in the hall of mirrors

On 'Her Face'

I should explain....

Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati is spiritual leader of Kashi Ashram, in central Florida. She is also an important AIDS activist – which is how I met her in the late 1980s (I think it was 1989). One of her followers in Los Angeles was also my AIDS Project Los Angeles phone buddy – that is, the guy who checked up on me, made sure I went to the doctor, etc.; so when she visited Los Angeles I went to meet her.

It was entirely amazing. I tend to worry a bit about institutionalized spirituality, and to avoid it when I can; but she not only a remarkable woman and teacher, she is also frankly a bit of a rebel – think of some of those 'wild' teachers famous in Zen and Sufism, who don't act restrained and saintly, and clearly don't fit into a well-behaved and socially 'correct' milieu. Ma was, and is, startlingly real, full of strong feelings and powerful intuition; one of the main ways she teaches is by the startling, even shocking, revelation – she will easily and definitely tell people what they need to know, even when it's not a comfortable thing to hear.

She became an important part of my life throughout the 1990s, as she frequently visited Los Angeles and San Francisco, and I visited the ashram several times on my own; I think this poem came from a week-long visit. The ten sections end up being occasional portraits of Ma in several of her aspects, and also of a few of the people around her – Bina, Rudra Das, Shambo – although it's unfortunate that I didn't write about some of my other friends there, especially Omkar Naga. Of course what it's really doing is trying to link up all those portraits into a sense of what Ma is like (from my point of view), and what it's like to stay with the people who live on the ashram.

This came up in the last few days also because D– was recently in India; when he visited yesterday he was showing photographs of his hotel, the school, the people, elephants in the street – all in an effort to convey the visceral, immediate experience of this strongly flavored culture, this place where feeling, music, spirituality, awareness, and philosophies that link up all of those are respected and in fact omnipresent. Different, of course, than visiting an ashram in central Florida; but I sympathized with what he was trying to do, and even with how hard it was to achieve – how can we convey the vivid three-dimensional reality of cultures that seem more honest, more real than our everyday lives?

I suppose that's what the poem is trying to do....

Her Face

for Ma Jaya

1.

Arc and klieg lights, endless fusion:
the spark leaps from one to the next,
a barely, fiercely controlled explosion.

Paintings melt in profusion, pouring fire
down the walls, flaring acrylics shimmer
through the alarmed, the seduced lens:

the walls melt into us –

2.

Sheer visual density of the figure:
the live brown map of face, great eyes,
rich silks with figured threads, gold clashing,
lips curled up in ecstatic laughter:

she reaches out her hands towards her own joke,
flinging forms of glowing heat to us. Yet, as
a flame changes, so swiftly the eye doubts
the difference between light and darkness,

there is another, visible only as afterimage:
goddess weeping, pure face frozen into grief
that does not move: tears run out
of their own weight, endlessly.

3.

Bina,
a light and moving figure.

Strings vibrate in sympathy,
eyes open deep into the camera.
Held notes maintain a solid ground,
the dull twin gourds resonate
with suppressed and radiant time:

the instrument that tunes the moment,
the dance that shapes us,
the note that plays us.

4.

The moment flickers as she
looks out on demanding meadows of
unflowerlike faces, sucking at energy:
feed me feed me feed.

She fights through flickering nonlight,
a fragment of abyss, a moment of
freedom-from: she turns towards again,
fighting the deep gray formless current,

Speaks, sets her face into the form
that it must take: and in a vast second
vaults over exhaustion, while speaking
comes alive: the form becomes reality, she

returns to her face, and in the time between
then and now – the space between the front
of the hand and its back – she is here, present,
real: aliveness that creates.

5.

Rudra Das.
Sharp planes of cheekbones echo through
the forged lines of an untarnished brass torso,
this body which is carved, made an emblem
by the hard, swift hands of a great artisan –

feet solid ground mountain:
Ksartriya, the warrior at attention,
deep attention to the mother's words.

6.

The web of many colors shifts: asking for
an old song. In the field of people, waving like
tall grass still not mowed, are scattered those
with strong memories of a certain time:

and over the crowd, a fragile armature of that
dramatic social hope, that public love, which
was living fabric a quarter century ago –
it rises, sparkling but barely seen, linked

from the outlines of crystalline forms,
spinning out above the crowd...
as the song ends it falls, silently, delicately crashing,
fading about our feet into the air...

7.

Shambo.
This drumming carves out
long, deep arches of air beneath dim rafters.

