Evan Vandermeer
Sitting on a bench by the campus grotto
where hundreds of little candles
flicker before men, women, and children
on their knees, I wonder if things would be different
had I been raised a Catholic, one of the quiet ones
like Eckhart or Assisi, whose conceptions of the divine
were less like the horse pill
pandered by suburban protestantism.
It’s too late for me to cough it up,
so much having already dissolved
and entered my bloodstream, so
I will have to wait, and pass through
enough foreign country
to rinse the stream clean, if such a thing’s
even possible. That’s what this foray
into Zen has been about, a scorched-earth experiment
that so far is working, and perhaps
too well—something about the air here
is refreshing in a way I’ve never known, in a way
I think he’d have understood,
or wanted to. Shortly before dying, he claimed to be
“kind of a Buddhist,” which might have meant anything
coming from him, an AA man through
and through who’d skip out on church
but believed in an all-loving God,
and prayed to Him. In those last few years,
as he sat on the porch smoking cigarettes
with Mom, they’d wave hello to his own dead dad
when planes passed by overhead, his beard grown out
for the first time ever, unexpectedly white.