Existentialism is a way of negation, as Sufism is a way of affirmation. Having advocated both, I'm here to say they sing of the same one day and one time. The other morning when I awoke from a disturbing dream of exile, I remember turning the phrase "scared the living daylights out of me" over and over in my mind until it seems like the living daylights had returned to my innards. I remember thinking that if I could take things in like a rattle snake sunning on a rock, I'd have the courage and clarity I seemed to have lacked as I wandered around disconsolately in my dream. In 1863, during the height of the Civil War and constant nursing duties in Washington, Walt Whitman tried to imagine some sane purpose for war. He wrote: "The fiercest wars are yet to be fought--the wars of peace: the wars of classes that honor labor with castes that don't; the wars of the arts demanding admission to common life or common life to be admitted to and to vivify the arts; all the answers will require the strongest men--the restrained, the self-contained, the self-mastered men." Whitman's definition of strength as restraint, self-containment and self-mastery reminded me so much of the definition of the spiritual warrior that Krishna gives Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. It was then that I tried to imagine myself a so-called "cold-blooded" rattler on a rock much as Eugene O'Neil had imagined himself a sea gull. This poem was born/borne of that imagining.
THE RATTLESNAKE DIARIES
for Art Hochberg
1
Sunning on a rock.
Drinking up the closest star's light
like it was a six-pack.
You ain't lived
until you can take it for granted
or leave it alone.
Either way, this world's an entirety.
You ain't died
until you can leave no trace
of having been here
day after day.
Some--which is to say most--days
this earth feels like a shadow
things cast to hide in.
There living things practice a presence so full
they become absent
in the sum they account for.
2
The night tames the sun to moonlight.
And even then creatures take respite
from the remaining heat of the day
in cavern coolness.
Sometimes I share a cave
with men in rags
who sleep on the same stones
I rest under.
It's them that treat me like a teacher
as we share this trance
called existence.
3
Hungry men imagine
I trap mice and birds
in a fatal squint of archer accuracy.
Shit, if it was that hard to find food
I'd call this a desert, too.
4
Prophets need the darkness
like a cold compress
placed on a fevered brow.
I've seen them talk to gods and devils
as if divinity and demon-thinking
were just moods of the same person.
You'd be amazed at what finds comfort here.
No scripture ever started in this place.
Prophets take rest from prophecy here.
I've never heard so many songs
about the pleasures of strawberries.
5
If I had to take form
congenial to the city-lives my companions fled
I suppose I'd vote
the straight Communist ticket--
sharing restored,
everything taken
to be given away.
6
I never killed anything I've eaten.
Fear of dying strangled them
before I had to.
7
Nothing ventured
nothing gained.
The man who first said that
was seated right beside me
in this cave.
For hours he emptied his mind
then used the dark juice of berries
to paint the blur and thunder
of bison on the walls below them.
I've never seen the ocean
but I imagine that its surf
crashes like hooves
as it herds life ashore.
--David Federman, Ardmore, February 10, 2014
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