I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
flapping against the sky and recalling that I am sky. Once,
the book well-thumbed and creased and read twice over,
I felt an ant crawl the length of my arm like a nagging
sense that this enlightenment wouldn’t last, that
whether I crushed it or saved it would determine
the course of my life, which I knew to be my one and
only life, and I knew that I would get it wrong, that one
day I would own a house and have a wife and son
and no amount of introspection would clear the crumbs
I hadn’t time to sweep between this and that
priority, that when the ants came looking for food
on Christmas Eve like a parable of how the living world
exists for the living I would set to work with poison
and impatience because the hour was growing late
and we are all made in God’s image, which is to say
we are power-hungry gods, we have things to do,
we can kill without consequence.
