Tombo

In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor,

           pulled off   his shoes, granted audience to us,

his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet.

           He smiled, our brother, at the story he told

of   deliverance at the hand of   Master Tombo,

           lord and creator, whose round energy

lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk

           our butter our eggs: see Him there,

in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case?

           In that elder by the yogurt shelves?

I believed his happiness and coveted

           a tidy universe. He picked his feet

while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s

           mango aura made the cold blown air

touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body

           and felt my silly bones collapse again.

I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save

           this faint believer and the indifferent world

that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle

           lavender respired from the flower stall

and Security spoke kind words to our prophet.

          Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash

of speech and flowers and winds and the tides

           and crave plain rotund stories

to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god,

           spilled blood made corn grow,

the blood gods shed watered needy ground

           and became People who worshipped the corn.

Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one

           inarticulate incoherent moment to the next.

Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh.

          Orion turns, burning, unchanged again.

Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees.

           My poor belief   lives in the only and all

of   the slur of   what these are, and what these are

          streams toward loss in moments we live through.

As children we were lost in our opaque acts

           but fresh and full in time. I remember

how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy

           broke another’s face, how we all stood

in hard gray summer rain so it would run

          down the tips of noses to our tongues.