One Inexpensive Desert

Desert Town
By Anne Carson

When the sage came back in.
From the desert.
He propped up the disciples again like sparrows.
On a clothesline.
Some had fallen in to despair this puzzled him.
In the desert.
Where he baked his heart.
Were no shadows no up and down to remind him.
How they depended on him a boy died.
In his arms.
It is very expensive he thought.
To come back.
He began to conform.
To the cutting away ways.
Of this world a fire was roaring up.
Inside him his bones by now liquid and he saw.
Ahead of him.
Waiting nothing else.
Waiting itself.