Cellar

bodhisattva

Cellar

In the fullness of a season someone

had to go first into the other kingdom.

                                               

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                Burned

Sisyphus lives in my cellar

and he is barefoot, a barefoot God

like Jesus on the cross

was a barefoot God.  Not often

but enough to know he’s there,

there’s shifting maybe in the chimney

maybe in the crates that have been

shiftless for almost twenty years.

I can’t even remember what all is

in them stuff all stuff.  Stuff

I’d wanted to save for one

reason or another.  And lately,

my way of stopping off

memory loss, my way of making

some burned end neuron

sizzle again is to open them, just a flap.

and the age of waiting is enough

to drive me back

just so.  It’s ridiculous

because now it’s taken on

the most of something too long

idle, some of it

has bottom rot and I’ll

consider it gone when I lift it

to my face, my eye and nose

and if it’s anything worth

saving say I meant it all along

just shift it from here

to there from one shelf

one box one shit filled one soaked

through oh  you know don’t you

Sisyphus, living there next to the door

of the chimney how sometimes

heat makes heavy things fall and tink

against the iron door, how rising

is the last edge any of us has

to the actual

letting go, letting it all go once

we’ve decided what goes

to the dump or

up in smoke.  It turns, some of it,

to creosote or cloud or rain

or stains, stains right there,

hold your hands out, see, move

them into the light, black at the heaviest

bit of grip, the meat at the end

of your thumb, smeared then

on the lip when the itch hakes hold

and the shovel is loaded – shoulders

a ship’s sail widening

to gain to the other side

(the spine is my midship)

of the room to pick up what all

whatever the fuck has to be

moved and given up

to rot, to clover, to ash