Flickering drumbeats, tiny
delicate ones suspending
the sharp bloody slap of strong beats:
they drip, they glitter, battering themselves
into rose petals

that drift redly across the still water,
silence, dimming twilight...

8.

Rain crashes into the dark banana leaves –
a sound of dull small hammers.

It looks like beating, like abuse:
but this is sustenance.

9.

At night the pond gazes upwards.

Smiling at stars, her liquid gaze
sees into their blazing cores:
the long eyes crinkle, remember
all their childhoods, assure them
of endless life, love without limit.

And the face resonates, burns through
that time when the candles are blown out,
our ashes are cast forth,
the fountain vaults, asserts:

all fused within
that eternal, dissolving moment
when red and white flowers fly,
land in the water, held by it lightly...

they are her eyes,
they are her heart.

10.

But when our own dawn comes,
what can we hold to us alone
and shivering under the banana trees,
when the fountain is turned off,
the light is pale and lifeless?

But see: among the reeds
are flowers still unwilted, floating.

[Los Angeles, Sebastian (Florida), 7/25/92-1/2/93]

Dialectic of Enlightenment

I open the door,
turn on the light
and smile in your direction.

Fog burns away, the morning glows.
Fractured reflection, light from your arms.
I touch them often.

Much later, in the hospital,
spots like acid burns
on your bloated torso.

Sea-waves in your eyes;
the waitress loves your jokes.
I lean back into golden haze.

The nervous friend, the co-worker.
When they leave, your eyes close.
I watch you breathe.

Spinning out conversations:
your favorite books, pet theories,
memories of beaches, mountains.

Your earnest last commands to fight.
Love like a gale behind me, pushing.
You ignore the nurse taking blood.

Anguish at the heat of your touch,
hands sliding down my back,
and touch again: when will this end?

Your sleep, disfigured, wasted.
I watch your bruised face,
amazed: so beautiful.

Sun cut the fog away,
such blazing light and air,
I thought you’d be here always.

I open the door,
turn on the light
and smile in your direction.

[Los Angeles 5/2-11/24/90, rev. Hong Kong 10/11/97]

Near Sea

Traffic on the bridge
is heavy. Your foot
tiring on the clutch.

Pull into the marina;
that must be your boat, I
read the painted name.

Stand alone on the deck,
cool salt breeze, turn
slowly, about to call to you –

I am far from home,
the wind blows flesh
off my bones

I am vanishing
I am nowhere

[San Francisco, 6/26-28/93]

In bed

[Los Angeles, 1990]

Float in white, not touching earth.
Hide quietly.

Blurred moments,
sense of shifting consciousness and dreams,
a time that goes in starts and fragments,
processes and gaps, reversals –

I hear the mail crash through the door,
the sound of panic: ancient bills,
requests to steam clean unreal carpets,
and most frightening: friendly letters
asking where I’m hiding.  No,
they’re safely far away, in the
next room.

Sick and in damp sheets, the gorgeous sense
of fever, such a rush, so different, such
an ecstasy.  Retreating inward from
the body, skin dies first.  The plague moves in.
And best: no caring, only silence.

In bed, the white outlined on white;
fair sheets sometimes, and sometimes foul.
The laundry maddening, the shower
too exhausting.

And dreams.
Killing murderous pixies on a rocky plain,
with dusty foothills rising all along the sun.
Then it’s back to snowbound shacks and
bleeding, cracking feet.

Unconscious, I can barely wake.
Fighting and not fighting.

My desk in sight,
piled high with bills,
rent, questions, mail,
the waiting calls –
malarial swamps
too filthy, huge, to drain –

Enforced incurious, I
return to sleep
to shut them out...

Like taking a tab of lethargic acid.

Shunting through bad cable channels:
chases (car and other), news: another
thousand dead –
Makes sense as silent pictures,
sound muted...
and thank God, remote control.

The familiar tangled limbs
of porno tapes, too often copied, fuzzy screens;
old tapes of movies broken into
fragments now incomprehensible...

Refuse to watch this anguished body,
riding out the rougher waves
of nausea and cramps.

I try to hide in children’s books
behind the Moomins, Mary Poppins, Oz.
We find our comforts where we seek them:
a boy and his tiger.

Time torn to shreds, remembered fragments, the
exhausted wish to be asleep, unconscious,
but only flashes, dark spots known between
the brighter areas forgotten...

The little girl pulls her stockings off
and puts on her other clothes.

