On the Way Out of the Sanctuary We Pause

On the way out of the sanctuary we pause for the uncomfortable
handshake with the preacher,

who says she has googled my husband and me and how she loves poets.
I look at my toes, hidden nicely away,

don’t tell her I love preachers, how they come to me in dreams and whisper
their sins into songs,

how I covet their fluid tongues, their belief, the way their words lift and linger
among silent seas of faces.

I don’t tell her how long I sat last Sunday for the Buddhist monk who preached to herself
before us, repeated with such fury

her own name three times in the same sentence with broken broken and perfect and foolish.
I recall the shush

of her feet on the floor and her voice shattering from inside her name. All Sunday,
perhaps unaware, she called

herself old, as if spitting her days to dirt. Her robe seemed so black and heavy like the way
she moved, and one neck muscle rose

out of her as if to say her straight back and quiet hunger wouldn’t save us,
but I fell into her anyway

and floated, a child roaring until the roaring was the way of it.
The preacher wears earth shoes

and her face goes on and on with smoothness. The roof here is so high,
everything airy, light.

I fidgeted anyway, but tried to sit still as a mountain so the firm monk would love me,
bewitched by a woman lost

in an iron cloak, folding, folding, into perfect order some cloth I can’t name, or perhaps it was her sleeve,
and now I want

to shake this Christ-hand forever and show everyone how worthless a poet can be,
but I can’t shake off the world,

can’t ask anyone to share my dark room, bring the pulpit, zafu, tablet, and stacks of dog-scented
robes to burn.

When I see my mother, all I see is a girl now, my mother sucked up into the Dharma or reaching through
the gate for those joyless angels.

Where is she? The monk said our country will be forever at war. Face it. And still I beg
for little wren-moments,

the squat chestnut & yellow flutter at dawn, like a handful of sweet breaths made to warm cool light,
and for a stint I stand frozen

at the window, harmless, as if on my cushion where silence by the teaspoon is both offering and medicine,
or kneeled, nibbling bread,

imagining a soft body at the lips. All last week such deadness, and still the birds kept coming,
one kinglet, one kingfisher, one kestrel,

and Brett Lott wrote God Bless you Ms. Bray, and these days I’m drawing pretty girls in my tablets
and childish sparrows,

whop-sided butterflies. It’s always this girl I return to in light of the holy and the trembling
and small mothers of fright.