Lying on his left side
he’s the monk he dreamed of becoming
during all those chaste weekends
sectioned by bells,
his only sins being to meditate too long
on the penis and testicles of the Cerne Abbas giant
and put one ear to the flimsy partition
while in the watches
Brother John grunted and grew so restless.
True, he took a lively interest
in Old Irish accounts of chastity tests
but rejoiced at courses and conferences
when his allocation was a spare cell,
reminding him of all he did not need
and could have renounced long since,
and he learned faith and doubt
are by no means mutually exclusive.
On his right side
he’s grateful not to have been born a woman
distraught at losing her longed-for child,
then muses on how the pursuits of his body
have empowered him, obstructed him
for more than sixty years.
Ah! When passion is so searing
as to be monastic, his limbs
so tangled with hers he no longer knows
which belongs to whom, until she turns away
with a single moan, sated, and ushers
herself into his lap…
He savours the silence,
the final inadequacy of words,
sleeps and enters into the courts of merriment,
until he wakes in the morning smiling
at what he no longer clearly remembers.
Prone,
he crushes his elbows and crotch
and disturbs his troublesome kneecaps.
They all grow Brobdingnagian
and his discomfort soon waylays his thinking.
True, there are those who speak
of hunkering down, and comfort,
and everything being gathered in,
but few of his thoughts are uplifting
and he seldom escapes what he must become:
glinting clods, clay, tilth, ash, mulch.
Face down, he’s about to be shot by a masked gunman.
Or else he’s on the battlefield,
a man already left for dead.
Chilly, and lying low, he’s crouching
like a fearful, flat-eared rabbit,
afraid of suffocating like a baby.
Supine,
he’s his boy-self on the top of the bunk again
so close to the pale blue ceiling
he can flatten his palms against it.
And now, listening to the larks
and pressing his palms together
(the head-and heart-line of his working hand
are one and the same) he believes
he will be ready to meet his Maker.
He’s as exposed as a yoga master
and knows he always must be.
Immaterial now beneath the roof-tree of the sky,
he could almost float away…
In the Western Isles, he recalls,
a makar used to lie on his back to compose.
He placed a large stone on his stomach
and stared into the dark.