Apologia

How petty honesties pervade lies.
Yesterday I read Paul—
if I know all truth
and do not care, I am noise.

But though much truth is given me,
I have begun to seek it out
when it hesitates, to help it on
selfward, rushing

where it glides, gentle truth, on muffled feet.
There is, yes, this eager fool in this man,
this clumsy heaviness
in pushing on a fuller life.

If this be loving less, he still does not love worse,
and the lack, it drops gently off.
Wilted, flowers pass, bring fruit to birth
(the poetry slackens now and then.)

So let me cremate my soul,
burn it, for its bumbling entries.
Thrust into fire,
let it turn to ashes and return.

My cloddish wanderings are the earth
in which my learning grows.
I, it seems, must die each time
for each time the pain

hurts you and kills me—
I am that moment blessed.
But you reel and I turn,
look, am struck again.

This could not be the grail
for which I have lingered in this frail bone.
The worm turned within the apple
and was bitten into.

It is the bitter organic taste
lying frankly on my tongue
and loosening my teeth.
True, mystics of a mundane kind

have sought me out and taught me all
they knew. When they passed,
I remained, obscure, circumspect,
a collection of anonymous graces

that vote (in specified equal voice)
at mealtimes and love-makings
for a general well-being,
a goodness of unspecificity,

an ambiguous glow.
There is after all my sainthood
and my prophecies to consider,
an encyclopedic tongue and a vision.

A life worth not a song, not a line.

I pick my way along imagined grass banks,
along my mind’s river, eddies and swirls
passing me in a silent rush,
and on the other side,

across the street, jewelled windows.
An entire city glitters vacuously at me.
The other side—
where people live their minute’s worth.

Whores sit outside the university.
They eat bananas and squat invitingly,
their legs spread, shadows and echoes between—
their eyes are pits, with glimmers of more darkness.

Here the daily men and women descend
from inverse abysses,
from their pits after a day of baiting.
Their scent is rank and bloody,

there is carnality and blood-lust
in their minds. But in steel compartments
they stick closely, unaware
of the sweat and smell and sex of the next.

Nothing works or even seems to
and the buses run late.
Back over on this side, where I live,
I keep losing my reasons,

my sight has, to my eyes, unknown purpose,
my vision becomes a variable, unquantified.
The vacuum never speaks.
I fall, falter.

A million other eyes stare at the ceiling
embarrassed or angry.
Still I remain, to the last, a heroic growth,
a thing of strange conviction, vision-driven.

But still I fail.
I will beg pardon, retreat, find a cave for penance,
where I’ll lie in rotting furs and darkness,
and light prayers and candles.

Apologia was previously published in the Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad Vol. 18, No. 1 (Fall 1999), edited by M.G. Vassanji.