Tell Me What is the Door to Purgatory Made Of But Your Own Belief?

Tell Me What is the Door to Purgatory Made Of But Your Own

Belief?

Help me to find what I’ve lost,

If it was ever, however briefly, mine,

You who may have found it.

                 Charles Simic

                       Mystics

Days it’s just letters the way letters loop

you know together and make words making

sense and maybe even praying  and pages

of them slide like they’re on someone’s lap

clasped by a hand a couple of fingers

a fist and the world’s coming on and going

by and wants for nothing not ever not even

needing to be seen even though look at me

here taking it all down by shape and time

and hue and heat (or not, of any of them)

of day and making it make happy or sad

or love or hate but who’s paying

attention listen I’ve gone over all the lines

all these times and brought them up like

a child is brought up from the bottom from

the very bottom of their bottom which isn’t

my bottom and can’t be and we situate even

so don’t we the way if you think on it like this

clouds begin by being drawn up and taken

to be changed and blown across the front

of us and the back of us and if they could right

straight through us and finally (briefly) set on down

in a foreign place who’s paying pray attention

round as their eyeball is or hard as

the very center of their hand when it opens

finally and the knot that’s been pearled there

is small and it’s rubbed by a thumb or a tooth

and tongue and is called to surrender to

if a thief ok a thief or a dismisser ok

a dismisser or believer ok a believer

to all whoever can take every feather

of every bird and give them their just indulgences.