Temple in the Jungle
by Alexander Lazarus Wolff
For (and after) Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951-2016)
The viper is mine, the pit viper with the scales
speckled by black, and I am the boy in the ochre robes
contemplating as intently as any monk in any monastery
has ever contemplated, but I have no insights, nor have I tamed
my viper. Now, there are only the lotuses and the koi clustering
together to be fed, and the luster of the beige floorboards
on which postulants congregate to chant, on which the light
of a setting sun shimmers like the polished amber in a pendant.
I have thought enough of death, of entering the black tunnel,
of shedding this body and swimming in the circumfluent darkness
where all is stasis and where time slows to a standing chill. Let us unfetter
ourselves and allow our minds to be like a mother-of-pearl dish, as radiant
as the disk of the full moon whose luminescence ripples
across the surface of the reflecting pool. And though my robes
are too loose, and though the nightingales will never
stop dropping their calls, there is only Goodnight in all this,
and Life is suffering. I have learned tolerance,
learned to take the blade from my wrist and hoard whatever
shrapnel of pleasure the day tosses at me. Now, my mind
coasts alongside the chanting, my fellow monks opening
their mouths in perfect halos of sound, the pitch undulates,
rising and diving like a plane attempting to correct itself. And my mind
does the same, though it can no longer sink into the sounds
they sing. That goodfellow Siddhartha Gautama. Oh, have faith,
force your desires away. Meditate. Meditate. The laity
do not know I am a product of fantasy. I am the illusion
that you can jettison the sufferings that make a life a life,
jettison it just as I have done to these robes. I have still
not touched the tip of peace unless it is in the scales
of my pit viper who is as still as a weathered stone. And though
there is no nirvana, no insight or mind of white silk brocade, there is also no reason
to blame myself — no reason to desire to end desires
This poem first appeared in the South Florida Poetry Journal, Issue 23, in November 2021.