Look forward to reading everybody else's posts & poems this
evening, and here's my own slight (and looking increasingly so!)
contribution, which last saw print in the Fall 1979 issue of the
_Denver Quarterly_ and reproduced with now with some reservations
but no(body's) permission. (She's a rebel/And she'll never be any
good--name that tune!) All saints are rebels, aren't they? And
often social misfits of other orders as well, it seems to me--
yet just as prey & prone to the 7 deadlies and other disorders
of the spirit, including ambition, as the rest of us. "The First
Hermit" is a (prose-poem) attempt to out that sort of spiritual
competitive spirit that I suspect plagued even the most "primitive"
and/or "muscular"/athletic among the early Christian saints.
The First Hermit
Carefully, I packed my little bag of nothing and strode forward
with a glad staff. Repairing to the wilderness, I even invented
a new name for myself: _hermit_. But what a bad dream I had that
first night in the desert. Dreaming of another, one who needed no
new name for his prior Paul. I saw him kneeling in the wilderness
long before my birth, and I thirsted hopefully (it's just a fasting
mirage!) but bootlessly in my requisite sandals. For I knew enough
to know how it works: dream at home and take it or leave it, dream
in the desert and vision is the Rule.
So off with me the next morning to find this so-called Paul, my
staff nor I too glad, I came upon a centaur drinking at a waterfall.
"Take a right at noon," the man-half advised. Upon following his
directions to the Letter, I soon met up with a date-bearer hoofing
along whose face disturbed me. So did something to do with his
hooves that made me lose my usual appetite for dates. "Are you a
goat or a man?" I inquired (very politely). "Are you a hermit or
a boor?" he retorted, adding a strictly unwarranted injunction on
table manners: "Use the middle fork this evening." But on reaching
a crossroads at suppertime, I wondered if I had misunderstood him
(and if he'd eaten those dates by now).
Then, lo verily, a crow swooped down at moon-up, dropping a loaf
at my feet. "From Paul," I thought I heard it caw as it flew out of
sight and what sounded like something about "merry," something about--
christ, no, it couldn't have _that_! It's just what the desert is so
famous for, arguing in circles, begging for questions--it's the
Mendicant Way of daybreak, discovery, he's gone stiff already!
And that is how I found him, kneeling in prayer or death, same
difference to Paul, still sparkling with sweat outside his cave.
Two lions were busy digging a grave nearby. "Make yourself useful,"
one suggested. "Make yourself at home," the other added, "Anthony."
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