on shared ground


the earth reminds us she is our Shiva: heartland for the imagination,
midwife to life, mother of dreams; smotherer of hopes, Kali Ma freeing the flesh-bound:
she buries her children as quickly as she births them.


Yes. Deny it, you dream-loving hope-crazed fool but here
:[the leaf-blast harness of wind
a leaf-dance across the grass in a good spring gust]


is the breathe and the flesh, the darkness before and after sight, the bone and ash
you share with me.

And she buries her children as ineffably as she births them.

Here is the green
the eternal grass we groped for in our hoped for
answers,
the rolling surface of the dark continents we plumbed to get those secret answers
that we longed to throw upon the svyet⁴,
here the smoldering piles of burned books, the catacombs oft-turned,
the bullets twisted into a red run of blood.

For we once raged and ever will against [“the dying of”] the svyet
just so we could bring the svyet and shine it novuslampros⁵limpid
on our own cobwebbed mind,
but we forgot and forget and will forget the world doesn’t need answers
and can’t keep clarity: peace and kindness aren’t answers
but deeds forgotten, forgettable, and necessary only to themselves.

I say forget all that seeking,
do not love too much those old answer-givers,
do not love the answers
secret, beautiful, and hard-labored though they are.

Mother will bury them as inexorably as she births them.”

L. T. put Dmitri down and walked back into the woods,
I watched him go silent into the green
Then I put the raspberry into my mouth. It was unusually sweet.

Footnotes:

1“secrets” or “mysteries” in latin

2“and unrolling further the scroll of the fates I will reveal my secrets” - the Aeneid, Book I, line 262.

3 Lines 833-836, Theognis; from Mae West’s Greek Lyric Poetry

4 “light” and also “the social world” in Russian.

5“bright” or “shining” in Classical Greek. Pronounced “lam-pross”