The Holy Surprise of Right Now by Samuel Hazo
The Holy Surprise of Right Now
by Samuel Hazo
If you can see your path laid out ahead of you step
by step, then you know it’s not your path.
-Joseph Campbell
Inside Brooks Brothers’ windowsit
it’s July.
Sport shirts on sleek
dummies speak in turquoise,
polo, Bermuda and golf.
Outside, it’s very much the first
of March.
The sport shirts say
today’s tomorrow and the present
tense be damned.
They tell me
to forget that here’s the only place
we have.
They claim what matters
most is never now but next.
I’ve heard this argument before.
It leaves me sentenced to the future,
and that’s much worse than being
sentenced to the past.
The past
at least was real just once…
What’s
called religion offers me the same.
Life’s never what we have
but what’s to come.
But where
did Christ give heaven its address
except within each one of us?
So, anyone who claims it’s not
within but still ahead is contradicting
God.
But why go on?
I’m sick of learning to anticipate.
I never want to live a second
or a season or a heaven in advance
of when I am and where.
I need the salt and pepper
of uncertainty to know I’m still
alive.
It makes me hunger
for the feast I call today.
It lets desire keep what
satisfaction ends.
Lovers
remember that the way that smoke
remembers fire.
Between anticipation
and the aggravation of suspense, I choose
suspense.
I choose desire.
The title is one of my favorite phrases! Samuel Hazo's The Holy Surprise of Right Now (1996) is the title poem of his collection of the same name, working out a sustained refusal of anticipatory consciousness — the version of life (in retail, in religion, in much of contemporary culture) that locates “real living” in the next and treats “now” as preparatory. The distinction between anticipation (future-oriented displacement) and suspense (present-tense not-knowing that keeps the moment alive) — is is one of my favorite articulations of why uncertainty is the seasoning of being alive. For me this ties to Zen peacemakers first tenet of “being with uncertainty” and the capacity to be in presence.