Dreams, not leaving, take the time
to tangle hotly with erotic borders
of a rock star’s wild tattoos, the dark and grinning
sense of meat and power...

Vast, creaking doors that hold the space
between dark sleep and darker waking –
I push at one side, desperate
to enter or escape, but cannot
move the bronze, the plated iron;
then from the other side,
I try to generate the strength
to rise and push it out; still trapped, again...

I lift the weeping children to the window
and cry out with them:
Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins, come back.

[Los Angeles, 5/15/90- 8/21/92]

Explaining Nachiketas

I probably need to explain the previous poem, and the story of Nachiketas, and my own connection with it. I'll tell all this from my point of view... which might seem a bit roundabout, but if you're patient I'll get to it.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were three powerful forces keeping me going after I was diagnosed HIV+; they included my brilliant Jungian analyst Mitch Evans, my equally brilliant writing teacher Terry Wolverton (who was running an HIV writing workshop), and Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati. Ma Jaya, as she is known, is a spiritual teacher with an ashram in eastern Florida, about midway up the coast; she is an amazing and extremely dramatic woman – just one of her many facets is a powerful focus on AIDS activism. In the late 1980s one of her gurubais (or disciples), who also happened to be my AIDS Project LA 'buddy' (i.e. the guy who checked on me, talked to me, saw that I got my groceries, etc.), brought me to meet her on the first of a series of visits she made to Los Angeles (and later San Francisco). Although I am not a particularly religious person – I've never done any formal practice in relation to the ashram – Ma and many of her gurubais are close friends, and an important part of the past eighteen years of my life.

One thing Ma typically does is give people a spiritual name; such names are usually taken from the Hindu pantheon and legendary figures, or related names associated with their qualities or strengths. After I'd known her for a year, she still had not given me a name – as far as I knew; she called me 'Poet' (a real honor of a name, of course!) but nothing else. When I finally asked about this, she admitted that she had a name for me but was concerned that I, and in fact her gurubais, might find the name kind of alarming. When I insisted, she said my name was Nachiketas – and that he was the boy who made friends with Death. I was, and am, frankly proud of the name – it indicates a certain toughness, a certain unafraid quality, that I've discovered in myself over the years, underneath the layers of oversensitivity and complaining that are probably more obvious.

The story of Nachiketas? Well, it was first explained to me by Thomas Byrom. Thomas was a gay Oxford scholar of Sanskrit, who was dying of cancer while living at the ashram; he published translations of the Dhammapada (a major Random House edition, still in print) and the Ashtavakra Gita (which he titled The Heart of Awareness – Shambhala, 1990). He also made a translation of the Katha Upanishad – the most famous and important of the Upanishads – which was unfortunately unpublished on his death, but I have a bound copy. I don't know if it will ever be possible to publish it, but it seems quite good to me – sophisticated but quite readable. In any case, the Katha Upanishad is the story of Nachiketas. Thomas told me all this over the telephone, in the course of several long conversations in those years; we unfortunately never met face to face, because when I finally visited the ashram he had died, in October 1991; he has a beautiful memorial bench along the river near the ashram.

***

Nachiketas was a boy, the son of a Brahmin; his father was making a holy sacrifice, but frankly it wasn't much of a sacrifice – old, skinny oxen, quite unimpressive really; and the boy, who (as we shall see) didn't have much tact, said so. The father, in a rage, told the boy to go to hell: literally hell, to Yama, to the lord of death. Well, the boy was not only direct, he was also extremely literal-minded, so... he went.

And in Hell he stood before Yama's house, but the servants didn't know what to do with him, since Yama was away and this was a living boy; so they left him outside, where he waited for three days. When he returned, the Lord Yama was shamed, as this went against all the laws of hospitality. So Yama offered the boy three boons, whatever he wished to ask. The first wish the boy had was that his father would forgive him; and that was easy enough. The second was that Yama would teach Nachiketas the ritual fire, which he did (I don't understand much of this passage, it's extremely Vedic and archaic, but fortunately fairly short). The third, however, as is right in any good tale, is The Clincher: Nachiketas asks Yama, What is the secret of death?

Yama is not at all pleased at the question, which he says not even the gods are supposed to know; he argues, expostulates, offers the boy riches, anything he wants, and so on. But we have already seen that the boy is rather pig-headed (remember, this is the character I am named for); and finally the god of death has to give in, and he admits: the secret of death is the secret of life.

