Compassion.

Marathon training. Sunday afternoon, I head for the door: eighteen, nineteen miles—horizon.
Halfway on the long loop, right turn on Rich Levels Road. Steering for home. Asphalt
undiminishes underfoot. Black-tar ribbons like flattened snakes on the older gray pavement.
Endless hauling in deep’s end: Delaware. November. Soul’s evening. Caravaggio,
some Dutch mustache master, could have caught these royal dusks. Each new layer of lacquer,
varnish, inks us into a blackness that seems somehow to swallow and suffuse light.
Autumn. You cannot change your life. Russet, rage, haze, razed corn, crop stubble, blush & husk.
Blues. Purples. Something poetic in that clump of combine harvesters, congregation
of alligators, machines for chewing and swallowing. Everything burnt to umber. Amber, ember,
Exodus. Book of Numbers. Incalculably precious, it makes me want to cry. My hips are
crushed to fine powder—pulsing buzz of a simple stroke-step swung millions of times. It makes
me want to cry so hard I give in: fall apart like a rotting bucket, like a buck left shot
on the shoulder of the road for the crows and the buzzards to feed on. Feast on. I wish to go
down now: all fours, keel over, feel myself breathed by feeling like a bellows.

Later I speak out loud on the road to no one. There are these phrases that get stuck in my head.
I mutter stumpfucker—slang for a kind of beetle that lives in the ash after wildfires. Or,
he is the ocean of compassion. He being the fourteenth Dalai Lama, manifestation of the deity
called variously Chenrezig, Guanyin, Avalokiteshvara, Kanzeon. The Bodhisattva of
Compassion—she who listened, and heard the cries of the world. Nothing but that love. A koan
describes her as being like reaching for a pillow in the night. Thoughtless dreamless
reflex. How many people walk around worried they’re asleep, missing their lives, caught up
in one thing, when really they’re somewhere else, and no way to get from A to B?
And Bolaño, in 2666, speaks of the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain.

Forgive others. Forgive yourself. Words simple enough to say with no one listening;
harder, an ocean, a lifetime spent doing it wrong until you find the way which is no way, but
wall, which has more to do with how disconnection stalks us, how to hide by standing
totally still. Forgiveness, salt rinse, sours under thought, tastes itself, turns criminal. Suffering
and compassion are the same thing. Cross the road without looking. To get to the other
side, your words and my tears are the same thing. Everybody is doing it. Every body of water
connects eventually. And lately, when I sleep, I lay waking still. Just below the surface,
submerged in the shallowest lens of dawning.

 

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The line "you cannot change your life" is from "In the Harvest Season," by Ryan Wilson.