“You Can’t Have Spiritual Experiences All the Time” by Carol Krause
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “You Can’t Have Spiritual Experiences All the Time” by Carol Krause.
You Can’t Have Spiritual Experiences All the Time
By Carol Krause
You can’t have spiritual experiences all the time, the doctor said. He explained to me why my brain was
causing objects in the world to have great salience. This is how meaning is made. It feels like a spiritual
experience. I nodded yes to the salience. And the constant creation of meaning. It was exhausting, to be
sure. But what was being revealed by my naturally psychoactive mind? And was it true that we can’t have
spiritual experiences all the time?
I felt my eyeballs quiver deep inside my skull, as they emerged to look across the room. I prepared a table
between us. I invited everything overlooked to sit around the table. And then I emptied a chair before his
feet and invited him to sit awhile, silently. The room filled with everything unseen. The light on the ceiling
luminous as fire. There was no need for any of it to be real. Our hands empty as air. We didn’t speak
about the way of things. Or try to calculate the brain’s rhythms on moving walls. Did we eat? I can’t
remember. I only remember a momentary lapse into timelessness. The room unseparating its borders
into a universe. Moments later, it was over. The table now invisible. We fell to the floor under the light.
I looked out the window and saw a barren roof. I wondered if someone would plant a garden. But who
would tend to it, with the patients needing so much care? Maybe one day a bird would land on the
concrete roof and sing rapture into every bed. The sound echoing against hospital walls. Every doctor
and patient flung into the trap of meaning. Each breath the most salient breath of all.
Copyright © Carol Krause
Previously published in A Bouquet of Glass (Guernica Editions, 2025).
Carol Krause is a poet who found herself trapped in the underworld and ended up decorating the darkest corners with stars. Her poetry has appeared in Arc Poetry, The Fiddlehead, and PRISM international, among other outlets. Carol’s debut poetry collection, A Bouquet of Glass, is published by Guernica Editions.
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