The story thus leads into the vast explanation of reincarnation which is the main body and heart of the Katha Upanishad. And now you know enough, certainly, to understand the poem – and the name, and what the name suggests. Except – and I almost forgot to say this – its literal meaning, which is: he is just going to wake up.

The Song of Nachiketas

“At last his father turned on him in anger. ‘Enough!’ he said. ‘Why should I give you to God? I’d rather hand you over to Death!’ As a dutiful son, Nachiketas took him at his word, and set out at once for the House of Death.” – The Katha Upanishad, translated by Thomas Byrom

I.

I fought towards Death, arms stiff, my ramrod spine
slammed at the river’s roaring, boiling blood,
my legs’ flesh cooking, yet I did not fall,
stalked through the reeking cries in that black air,
pulled up the smoldering bank, dragged past sharp rocks
before Death’s house, its red enormous door,
and pounded, shouting: Can you not know me?
Behind the curdled glass white twisting forms
clawed at each other, shrieked confusion, cried:
Death is not here, he walks out on the earth.
Three days I stood before that door, and held
my rage in tensioned muscle, fear tied down
to rigid tendons, stared at souls that writhed
in mid-air, cracks across the sky that blew
black storms of hail and fire into my face;
dark lesions purpled down my arms, my throat
was filled with sand, sparks burned unguarded skin;
my left eye burned to ash, my bowels imploded,
tore each other in the bloated sack
of melting bile my body had become:
such waiting, breathing, holding, screaming, pain –
I seized black, ragged vultures’ grimy wings
and flung them into stones, watched steaming brains
drip through rough granite cracks onto the ground.
The third day’s end: a figure strode across
the river, feet unburned, robes red, hair black,
his eyes a deeper black, face livid white.
I wrenched my gaunt charred legs and turned, I dragged
my shattered face to face him, sucked in all
the air like fire, screamed: Know me, O Death!

II.

His smooth white arms grasp mine, he holds me up
and carries me into that great red house,
carved muscled skin beneath my head, my neck
relaxes from the soft heat of his touch.
Great curving stairs, white halls hung with pale silks –
he gently brings me to a broad, deep bed;
the room’s dim light hides colors, but I squint
my eyes to catch faint, half-imagined things:
a chair I know, a quilt I recognize,
and if those curtains opened, I would see
the trees that grow outside my mother’s house.
He puts me down, a precious bundle with
the rope that holds it fraying into threads,
unraveling into pure strands of light;
he asks forgiveness, wipes my forehead, then
he says, unwary: Ask, and it is yours.
I see my chance and pounce, but carefully:
What is the secret of our deaths, O Death?
His eyes grow dark and he retreats, he begs:
No, ask me something else, that is too hard.
But, drowsy, brushing lips against his arm
and breathing in his skin, I gaze at him
with my eyes wide and smile insisting, sweet.
His arms encircle me, I clasp my legs
around and through his legs, I stare into
his face forever, for a moment, see...
(As for the secret, which his eyes reveal
just as his lips meet mine: I drift away
on waters, hearing sounds familiar, new –
a wet exploding, cry, and then: a breath.)

[Los Angeles, 4/20/91-8/29/92]

[untitled]

Ravel glides through my fingers into air.

My touch is shaky, robe falling loose, aches span
my ribs, so tired. Not tired of thinking of you:
dark, broad chords spin out past the lamp’s circle.

Conjuring you into the room behind me:
would you turn away if I made a mistake,
would you leave the room, or stay and listen?

Would you come put strong hands lightly
on my shoulders, lean your hips, thighs
into my back, gently, not disturb my arms,

stand within the reverberant web of notes,
read with me the fine net of lines and figures,
silently share what only musicians know?

I play slowly, trying to never reach the last chords,
wanting to freeze this forward-spinning time, falling
that great distance, afraid to have to turn

and face the empty room.

[Los Angeles, 6/9-10/14/92]

[untitled]

He is nearly on time.
He smiles.
We talk of rents, deposits.
He laughs about a former lover,
I earnestly explain the thermostat.
He says he’s very interested.
I pass him, feeling a wave of heat,
to go into the kitchen.
He follows, and we discuss our sleeping habits.

When he is gone,
I stand, holding the back of this wooden chair,
trying to catch my breath.

[Los Angeles, 1/10-2/26/90]

Seasons

This frozen twilight, ice holds my breathing under and alone.
I brush away wet darkened leaves, lean down on your grave...
Direct, above, strong sun gives flame to your arm across my back;
I push aside green branches, catch your morning eyes and smile –

[Los Angeles, 11/4/91-9/21/92]