In the east many creatures of the tombs are there, some dead,
Others ill, others convulsed with agony,
Others as skeletons, others deeply cut with arrows,
Others full of life, others in their youth,
With apparent riches and treasures of gems.
~The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava by Yeshe Tsogyal
Discovered by Orgyan Lingpa, translated by
Gustave-Charles Toussaint, Kenneth Douglas, and Gwendolyn Bays
On long tables, a banquet for the dead,
but only after an hour in long lines standing,
hungry, outside in snow and inside along steam
tables stocked with boiled greens, potatoes,
and slabs of stuff that looked like meat.
Seated to his right, gaunt, gray, a man
wrapped up in a colorless shroud, to the
left wild black hair and beard, out at cuffs
of a business suit grime-black, a filthy white
man scratching bites and sores on his wrists,
forearms, and neck. Across, a black man,
reserved, almost haughty, in gray dress
hat and fitted suit, hands trembling, eyes
red with burst veins, at whose left another
man crushed by circumstances or
insanity and on his right another, each bent
intently on his plate of food, some with
table manners, others eating with their
hands, and at least one eating directly
from his plate in the manner of a dog.
The New York City Men’s Municiple
Shelter, the MUNI, for most perhaps
the last chance to eat that winter
day before sleeping in some unheated
room or overheated dorm or office
building heat exhaust street grate.
Hunger is heightened when the next
meal is in doubt. It threatens death.
They ate in silence but for incoherent
babbling of a client here and there
and the sounds of slurping, flatware,
and gnawing. The skeleton to the
elegant black man’s left, across
the table to Rhosonny’s right, flopped
off his table-attached school-style
stool and began to convulse.
Everyone continued eating, no
exception. A medical crew arrived
quickly, but to no avail. As they
worked 200 men ate, when they
pronounced him dead, Rhosonny
had just begun to eat his dessert
chocolate chip cookie, a rare treat
which he finished with relish.
As he walked around Bowery,
Houston, Delancy dark clouds
blotted out the moon. Wind howled
down the canyons of buildings,
streetlights swayed, snow drifts
covered in soot gleamed with malice.
He walked. Fear walked with him,
but he couldn’t bear to spend the night
in a rat infested pile of rubble or
a tin walled cell with chicken wire
ceiling or a dorm of cots and snores
sweltered in insecticidal stench. He
walked. Anxiety suffused him. His eye
felt parched and cold beneath its patch.
His sinus cavities congested, he could
hardly breathe. He suffocated in terror.
Just before dawn black clouds withdrew,
trailing a gray stain as sky. As the sun
made its move and threw blankets of
powder blue into the gray distance,
Rhosonny sat on an Essex St. Bench,
relaxed his body, looked deeply
into the sky and let his attention
rest on the space between his eye
brows where congestion blocked
his breath and opened up that space.
As the moment became more luminous
and the sun cleared brownstones
to the east, his sinus passages cleared,
slowly responding to his mind laid
lightly upon them. The sky and his
breath became not other than each other.
The moment remained still and changed
without pause into itself in the future.
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