wretched thou art
wherever thou art
I sit and work on a line and lean into the pain my mind
continues
trying to think and all I come up with is a texture without
ideas
and to whatever
thou turnest —
the body I have is the body I once had but they could not
differ more
the teacher Agnes says abstract form holds meaning
beyond words
I turn the pages
of the old book
the way certain feelings come to us with no discernible
worldly cause
the teacher Buddha says the practitioner agitated by
thoughts
I have not held
since childhood
makes stronger their bondage to suffering and the sting
of becoming
during the time illness makes me feel most tied to the
material world
its binding broken
its brittle paper
I sit in meditation and sunlight from the window calms
my nausea
since the emergency I feel such sharp tenderness toward
common objects
its dog-eared corners
torn at the folds —
sort of attached to the white wall white door white dust
on the wood floor
mostly pain is an endless present tense without depth or
discernible shape
miserable are all
who have not
an image or memory lends it a passing contour or a sort of
border
the white door open against the white wall snuffs
headache’s first flare
a sense of present
life’s corruption
I remember a man patiently crying as doctors drained his
infected wound
lying on the gurney in my hospital gown we suffered
from having been being
but much more
miserable are those
adjacent and precarious the way a practitioner sits alone
on a cushion
resting alone unwearied alone taming himself yet I was
no longer alone
in love with it —
Copyright © 2015 by Brian Teare. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.