The pious dreamed of Mother Mary cast in concrete,
hiding the virginal stone behind red lips,
and robes blue and still as the winter Kentucky sky.
Thomas Merton saw her on trips from the monastery.
She multiplied on porches, and in flowerbeds,
encircled by threadbare tires worn down by the road to Gethsemane.
Catholics build red brick homes and two-car garages
to be near the many monks that toiled the fields, transformed
cows into hoops of cheese, and converted
Kentucky bourbon into tasteless chocolate balls.
At night these same monks bought back their souls
through prayer, rising again and again.
It seemed right that the Blessed Mother’s shelter be humble
as in Bethlehem. The family bathtub with lion’s feet
that had toiled with ancestral flesh was sunk
into the ground on end to make an arbor of porcelain
for the Immaculate concrete. Merton saw all this
as he left Gethsemane for the East.
He must have smiled as he began his Asian trip at last,
finally granted the freedom
to look inward through Zen eyes at the world,
and not outward through the crucifixion.
In the bath in Singapore the electric fan fluttered off the ledge,
danced on the porcelain edge of his bathtub and sank into the water,
stopping his heart, making him as free as the words in his books,
and wholly complete in his foreign arbor.
He is the only monk at Gethsemane ever to be buried in a coffin,
brought back in a box from far away to begin again in silence.
Terry Parke studied poetry composition with James Dickey at the University of South Carolina. For twenty years, Terry’s photography appeared in Esquire, Fortune, Business Week, Rolling Stone, Money, Time, and Newsweek Magazine. His first published photograph was an Esquire cover of James Dickey. He has also had time to be a ballet dancer, an actor, a cop, a shaman, and a Buddhist monk. Currently he is a psychotherapist living in New York City.
