Benedictine

There was a garden, if I recall, with roses perhaps,
a smear of jasmine.  And although I
sat there daily, twice in a short rain,
I cannot remember it now.  Just an odor
swaying up the exterior wall,
a certain churning with the seasons.
What I do remember is the night-cot,
staved pine, with a little skin of burlap.
And the slow striving to leave the body, to walk
without swaying, to sleep without turning--
the backbone pressed by a gap in pine boards
as finger might press a garden bean.
Just a whittling away, a daily paring away
of the human contentments, until
under the temples, over the ears,
a heat pressed like a snug hatband
and the self was lifted!  It was then
I would sit in the garden, all the roots
with little hooks, and, as if through a thick glass,
the furious scarlet faces of the flowers.

I left when the change came, the papal slackening
that set us off like stones from a sling.
I relearned the world: lovers, infants,
the scrape of the razor on the long thigh.
In a small wood just south of my house
I discovered a silt creek.  Often in summer
I wade there, the silt on each foot
like an ocher shoe, and the freeze flaring up
just under the kneecap.  And often I think
of the old life: cloister, cell, lost hatband,
the cot with its bony palm. Thick and silent,
each memory carries me easily--although
the garden has released me completely.