Dinky Lakes

Dinky Lakes Wilderness,

Sierra National Forest   Mid-August 2014

Late, in the warmth of the bag,

a thin volume of poems

in high country

—eyes still wide,

abandoning the words

of the ancients,

I turn to my back

to return the gaze

of the waiting

sea of stars…

**

John Muir calls the Sierra, the “range of light,” and so it seems. At 1:00 AM,

the Big Dipper spills southward, luminous dusts of the Milky Way scour the dark

and the moon casts light through the quiet pines, just enough for me to rise and pee.

          Unpremeditated…

          take again the given winds

          that fold the syllabled words

         

          to where the earth and the sky

          and water and fire 

         

          come to speak and to mean…

               “Deep in the woods, unknown to the world,

               A bright moon comes and shines on me.”

                            

                                     from Wang Wei’s (?701-761),  “Bamboo District’s Lodge”

**

Directions to the cabin

at Boulder Creek    August 24, 2014

Leave Highway #9 to the right,

on Prospect:

climb the canyon’s walls

to where the reach of trees circles

a cache of sky so clean

Heaven need only let go

to find its way.

Where Heaven and Earth meet.

That’s it.

**

Scatterings

Be receptive.

We are never not receiving.

It is never not reciprocal.

That's all.

**

8/29

I can tell you only of my experience and even that is suspect. A dream

within a dream, Dogen said—and our contemporary, Ko Un, living openly

in his native Korea, cautions: inclinations

toward the ‘much more’ that lies beyond imagination, that too:

a dream known as ‘greed.’

**

9/18

At 5 A.M. the streets are still, empty but for lamp-lit shadows

that seem to accept, without protest, every soundless passing, low-looking clouds

the only ones to leave a trace.

**

10/4

In a place with tools that are used,

worked for the fun, for the joy,

where order is not overly so.

A space of movement, sweat and smiles,

of lingering scents of incense and bells,

the hum of human lungs

and that silence that surrounds

the settled heart.

**

9/29

to Robert Lax then

and to the solitary work

of this solitary mystic poet

of the Isle of Patmos,

unselfconscious model

of charity and grace, received

and the nature of play as prayer

that comes of that.

The work is ourselves,

the dance our living with others

and the foundation the music

that makes it all so.

**

10/5

Life-death has its own reason.

May today and all that it is

bring us closer, clearer…