Vertigo at Trappist Abbey

At forty-six, single, heading west on 99
a sharp right turn at Bill’s Market
will get you to the small white room
with Jesus staring down from the cross
on your little spartan cot with his sad reminder.
I’m here for a change but it’s the same old trap,
not two soft breasts within miles
and a Gideon consolation to tease the old ache.
Outside there’s a wind in the maples talking to
that higher advertised self it’s supposed to all be about.
The monks are at vespers--belted, robed, sandled, safe--
but I’m in my room at my little prayer desk
under the Last Supper reading an axe murder mystery,
Death and the Good Life.
I sense this inner realignment isn’t going to work,
the ball joints and shocks are too far gone.
Then it hits me, there aren’t any dogs here. Where are the dogs!
A slow fear begins to rise in my stomach like baking yeast,
like the time Henry Fonda was lost in the woods berry picking in
Golden Pond and found his way back to Hepburn, running scared.
Relax, it’ll get better after dinner, I think--but it doesn’t,
you ever try to mix polite reverence with a stomach screaming meat.
Remember Bogart in The African Queen
when he’s eating dinner with Hepburn and her missionary brother
and he tries to stop belching at the informal formal table?
Well, Bogart isn’t here, and you couldn’t beg a belch with a prayer.
It was the old hand in the lap trap.
My Uncle George always said, “If you find your hand in your lap,
excuse yourself and run to beat the devil.”
It occurs to me there are no children’s voices,
the main color is white and the smiles are a kind of off nice,
like at Hanson’s Funeral Parlor where we took Aunt Ethel.
I heard the biblical echo spoken above her stillness,
“Love not the world, nor the things of the world,”
but she did and so do I.
I don’t want a gray heaven of starched hymns and formal feelings,
to sit forever in an itchy wool suit.
I want cement sidewalks, oil stains, yellow paint, and real butter.
I run for my life back to my suitcase,
take Jesus and the Last Supper out of the desk drawer,
put them back on the wall and check out.
My Toyota starts like Lazarus and I push the pedal to the floor
the way James Dean did in the car race in Rebel Without A Cause.
I fly down the road past gold green prayer fields to
Bill’s Market where signs like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs
lead me back to Ed’s Expert Auto Repair, Grist Cafe, the Spot Tavern (topless).
My eyes begin to water before Honda, Zenith, Texaco, Century 21.
Off to my right at a small airfield I see a twin engine skywriter lift
its moving wheels and rise from the ground.
I want it to fly high, high into the air above the blue earth
and say in the sky, Open! Honey! Free!