Ecstasy (slight edit for clarity and rhythm)

If you want the Ecstasy

you will have to set your fingers on the dead garden
and plow. Defile the old neat rows where the stunted tomatoes grew
last year or the year before. Imagine the first
translation of the King James Bible is breathing down your shirt.
Give up the missions and the passions and dig
as if you’ve got a mother down there gasping for breath.
Lift the dirt up over your head and pour it over you.
Watch the earth gush out over the tops and sides
of your fingers as it chooses liquidity over stasis. See your own face
in the quartz flecks hiding in the soil. Urge the stones
to bite you back. 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.
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 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 past his humanity to reach
the breast of the Mother.