If you want the Ecstasy

you will have to set your fingers on the dead garden
and plow. Lift the dirt up over your head and pour it over you.
Give up the missions and the passions and dig
as if you’ve got a mother down there gasping for breath. Imagine the first
translation of the King James Bible is breathing down your shirt in the back
and strangle the clods in revenge. Watch the solids gush out over the tops and sides
of your fingers as they choose liquidity over stasis. See your own face
in the quartz flecks hiding in the soil. Get dirty and factor in
the way water feels when you finally get to wash it off even though
some of it’s going to stay on you no matter how you search for it. Defile
the old neat rows where the stunted tomatoes grew last year or the year before.
Ignore the neighbor’s laughter and the police waiting for you to finish so they
can ship you to a place built to hold the diggers. Urge the stones
to bite you back. Exalt the broken glass you find lodged in your hands

when you finally stand up with your back sobbing into your chest. Go inside
and find the phone book. Bury it in the hole you’ve made. Spit a glass of sugar water
into the pit and listen to it gurgle around the pages. Tear up a suit and lay the strips
gently upon the Body of the Names of Potential and Contact. Open your eyes
after a brief prayer and cover it all with everything you have moved this morning.

If you want the Ecstasy
you have to dig.
You have to be ridiculed.
You have to be filthy.
You have to wait.

It will not be at all as you expect when it happens. You will be
clean and the garden will have been long ago forgotten. You’ll
have moved. You’ll be in another city on the day you see
the long buried Phone Book in the eyes of a badger encountered
in a foreign backyard.

Ecstasy — there in the badger’s eyes.
Upraised dirt and blood
on the badger’s paws.
He has been feeding on the tendrils that grew
from what you buried long ago: connections
to the larger world.
You’ll know him:

the old man, the flattened man, the man
who dug his way past his humanity into
the breast of the Mother.

What do you think about
when you’re facing the near-empty parking lot
at the end of a long day? Me,
I head for my car trying to imagine
a workless existence, days spent
on artless fantasy, nights wasted on
television and cheap ice cream. Everyone I know
wants to share their vision of this: lottery
segues to inheritance merges with reality show rewards
and business schemes. At the end of the day, after
all the lunchroom blather, we go home and keep thinking
about the report still looming undone, the meeting politics,
the kids who don’t want to pay their dues
(who seem to get away with that)
and the God-damned boss who does exactly what we do
(but gets more out of it, we think).

What do you do with your hope? Me,
I push it down to bubble within me, making
thin soup of my blood and talent. I sleep
badly, self-important in the small hours. Occasionally,
I toil over a single word and tuck it away in the desk
I keep at home in the spare room next to the dusty guitar,
the room I call “my office” to make it easier to pretend
that daylight’s cubicle is secondary to the night’s work
I spend so little time on.

What is the nature of heaven? Me,
I’ve started to think it’s a place much like this one:
a globe with a molten core speeding around the sun.
The same physics apply, the same gravity
would hold you. The only difference is in
the level of will needed to rise from your place:
in heaven your feet go where you want them to go,
even if where you’re headed is miles above the ground.
Can you imagine such a world? I can.

I can imagine that it never rains in heaven, at the end of the day
there’s a shuttle to your car, and if you decide
to stay home tomorrow no one’s going to call you
to find out where your key is or how far along you are
on that report. You’re in love with your boss, you’re one
of the scrubbed young things moving up in the world,
there’s plenty of money and plenty of time.
Your dreams become so compact they smolder
like a coal seam fire, and you’re warm enough at last.

Think about that often enough and you will barely mind
the long walk to your car, as long as you can afford
a new one every few years. There will even be days
when all you’ll want from heaven
is a better umbrella.

Shoveling at night
while the powder settles.

Bare pavement underfoot,
soft hills on either side of the driveway.

Snow falls back onto the black
from the mounds I’ve made.

I clear what I can,
leave little behind, knowing

it will come back when my sore back
is turned.

I’ve been cleaning up after snow
most of my life, bending and lifting

in the dark, muscles crying out
more loudly the older I get.

Every time, I tell myself spring is coming
and for a moment, the pain stops.

Every time, it snows again
and I go out to shovel, thinking

that next time I won’t bother,
but next time never comes. I bother,

am always bothered, with drift and shift
I can’t forestall. So late at night

I bend to the task at hand. In the dark,
any progress is worth the ache.

good night, america. tonight
you don’t matter. tonight you’re just
a shell around my room, and it’s cold out there.
i’ve got the heat up in here higher than i should,
too high to save the earth, keep it green and all that,
but it’s a small room after all and i’m cold.

good night, america. you’re a thin blanket tonight,
and the comfort you can offer me is just more rough fabric
on a tired hide. tonight i’m just another poor dog
far from home, wanting for nothing, really, but wishing
for so much more than this. it’s not enough for this
tired old pooch.

good night, america, i’m sure you’re something to see in the daylight
with your mountains and your majesty, but really,
when you’re always playing at being so far away, so remote, it’s all i can do
to remember half the words to the songs i used to sing you,
all that glory, those rockets, that flag. good night, america,
a man’s gonna die in this little room, maybe tonight, maybe later,
and it’ll be just another day for you, you and your spacious
and absent skies, so perfect if you look at them the right way.

Just now the light
flickered and the sound
of the dryer broke before
kicking in again, and

I began to wonder if these things
were real, or was I dead or dying
for one moment, the world I know
collapsing and then reexpanding

to its original size all in the course
of a single dimming.
It doesn’t matter now
as I am here, alive, and full and bright again,

but from now on I’ll be waiting for it to happen,
and when it happens at last I have to believe
it’ll be that swift — and I’ll have no flashlight, offer no fight
against the dark on that night; calm

as an old filament, I’ll just fall apart
and rest. It’ll be quick. The sound
will fail, the light will fail, and I’ll be sitting
in the dark, wondering what just happened.