Ecstasy

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.