Sunday, March 8, 2009

Soaked green, winter poems

1/12/09

Light

 

Neither day, nor night.

the moon glows sunlight

into star-swelled skies.

 

Light. Only light. 

 

**

 

1/22/09

Mary Oliver

 

The effort

she could give, she said,

this giving of herself.

And so she did, a devotion

of patience and of will

and observation, of which

come the poems.

 

 

1/24/09 

Writing the world

 

Rethinking, remembering

the marriage of intellect and experience

reordering, or is it ordering

the world in such a way as to see

anew, the silvered thread

that’s joy run through. 

 

** 

 

Taking refuge

 

It’s not technique,

nor the other things

the learned might bring,

but the coming itself that most counts,

the coming back and the deepening listening

coming of that.

 

 

1/25/09 

Rereading Carruth,

 

looking more closely than before,

looking for the how

that is his, seeing sentences,

full sentences not prose,

but poems.

 

Unmistakably so,

but how so?

 

 

1/27/09 

True Nembutsu

 

Resolve eased away,

unclenched and opened

within certainty and song.

 

Namuamidabutsu 

 

** 

 

Unexpected gratitude

 

In real friendship,

studded with acute and sustained observation,

a few scattered words

will sweep doubt with such sudden ease

only laughter’s left, standing naked

and unbruised in truth’s spot light. 

 

 

1/29/09

 

Over time

I began to understand the universal

as not mine to apply

but something ringing resonant in others

for me to hear. 

 

2/7/09 

From DT Suzuki

 

so clearly spoken a koan

from the Zen soaked tongue

 

to become

not the poet, but the poem

 

to become

Naumamidabutsu 

 


2/8/09

 

Sitting in the quiet chill of morning, remembering waking

in the drift of horizonless and distant calling held close,

the gentle start and ease of recollection murmuring recognition

and the smiling spread of gladness.

 

Namuamidabutsu

 

 

2/9/09 

San Diego, Hotel Row

 

It rains big here. Scowling tumblers unfold

splashing tropic drops against cement walkways

strung in sporadic sections off the portage road along side the hissing stream

of headlights. I celebrate

these stretches of safety from passing morning traffic,

looking to the clouds as the rains ease a bit.

Sweat trickles and a distant stoplight blinks

suggestions of the mid-point of my walk,

a time to return

to my temporary home,

cloud hidden blue at my back. 

 

** 

 

Breezes play,

trees rush cold through clear skies,

the full, slow falling moon,

a certain signal of new things already come.

 

 

2/12/09 

Awakening at dawn

 

hearing more deeply the voice

that speaks of its own calling being heard,

resonant of praise and response, of the shift and pull

of the softened tears of the opened and settled heart.

 

 

2/13/09 

Counting one’s blessings suggests something missing…

 

And complete, a week smooth through mornings away

to jagged evenings soothed over time to rounded returns

to beginnings never really left behind.

 

 

2/20/09 

San Luis Obispo

 

And how in time

through unfamiliar windows

framed inclinations where once was flow

find trees on line on hills

once open and free 

 

**

 

The mystery continues its quiet way,

wintered hills soaked green under a clearing sky

and the last receding drifts brightened white

 

 

2/23/09 

Something Matthew said…

 

suggests I’ve been looking in all the wrong places,

thinking all the while I’ve been right

about the light, seeing now

I have not seen even a single thing

quite right

 

no ideas but in things, say the poets;

no light but for things, so shining

 

yes, light is un-seeable, except

in the myriad things, which as such

so reveal us to ourselves, so shown

 

mutually luminous within imagination unbound without horizons,

spontaneous release in unlimited, unending possibility 

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