Five Ways Home: Dulce Domum – A Poem by V.B. Price

I. THE CHACO WAY

Giving his life
its head, mind riding
thermals
over the cliffs
where nothing ever goes wrong,
the perfectly
what is
detects him
like raven’s shadow
fast across a ridge.
Fear thins out.
Nacre skin, fossil
Aphrodite’s perfect
blush appears
so touchable her knees
smooth into stone,
and he hears himself say
“I have no way of knowing.
I have no doubt.
Light might know. My body might.
I’m just feeling my way around in my brain
looking for what’s in my madness
for flying through rock,
in badgers’ dreaming of saying no,
in the flood off the cliffs
that never came.
I know faultlessly
that as keys open locks,
lives open the vaults of the given
and everything is
no longer missing
at last.

II. PARIS SATORI

Altered states
are what we’re made of.
When pain turned itself
into his body
the mercurial became
the fundamental.
The state of himself
confounded him.
He startled who he was
with who he is.
On the road to the Luxemburg Gardens
in a back street breeze on a Paris morning,
he was stooped as a fairytale villain,
back full of ache and acid.
He walked through the gate
into the shade of the Chestnut arcade,
and straightened out like a willow bough
snapping free from river mud moving on,
pain ignoring him
as he tall walked with the children
around the sailboat pond.
An altered state
had loosed him.
It happened. His body knew it.
How was beyond him. Some days still
he returns to the nerves of Paris
like a glance at Venus
over his shoulder, and feels clean
through the pain of the world and out
the other side of his body.

III. FREE ON FENTON LAKE

Right behind the mirror,
right behind the tinnitus
of monologues, the ruins of twilights
across a life, right behind
is the pause that opens
everything, a window of always,
like stepping out
onto a lake, walking
on frozen water,
on water in a different state,
as if our minds
were altered to become the dusk,
breathing in and breathing out
on little chairs
on solid water
in the center of the lake,
the fisherman around
wondering if we’ll pull
whole fish through the ice
without a hole, silent
ice shamans. No
fish, ice cutters lose
their focus on them fast,
while theirs has opened
to the single moment
through which the whole
cosmos fills
their breathing,
trusted as the ice,
as the un-
questioned next
whole
breath.

IV. THANSGIVING ON THE DURANES LATERAL

Turkey in the oven,
he counts his blessings on the ditch.
Night soil keeps no history. Scars
and vandal pocks
reduce to blessed events. “Shit
floats,” alimentary, easy
goes it. The walk’s too full
for pain. He never forgets
who saved his life,
who graced him
with the luck of kindness;, the stress
of torments slipping out
into his life, teaching him how to dance
on boulders of ice.
Most all of them
time has misplaced.
He imagines
all the nows with them,
not what he wanted to happen, but what did,
the bounty in the paradox.
And he feels obstructions passing, his luck
still with him, the whole
pantheon of his life, the perfect
myth form of who formed him,
the fortune of fate, strong
in the legs that still
know how to walk
under the heart that still
knows how to praise.

V. THE CHRISTMAS WAY

He knew that places are states of mind.
Snow moon along the river,
tidal light shadowing sleep, all
so far from now
marvels of comfort can still
save hope from the hard
devils of the heartless.
Thoughts, he argued, foreshadow
what comes to be.
When he turned so furious
at the world he saw
no way out for himself,
no sanity, no honor,
then there was only
one solution:
to be
what he needed.
The peace of the starry cold
in the weathered barn long ago,
a shrine
to what matters,
where he first felt he was known
as he really is
and he heard the defiant
old woman tell him
his freedom to this day:
“Give what you need.
Give what you need.”

(Image by John Fowler)