Photo Credit: Unknown
Flaming Aum
It’s a conspiracy,
someone said,
but I’ve done this myself.
I’m collecting things.
Drowning in stuff.
Clinging to memories while
packing and repacking
what
I’ll surely leave behind
when the big whatever
has its way with this corporeal
sensibility,
when I no longer identify with this body
when I no longer believe my emotions
are me
and when I’m no longer worried
about missing a call.
So I’m phoning aum
on my imaginary
gold-plated phone.
Wondering when I signed on
the dotted line
for this disease of busyness.
Trying to remember where I put that day,
that hour
that memory of how I first met love
on the back porch.
I’m packing it up.
Throwing some out.
Labeling the way
for the great unpacking
when it all turns to dust,
floats away,
and burns.
Cashed in
on the illusion
that anything
or anyone
is guaranteed.
Mary Celeste Labadie
(from Desert Shovel Review)
I had never seen Abiquiu Lake so low.
Even morning primrose bowed their eyelids
to the Rio Chama.
Things forgot the time:
a hubcap along the road
the empty roadside table
and the joyous day, the third of May.
There were dreams lurking under sandstone.
There was a desire to preserve litter:
Ribbons of toilet paper, ripped t-shirts
and holey ice bags dressed wire fences
like prayer flags.
The presence of crow reminded me
of the Pojoaque poet who said,
You’ve taken mushrooms, you’re a shaman too.
This carried me into song—
to chant and drum,
to skulk like hungry Javelina
for newborn,
sprouting gardens.
All of it,
like stones in the hand,
turned and turned in the medium of memory
and the depth of Abiquiu—
exposing its thin belly,
the impermanence,
the one-day bloom of datura.
Mary Celeste Labadie
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