One Hundred and Eight Doors

Open, the door is what it is not. Orpheus looked back from a door 
too soon and tore himself into O. Once a woman pierced an apple 
to eat god-flesh. Once a woman pierced me. She sewed the hole with a lock 
of her hair and unspooling, mouthed, This way I can always return to you. 
If we are all searching for a door. If every door is a wound 
mistaken for a meadow. The monk knocked. Who wakes the House of Lotus? 
I, your lover. The flower drowned in the lake of tears. The eye is the door 
to sins, said the Book of God. The eye shall be killed, said the Man of God, 
and emptied two oil lamps into his eyes. The devotees asked him, on his deathbed, 
for a final teaching. I wish to look at my eyes one last time . . . For the door is what it keeps 
out. For the door bisects every desire. Beneath every threshold: bones of a nation 
buried alive. The lintel carved with names writ in swallowed passports. 
The martyr is a witness—for whom? The door cannot remember its mother 
tongue, so it swallows bodies. Every day it grows hungrier. A mouth, 
rooted, hinged dark, we walk in and become its language. So the door becomes 
a wake of live vultures. So the door believes the tree is still growing. 
Around me, stone walls; on each rock, a pink palmprint of the Disappeared. 
To escape, I must recite every name. I chant, Shunya shunya shunya . . . 
The door opens. The door opens like an arrowhead. I swallow 
a bodhi seed every time Apa’s fist could not open. The first door was the one-winged 
Himalayan danphe that drank rain only. When it appeared in the sky, 
the dead could talk to the dead. A walking door of ash, we go 
from house to house hoping to find—what?—an heirloom peaked comb, bones 
of an extinct bird, god, the beloved humming in the other room, the fireflies 
that danced around us in the pine-dark which we crushed in our fists 
to see if our fingers glowed? Inside or outside: where we’re facing. 
Enter or exit, we always leave the door behind. In this way the door is 
more human than we. The wound is the door to the light, says Rumi. The doer 
is the sufferer, says Ramana. At the gate, my documents are always of the wrong color. 
Give me back my brother, I say. The door says, Which one? I feel most political when I’m 
entering a door. In search of home, I move from form to form. I bury 
the comb teeth in the buckwheat field for my Unborn Moonbug to return
from earth when I’m gone. The door is a mother. It follows. 
What I’m trying to say is I am one of her six children, you, my only mother. 
Finally, we arrive, at not home or the other shore but another door. No return: 
the obol—we turn and turn, haunted by the first zero, our throat failing 
to split into a keel. If we are all a door—at night faceless ancestors come and go, 
gossiping of X and O. Nine lives later, the monk returned. Who wakes the House of Lotus? 
You, Beloved, only you. The calyx opened: the monk drank the sacred tear 
from his own lips. The door is always inside. The door is, whether we are or not. 
Every door takes us back to the alfalfa field where coyotes cut howls on blue sirens. 
What I’m trying to say is you walked in and a door was no more.