Dak Thok Monastery, Ladakh
At the Zen Mountain Monastery
A double line of meditators sits
on mats, each one a human triangle.
Evacuate your mind of clutter now.
I do my best, squeezing the static and
the agony into a straight flat line,
but soon it soars and dips until my mind’s
activity looks (you can take the girl…)
uncannily like the Manhattan skyline.
Observe your thoughts, then gently let them go.
I’m watching them all right, unruly dots
I not only can’t part from but can’t help
transforming into restless bodies — they’re
no sooner being thought than sprouting limbs,
no longer motionless but striding proudly,
beautiful mental jukeboxes that play
their litanies of joy and woe each day
beneath the shadow of enormous buildings.
Desires are your jailers; set them free
and roam the hills, smiling archaically.
It’s not a pretty picture, me amid
high alpine regions in my urban black,
huffing and puffing in the mountain air
and saying to myself, I’m trying but
it’s hopeless; though the tortures of the damned
make waking difficult, they are my tortures;
I want them raucous and I want them near,
like howling pets I nonetheless adore
and holler adamant instructions to —
sprint, mad ambition! scavenge, hopeless love
that begs requital! — on our evening stroll
down Broadway and up West End Avenue.
–Rachel Wetzsteon
(See the post below for more information about Rachel Wetzsteon.)
I am unfamiliar with R Wetzsteon’s poetry. The two you have posted here are very powerful. Perhaps I understand her. I have found that being content requires a certain mindlessness (not mindfulness) and a refusal to reflect. Yet to be a poet that is what she had to do. She engaged the despair in order to express it. “Observe your thoughts, then gently let them go” is I suppose something no poet or artist can do. Nor should do. She has expressed that dilemma so well in this poem.
What a voice she had. That it will be forever still now is such a loss.
Janet, I’m so glad you connected with these two poems. I didn’t dig into her work before her untimely death, but now I am amazed by how connected I feel to her work.
Such an interesting take on the Zen poem. I read it as a beautiful retelling of what all of us go through when our monkey mind is being asked to sit still, to quiet down. I have never given myself an artist’s out on that one. But your comment has caused me to think about that differently.
Maureen, I second your response. What a huge loss, and one that I don’t quite know how to hold.
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