Agoloso Presents - Atondido Stories Agoloso Presents - Mama Mada | Page 206

Mama Mada
After this, Loving Kindness and Asanga Flew
by R. A. Villanueva
These church gates are locked, like yesterday,
and so I have not yet prayed
for you the right way, knelt in your memory, offered
intentions or lit chapel candles in your name.
When John told me, I was an avenue away,
reading on a gallery wall about Asanga,
who wanted Loving Kindness to meet him in a cave, who waited
and waited to talk enlightenment over Assam tea.
On that painted cotton, he wears a halo of mineral malachite,
is clothed in a dye of ground cinnabar, is flanked by the story
of his life. This is what I know now about the upper-right corner,
where a miniature Asanga flies
with the found bodhisattva and both float buoyant without need
for pinion feathers or ailerons, where they are weightless,
steering towards paradise with just their robes and arms:
Loving Kindness and Asanga flew to the Tushita heaven.
It is what I was trying to understand before I took John’s call
and he asked if I had heard about your passing
days ago, alone in your apartment, most likely from a collapse
of the heart. It is what happens after Asanga lifts
Loving Kindness up and carries him through town on his back,
the townspeople blind, as always, to the beatitudes among them.
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