Revelation
Charles Rammelkamp
A Lotus Flower Just Rose from Under Water, by Wu Bin from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). source: China Daily
Revelation
I just assumed all bladder leak pads felt the same. – television commercial for Always Discreet incontinence pads for women
My eyes were opened, Ricky confessed,
when I took a World Religions class in college.
They used to hammer me as a kid
with Jesus dying on the cross for me,
as if I owed something
to this guy I’d never met,
a debt I’d never be able to repay.
Plus, here was this guy, writhing,
in great pain. Not really very appealing.
Nothing I aspired to, you know?
But Hinduism? Buddhism? Taoism? Zen?
Those really appealed to me.
Peace. Enlightenment. Pacifism.
A welcome to something better.
Take a look at the symbols.
You get a cross in one,
a guy writhing in agony
like a fish on a hook.
In the other
you get the lotus flower:
purity and enlightenment.
I could see that.
It was no contest.
Wu
“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” ― Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean Well Lighted Place”
Nothing is everything
the earworm jingle
in a television commercial
for a psoriasis treatment,
has me humming the catchy tune,
and I’m thinking
about the Tao Te Ching.
The value of emptiness.
Everything comes from being,
Laotzu is said to have said,
and being comes from nothingness.
But then I’m boomeranged back
to thinking about teenage acne,
how my father said it was nothing,
meaning there were more important things
than the clarity of my complexion,
from which I took little comfort,
as if it trivialized the anguish I felt
about the pimples over which
I had no control,
like an attack of the zit-men
in a B scifi movie,
although his concern was nothing
like that at all.
More like I had everything
to look forward to, didn’t I?
Everything is nothing.
Poker Faces
When I finally returned to Potawatomi Rapids
after years living overseas,
in the foreign service,
one embassy after another,
I was horrified to learn
the horny old goat Brent Robinson
pursued my niece Beverly
like an animal in heat,
a woman thirty years younger than he.
“Robinson’s a shrewd banker,”
Uncle Pete, Bev’s grandfather observed,
when the local rich man’s name
came up in conversation.
He had some sort of power over Pete,
maybe a loan of some kind
on Uncle Pete’s car dealership.
“And how does he plan
to get Bev to marry him?”
I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral,
a guy in a poker game,
cagey about his hand.
Uncle Pete smiled
like the guy holding the royal flush
in a game without wild cards,
“Only if she accepts his proposal,”
he laughed, his eyes crinkling
in a way that made me miss
all those years apart from my family.
“And I don’t think
that’s happening any time soon.”
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.