Musings

Morning Commute

The pigeons of MacArthur Park,
Nodding across the grass purposefully
In their grey suits, heads high,
Are making their morning commute
To earn their daily bread
Crumbs.

Diffidently they strut
Past an aging, daydreaming professor
With a canvas book bag slung over my shoulder,
Past the spent whores
Lying in the damp grass
In their sleeping bags,
And past the muttering men
Pushing shopping carts
Filled with garbage-bagged belongings.

I consider the pigeons
And the people
Of MacArthur Park
As I walk past
From the subway to the bus stop
On my morning commute,
And muse
On the humble yet noble places of each of us
In the cosmic order.

The People's Religion

(See my previous "musing" about the Santuario de Chimayo here.)

We just spent a week together, Roberta and I, traveling in New Mexico and Arizona. Along the way, we visited the Santuario de Chimayo, a little adobe Catholic chapel north of Santa Fe. It's a famous shrine attracting pilgrims who come to get holy dirt from a hole in the ground in a room at the back of the old chapel. The dirt is purported to have curative powers: crutches hang from the walls of the back room, as well as notes and cards from people who have been healed of many conditions. The Santuario de Chimayo putatively is the property of the Catholic Church. But it could not be more obvious that it belongs to The People - to everybody. There is a chain-link fence near the parking lot that is encrusted with little crosses made of cottonwood twigs by The People. There are plastic rosaries and other offerings from The People hanging from the pillars marking the Stations of the Cross on the chapel grounds. Nobody directs or manages these devotional acts. If the Catholic Church went belly-up, if its vast corpus of theology and its ponderous religious bureaucracy were to evaporate tomorrow, the Santuario de Chimayo would remain, and the spontaneous worship of the Holy One by The People would carry on.

I went into the little room and filled up a hankerchief with the dirt. Lately, whenever any of my USC students embarks on a major adventure or marks a turning point in life, I send him or her forth with a little container of Chimayo holy dirt. This happens a lot, so I needed to replenish my supply. Then Roberta and I sat int the chapel, gazing its rustic painted altar retablo, and I did what I always do when I go there. I cried, feeling the whole human condition of hope and pain and misery and joy and redemption and resurrection. With one hand I held Roberta's, and with the other I held the hankerchief full of holy dirt. That ball of dirt felt heavy with all the dreams of my student friends at USC. It felt heavy with all the yearnings of all of The People I have ever known, in all the highs and lows of their lives. That dusty dirt, from which we all were formed and to which we all will return, summed up the human experience. I felt it all, sitting there on the wooden pew with my dear wife.

The surface of religion is its structure of belief and doctrine and organization and formal worship. Dig into the dirt below that surface and you will find its essence, which is The People's sense of the sacredness of human experience, our visceral engagement with the holiness that pervades the cosmos. The desire to express it drives me to dig out a scoop of dirt from a hole in an adobe room so tiny, and with a door so small, that I have to bow down to enter it. It does not matter whether or not the dirt has some intrinsic healing power. The acts of touching it, rubbing it on whatever part of the body ails us, scooping it up to take it home, and blessing adventures with it are ends in themselves.

After being healed through the prophet Elisha, the Syrian general, Naaman, took a cartload of dirt from Israel back to his home country. (2 Kings 5) This was an example of henotheism - the idea that gods are local to the "dirt" of the countries where the people who worship them reside. Beyond the soil of Israel, people at the time believed that Yahweh had no authority. Naaman wanted to stay in touch with the power of the God of Israel, who through Elisha had healed him of his skin disease. Nobody told him to do this. It was his own spontaneous act of devotion.

A container of Chimayo holy dirt rests on my desk as I write, keeping me in touch with that hole in the dirt floor of the room behind the chapel in New Mexico. It keeps me in touch with the raw root of all religion: the humble, awe-filled awareness of The People that life is sacred.

 

The sky at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 7/6/11

Bob's Poetry Supply

(This "musing" is dedicated to my mother, Barbara Burklo, who is a retired journalist.  A few weeks ago, in chatting with her on the phone, she mused:  "What do retired writers do with all their leftover words?"  This is my response.)


When writers retire,
    they sell their leftover words
        to Bob's Poetry Supply.

Words of Anglo-Saxon origin
    fetch ten cents a pound,
while those of French provenance
    bring thirty cents per kilo.
The leftover words are stored
    in a vast warehouse near Cleveland.

When working writers are at a loss for words,
    all it takes is a quick web search
        at www.bobspoetrysupply.com
            to find the desired verbiage, on the cheap.

Bob's specializes in words for poetry,
    but of course that implies
       that the warehouse can provide words
            for any purpose or occasion.

Shipping is free for up to thirty words.

Bob's crack team of word baristas,
    all poets who have tried and failed
        to make a living at their noble craft,
            can deliver hot words or cold,
                creamy or skinny,
                    to the customer's taste.

Tours of the warehouse can be arranged.
Dirty words are kept in a locked basement.
Religious terms are stored behind (stained) glass.
Words that end in "tion" are piled on steel shelving
    for distribution by forklift trucks.

Customers should be advised
    that there are periods of peak demand:
Approaching Valentine's Day,
    shop now while supplies last.

Adverbs move quickly.
Adjectives are almost always available.

Smart word shoppers shop at Bob's.
He accepts Visa, MasterCard,
    American Express, and Discover.
What could you express at all
    without the leftover words
        you'll discover at Bob's Poetry Supply?