THE NEW SADDHUS

Barefoot, in unaccustomed clouts or skirts of raw muslin,

With new tin cup, rattle or scroll held in diffident hands

Stripped of the familiar cuffs, rings, watches, the new holy-men

Avoid looking at their farewelling families, an elaborate

Feigned concentration stretched over their self-consciousness and terror,

Like small boys nervous on the first day of baseball tryouts.

Fearful exalted Coptic tradesman; Swedish trucker; Palestinian doctor;

The Irish works foreman and the Lutheran Optometrist from St. Paul:

They line up smirking or scowling, feeling silly, determined,

All putting aside the finite piercing recklessness of men

Who in this world have provided for their generation: O they have

Swallowed their wives’ girlhoods and their children’s dentistry,

Dowries and tuitions. And grown fat with swallowing they line up

Endless as the Ganges or the piles of old newspapers at the dumps,

Which may be blankets for them now; intense and bathetic

As the founders of lodges, they will overcome fatigue, self-pity, desire,

O Lords of mystery, to stare endlessly at the sun till the last

Red retinal ghost of actual sight is burned utterly away,

And still turn eyes that see no more than the forehead can see

Daily and all day toward the first faint heat of the morning.

Ready O Lords to carry one kilo of sand more each month,

More weight and more, so the fabulous thick mortified muscles

Lurch and bulge under an impossible tonnage of stupid,

Particulate inertia, and still O Lords ready, men and not women

And not young men, but the respectable Kurd, Celt, Marxist

And Rotarian, chanting and shuffling in place a little now

Like their own pimply, reformed-addict children, as they put aside

The garb, gear, manners and bottomless desires of their completed

Responsibilities; they are a shambles of a comic drill-team

But holy, holy—holy, becoming their own animate worshipful

Soon all but genderless flesh, a cooked sanctified recklessness—

O the old marks of elastic, leather, metal razors, callousing tools,

Pack straps and belts, fading from their embarrassed bodies!