wretched thou art
wherever thou art

I sit and work on a line and lean into the pain my mind continues
trying to think and all I come up with is a texture without ideas


and to whatever
thou turnest -


the body I have is the body I once had but they could not differ more
the teacher Agnes says abstract form holds meaning beyond words


I turn the pages
of the old book


the way certain feelings come to us with no discernible worldly cause
the teacher Buddha says the practitioner agitated by thoughts


I have not held
since childhood


makes stronger their bondage to suffering and the sting of becoming
during the time illness makes me feel most tied to the material world


its binding broken
its brittle paper


I sit in meditation and sunlight from the window calms my nausea
since the emergency I feel such sharp tenderness toward common objects


its dog-eared corners
torn at the folds -


sort of attached to the white wall white door white dust on the wood floor
mostly pain is an endless present tense without depth or discernible shape


miserable are all
who have not


an image or memory lends it a passing contour or a sort of border
the white door open against the white wall snuffs headache's first flare



a sense of present
life's corruption


I remember a man patiently crying as doctors drained his infected wound
lying on the gurney in my hospital gown we suffered from having been
being


but much more
miserable are those


adjacent and precarious the way a practitioner sits alone on a cushion
resting alone unwearied alone taming himself yet I was no longer alone


in love with it -




About this poem
"This poem emerged from a meditation practice during which I allow ideas, phrases and images to drift by while I sit, and afterward I write down what remains with me. Raised a devout Christian, I was taught to think of suffering as a moral good, an allegorical narrative ending in eventual redemption; chronic illness with no discernible end has led me to question and let go of whatever remains in me of such ideas. Thus on this particular day-a high pain day-my mind kept returning to the profound difference between a suffering that's supposed to lead somewhere as opposed to a suffering that is simply our shared condition."
-Brian Teare

About Brian Teare
Brian Teare is the author of "The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven" (Ahsahta Press, 2015). He teaches at Temple University and lives in South Philadelphia.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Brian Teare. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate