Clemency

Clemency

Do you want the earth to be heaven?

Then pray, go down on your knees

as though a king stood before you,

and pray to become all you’ll

never be, a drop of sea water,

a small flame hurtling across the sky,

a fine flake of dust that moves

at evening like smoke at great height

above the earth and sees it all.

                                    Ashes

                                    Philip Levine

What if it is?  What if clemency is

farther than your eye can see, like the trick

of mountains that seem to be

right at your lap and knee to stroke

or choke but really are days and days

(and a good pair of shoes)

away by foot and at best hours

by car.  And the closer you get the less

you can see.  Then you have to come

by touch alone, because under the hem

of the canopy it’s a different world entirely

and it's hands and knees from here on out.

Who from the top of hill against

your life's horizon would have imagined this

for you, after all your shot in the head dogs

and used up fetal women?  Who, smelling her 

cervical sorrow on your thumbs, would have received

your ravager heart with the fortitude

of a saint but this mountain?  Truth be,

you have already tried the sea, where it was

a take your pick long-line of hooking

yourself with your Sisyphus stone of atonements.

There was too much sea to see anything

but yourself and the all their names

cast in the polished molasses black, 

look, it knocked you through the way you knocked

your first wife, up through the cellar

door of her spine and out, her carapace,

a crude selkie skin, getting brittle, going to crumb

behind the door.  Because you never let

yourself make love you killed everything you screwed

and took a bow in the locker-room of your sixth rib.

All that’s done with now.  On the run

you’ve made it to the bottom and you think you can

finally be glad.  Still, all the women, all the boys

and girls you broke have assembled like a quilt

at your feet.  Each square has a story of reach:

you touching them and then how they had

to touch everyone else ever after.  

The saints say you must love them before you can pass

through.  You must let your hair grow

to your groin and wash and oil their feet

            the way the penitent did in scripture

and kiss and wipe through all your crime-grime.

You must become as one of them

before you can climb.