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Here's a poem which was
published in a magazine

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by the late--

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he was a lovely person,
the late Thomas Merton,

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who, as you know, died last year
of suffering perhaps the most

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bizarre fate to overtake any
poet of this decade, anyway.

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Well, he had lived for
many years, 25 years,

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I think, in a Trappist
monastery in Kentucky as a monk.

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And just about the
first time where

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he wrote a great many
poetry books and manifestos

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and the like.

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And about the first time he
left, he went to the Orient

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and studied Zen Buddhism
in Siam in Thailand

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and checked into his hotel
and was promptly electrocuted

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by the faulty wiring
on a fan in his room.

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I guess he should have
stayed in Kentucky.

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I don't know.

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It was a great loss.

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The only reason I recall it
here particularly was that--

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I say-- the last
issue of his magazine

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The Monk's Pond before he left,
he published this poem of mine.

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It's called "Consider the Poet."

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Consider the poet who walks in
a stony field behind his plow

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turning up old
flints, adze-heads,

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and the bones of
ptarmigan; who lives

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in terror of tea
leaves, inkblots,

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and mendicant feathers; who
spends his tears on jujubes;

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and on feast days, pulls
coins from dirty ears

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to the applause of grass blades;
whose overcoat is specked

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with the dandruff of alphabets.

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A salamander born in
the hospitable lava,

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he traffics in scoriac
mysteries and scalds the hands

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of those who put trust in him.

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Arbiter of waters,
nuncio of the wild iris,

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Ishmaelite among the
tenements of eyes.

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You salute each
morning the flags which

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flutter in the cottonwoods.

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And bear in your lungs the
deadly flower of recollection.

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