Monk's Journal
I
My cell’s window forms a skin. It’s pebbled
Like a boar’s hide and thickly patterned
with small jagged shapes, as if
Translucent leaves had fallen on the panes
And were rotting at uneven rates.
II
I trundle through the fallen snow to take
My daily shit. Smoke rises from turds
And frosts the hair on my thighs. My ass
No doubt, is white, a spectacle I almost
Wish that I should share. Later, when I
Go outside to pee, I piss new holes
Into the snow each time to make a face.
Eyes, nose, crooked teeth--
My body-heated waste drills holes right through
The crusted snow to touch the frozen roots
Of next year’s spring. Beneath those yellow lids,
Black eyes look up at me to say
I laugh at your poor pale poisoned piss.
Come March wind, I’ll blaze to green again.
You cannot kill what is not meant to die.
III
This morning I stared into my books.
Every quarter hour they told me less.
By ten, they hit the zero point
And began to drain what I already knew.
By noon I knew nothing at all
And sat at my desk knowledge-naked,
quivering like a peeled egg. I saw
With utter clarity the utter
emptiness of all I knew
and all I had acquired. I cast
Myself down into a solemn melancholy
And sat with an ache in my heart
for the accumulated sins of the world
And my own paltry musings
Which I saw had come and would come to nothing.
IV
I scrape away the blackened coals
to find the fire and nurture it until
I have enough to melt the ice to make
my tea. The disk of ice grows less and less
And then floats free. Each bubble trapped
Inside the ice is liberated one
by one, bobs up on a short tether, bursts
To mix last night’s air with what I breathe
today. I thus inhale the past, as I
Do too, when I lug my aching joints
To the table I have built within my cell
And break my skull against those sullen
Marks until they ignite and blaze again
With the heat that lay within them all
Those frozen years.