A Servant Of This Paradise
A satisfying exchange of ideas last night, based upon an interview with Stephen Batchelor. Batchelor is a prolific author who treats the intellectual foundations and practice coming from the Buddhist tradition. I have been interested in Buddhist thought for a long while. I think the philosophy of life derived from Buddhism offers an alternative angle of view of the default ideas and attitudes of Capitalist-Christian America. I think the down-to-earth insistence, that everything without exception is the result of what came before — is a fruitful proposal for consideration. Batchelor states this as the “principle of conditionality.” Our attention is drawn to how everything is conditioned (depends upon) everything else.
This mornings poem received from poem-a-day impressed me as a striking example of a “this worldly” focus. Quietly I ask myself, what more could I ask of my life, what more richness could I imagine than such as this? This world and this life is paradise!
The Head of the Cottonmouth
by Roger Reeves
Why would I abandon the hunger-suffering
Vulture, spread-winged in the middle of the road
Eating a rabbit while it snows? Wouldn’t you
Want to touch, watch his comrades close down the sky
And, in a black circle, eat red on the white Earth?
And when the hiss of something slithers in—
Panic un-paused—wouldn’t you watch the circle
Break into black leaves pulled from the earth and flung
Into the falling sky? Wouldn’t you want to be
A servant of this paradise, not a God
In front of a screen, naked, lonely, asking—
No more a God than the crown of vultures
Frightened by a hiss that was a tire deflating?
Why would you trade Paradise for an argument
About Paradise?
“This poem is part of a longer series of poems called ‘The Head of the Cottonmouth’ and ‘The Cottonmouth’s Head.’ The series started with an incident with a cottonmouth in Arkansas and the ritual of cutting off its head and burying it far away from the body. I began to think of this sort of ritual in relationship to other rituals around fear, cleanliness, disease, and the pandemic. The pandemic caused many of us to retreat behind our screens and seek validation there, distancing us from others as well as ourselves. This poem asks us to come back to ourselves, to our finitude, to our hungers.”
—Roger Reeves
Roger Reeves is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2023), Best Barbarian (W. W. Norton, 2022), and King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). The recipient of the 2023 Kingsley Tuft Award, a 2015 Whiting Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Texas at Austin.
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