Poetry

Tuesday, 27 February

A contribution to an organization

A place at the table

A reliable noncoercive situation

An angular facade

Overlooking an abutment

Words won’t quit

Nor will they assign themselves to purgatory

Traduce or seduce their best friends

No matter how inchoate they may become

Gurgling past

Twinning twigs and spits of leaves

Chokes of stitched pine needles

And little gnarled brambles of ivy

Four legs withstand heat

In the enigma formations that gods

Distinguished as men

Shove into ovens without rhyme or reason

Allow us to fracture once more

An alive certainty into a piece

Of coarse filings that adhere instantly

As soon as the magnet is applied

What is your primary motivation?

Greed.

Then you are just like me

And your life is an impossible joke

But all right

If you leave enough space behind you

So you can take one step back

Wednesday, 28 February

Ash Wednesday of the latter days of our lives

Ash Wednesday of the feast of the bear

Ash Wednesday of a shock in a hooded device

Ash Wednesday of a clipped parcel of tides

In holiness

There is no divisibility

In the heart

There are no tides

Only stepping into a forge

There is a bitter restriction in the body

And a hole there where indecision

Inculcates and extirpates exclusion

Fanning out all around us like clouds

Low over the hushed hills

And the histories of us

The way we rally round confusion like a flag

Constantly making bad things worse

Letting the bread mold and the soup burn

Raising up what should gently be put down

To the Nth degree

An occasional altercation of supreme

Anguished anodyne conceptions

Of human possibility

These words block the narrow drains

And cause the plumbing to back up

Stinking mess under the house there

Where no one ever looks

But the smell wafts up unsubtly in the night

Thursday, 1 March

I give all the right answers

But only at the wrong times

Or the wrong answers at the right time

It’s not easy to own a turned warp

Inside a small bottle

Since the meeting got canceled as it

Generally does

There were piles of paper to attend to

Records of clouds of former thoughts

And a thirst as big as night to slake

Heartily

Into the past

Where it belongs

Don’t conceal your heart

I ate something I ought not to have ate

I drank something that it was a definite

Mistake for me

To have drank it

And I have stepped where I

Should not tread

Lord bless us one and all

Tiny stars far away

Do you feel the languor of bated days?

Does your breath come short near the end

As mine does?

A table cleared of papers

A jar emptied and washed out

An exhale but no inhale: Dainin

Friday, 2 March

I don’t think you could do better than that

To write down all what occurs to you

Never mind that you don’t know nothing

No one does

They might think so

And everybody says so

But that’s just talk

Stand up right in the middle of lunch

And holler or maybe sing

Hit them on the ear with your cane

But love them just the same

Go on as much as you have to for as long as you need

Blood washes out pretty good

In cold water

If applied soon enough

And that soft spot

Around the heart

Could be got at with some kind of special

Wrench

I expect

What you see is what you say

Or was that versa vice?

The seasons have a way of never quite

Arriving like Spring is almost Spring

And then it’s Summer but

Something like a stone doesn’t look like

It’s got that problem

But, you know, it does!

Saturday, 3 March

Lurch of the boat splash of the waves

Careening off the body side to side

On the loopy billowing swells

Fog at the horizon

Back on land crickets chirp continuously

In the nighttime cool

Inside a fire pokes along

On the desk a polished stone, a lamp, a

Pencil

I am growing old

Like Chinese poets I say my hair is white

Though it’s not white

I say I’m growing old

Though I’m not growing old, I’m not old

I’m as old as I am

That’s how old I am

New brakes for the car

A pile of dishes to wash

Hills sliced in half for the highway

A day slides by back

Into the corners of the past

Into memory

Hope must tender addition

To a way of looking to see

Hope everywhere is to see merely

Anything as it really looks

Without anything to it

Expanding forward and backward in all directions

Sunday, 4 March

First Sunday of Lent it is the abstention of time

>From appearance, the interior

Of what comes but never goes

How phenomena appear to unfold

Is not one by one.

Compared to a folksong.

I am entirely inside some other voice.

It’s just a job is all it is

Covered with soot

It makes a difference

Whether you arrive before the party begins

Or after the game is over

It keeps on getting quieter and quieter

A great warm peacefulness

With nobody there

Maurine said

When she came out of her coma

Just before dying

So today we memorialize her, reading

Rilke, Sonnet from Orpheus

And my own of February 25

Resolving her karma

Giving her final offerings and Refuge

Saying, all of us, how we feel

Chanting Ho for a long time

Then going away slowly

As everything does eventually

All things transient, impermanent

Monday, 5 March

My face is dark

As if a cloud had descended from the sky

Into my face

Can’t see it there in the mirror

Or anywhere else

Outline of my form

Moves across distances

But there’s no detail there

No color nor articulation

At the top of the hill

A haze where ocean meets sky

No definition, no boundary

Love’s impossible

And not to love’s impossible too

To be here is to be gone

I want to leave

But there’s nowhere to go to

It’s finished

And I long for a simple beginning

Because it’s never begun

This song, a clear melody of longing

I can hear it wafting across balconies

A piercing violin

Caught in a dream

Whose incidents I can’t remember

Each step upward an ache

Walking on in the mud and dust

Listening

Tuesday, 6 March

Reading Carl’s book

About Dogen’s Meditation Manuals

The confusion about which text preceded

Which text the why how and maybe

Of whether Dogen said what he meant

When he said it or said it when

He meant it-- very interesting

That Dogen’s deep pure insight

Is mixed with such a rich dose

Of blind sectarian venom, guarding

The Real Dragon, the One True Way

Of the Buddha against all fools

Who’d wreck it with too much

Enthusiasm love and sincerity phooey

On Kamakura Tokugawa Japanese Dogen Soto Zen!

Honey colored sun today deep light

Makes shadow just as deep on boles

Of eucalyptus trees where branches cross white light

Apple, plum trees a profusion of bloom

When I say these things they do not stand for

Anything other than exactly what they are

They are not signs for a human mood

As they would be in Chinese poetry

(Except insofar as a tree, an actual tree

Is never a tree but is everything that is

Not a tree-- so stands in for

Everything else and in speaking of it

I bring up everything, and so nothing)

Lord, it is time
Winter's coldness was strong
Now we have seen it through
Spring has come, the time of the season's opening
Days of our first freedom
Bless us as we praise you
Help us to remember who made this food
And to hold in our hearts as we eat
All those in want, those who this night have no home
May we in our lives be firm
In making effort always for the good
And never stop loving you
Finding you everywhere we go
Blessed are you who brings us friendship
And the fruit of the earth