Though I knew intellectually that I should expect no reward from my Buddhist practice, nor from my experience of "god" now receding into the past, my complete lack of success in making the truth that had been revealed to me germinate in others, sprout, develop, and flower was a great disappointment.
I felt resentment.
Anger.
I would dismiss it.
Hello—
It would return yet again.
Accept.
No!
Accept.
No!
Now my intellectual life in the city was comprised of college and car.
My world looked ugly.
In my classroom I found complex, terrible agonies.
Into my car and off to work—
Into my car and back home—
I struggled.
The streets and highways were all mashed into pieces, broken up, crumbling, constantly under repair, chuck holes, potholes, orange barrels, barricades, and detours. The city streets lay across one another helterskelter, every which way, and several intersections looked like double asterisks, six or seven streets all converging at the same point. North of town twenty-five different roads, streets, lanes, and entrances all merged in less than half a mile. Traffic lights were broken, on the blink, or deliberately ignored. Drivers accelerated on yellow, their vehicles speeding missiles. Down the city roads and streets they whined.
I was reading about death camps.
Holocaust literature.
Of slavery—
On TV there were images of Asian and African famine.
Hopeless—
Brown—
Dying—
Death—
"Brought to you by Insurance!"
Blood—
Sores—
Shit—
Big stinking buses advertised for the military, for lawyers.
Football.
Black fumes rising and descending.
Turning to grease in the long winter of ice, snow, and slush.
Poverty—
Racism—
Crime—
Fear of walking.
Influenced by John, Gaskin, and The Farm, I tried to be vegetarian. Ruth stopped preparing red meat in our home. Then we stopped eating it period. I had always loved sports; now I struggled with the pigskin of football, the horsehide of baseball, its elaborate, big leather gloves. I bought canvas shoes and canvas boots, canvas belt, nylon wallet.
My awareness expanded.
It grew.
The more I did, the more it seemed I had to do.
No end to it.
When I headed west to work I witnessed the daily carnage—dead animals split open at the sides of the roads or swollen, bloated, and stinking at me as I drove by, dead skunks, six of them one day in February, and every day dead squirrels, or a dog, cat, kitten, raccoon, possum, deer.
One day it was a collie, I think, opened up from collision and impact like a giant fleshy watermelon, ripped in half and torn asunder, so much flesh, its ruin so big, so confusing, I could not see it for what it was. It looked artificial and unreal, like red beef behind glass at the supermarket, and at first I thought it had been a calf because of its coloring and its size, and then as I sailed on past I experienced the necessary flash of recognition and realized what it was—no, what it had been. Four days later its remains still lay there, its pieces hammered and pounded and dried into three brown and gray doormats that under my whirling steel and rubber tires did not even thump. I monitored my bitter mind.
"Lassie!"
On another day it was a neighborhood dog, a mongrel cocker, black and white, pretty, no visible wound, lying in my lane up the block in early evening as I motored to my night class.
I had to slow down and ease on by it.
I idled and looked.
Stopped.
Stared.
Oo—
It lay dead.
Blood.
So much blood—
A huge, spreading slick, a glossy dark red and reddish purple puddle four or five feet across, thick, viscous, its blood all run out of its mouth in a maroon and black and red cartoon.
It must have been bled empty.
Bled dry.
So much blood I could hardly believe my eyes.
Fascinated.
That urge to stop and stare like a kid, to maybe touch it with a stick, to poke it.
To respond—
To feel—
To care—
Even to carry it off to the curb and hunt down its owner.
I could not.
I was late to work.
Job.
Late to my money.
I honored its passing with only a moment's short silent prayer.
"One day I too—"
When I came back three hours later it was gone.
Impermanence.
No corpse, no puddle, no blood.
Not even a wet spot on the concrete street to mark the site.
Nothing.
Its owner must have discovered his puppy and carried it off, then washed down the street with his garden hose. I liked imagining this act, its simplicity, practicality, its humility.
Its reverence, its fundamental decency and civic responsibility, its love.
It reminded me of my father.
The summer heat and the heavy traffic took care of the rest.
Gone gone—
Gone beyond—
Gone beyond beyond—
Hail the goer.
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