Here's a poem which was published in a magazine
by the late--
he was a lovely person, the late Thomas Merton,
who, as you know, died last year of suffering perhaps the most
bizarre fate to overtake any poet of this decade, anyway.
Well, he had lived for many years, 25 years,
I think, in a Trappist monastery in Kentucky as a monk.
And just about the first time where
he wrote a great many poetry books and manifestos
and the like.
And about the first time he left, he went to the Orient
and studied Zen Buddhism in Siam in Thailand
and checked into his hotel and was promptly electrocuted
by the faulty wiring on a fan in his room.
I guess he should have stayed in Kentucky.
I don't know.
It was a great loss.
The only reason I recall it here particularly was that--
I say-- the last issue of his magazine
The Monk's Pond before he left, he published this poem of mine.
It's called "Consider the Poet."
Consider the poet who walks in a stony field behind his plow
turning up old flints, adze-heads,
and the bones of ptarmigan; who lives
in terror of tea leaves, inkblots,
and mendicant feathers; who spends his tears on jujubes;
and on feast days, pulls coins from dirty ears
to the applause of grass blades; whose overcoat is specked
with the dandruff of alphabets.
A salamander born in the hospitable lava,
he traffics in scoriac mysteries and scalds the hands
of those who put trust in him.
Arbiter of waters, nuncio of the wild iris,
Ishmaelite among the tenements of eyes.
You salute each morning the flags which
flutter in the cottonwoods.
And bear in your lungs the deadly flower of recollection.