Soundless,
the slow
morning
lingers
outside
windows
open,
suggests
without
speaking
next moves
be held
soft, close,
gentle
fingers
stroking
lightly,
word-count
simple,
in two’s.
**
”If people
would just treat it
like a garden
(not like a problem
like a garden)
if they’d
work on it
lovingly
like a garden
pretty soon
it would bloom”
—Robert Lax
**
The blossoms of the buckeye
running the ditch along Old Quarry Road
are beginning already to wilt,
non-native blackberries just bulging green
and orange-yellow monkey flowers
overflowing the trail like a garden.
I can’t remember what day it is,
but morning takes me in
just the same.
**
Those whom I’ve come to trust
say nature, nature holds us,
along with all we’ll ever need,
our completeness, ground-zero,
a given.
And for me, of this, there’s ripples
at times, glitterings on the surface,
or sometimes wave-like, a risen surge
to surface and its air-light freedom,
cresting all that’s come before
to bubbles breaking open,
air back in to air,
like song.
**
I wonder if flowers are bothered
when winds bobble them?
**
Singing songs in my head about death,
when suddenly a bird streaks by
and catching my eye, pulls me outside,
out of my head, along with it,
where death’s keeping up,
as always it does,
is just one part
of the longer song.
**
Re-learning things you didn’t know you’d forgotten
is deeper than history, a quieter frame, thoughts
at rest among their roots, for nourishment, renewal.
Sunlight and shadows narrate moments without
haste or hesitation, judgement set aside for truth-
bared language of resilience, a flowing flowering
of realizations allowed, limbered steps finding
their own surface at their own pace—a peace
in itself, unique and as freely shared as air.
**
Things un-raveling
make perfect conditions
for re-weavings.
**
The mother junco
has not returned
to the empty nest
a few feet
from our front door.
Is that her mate there
on the wires overhead,
waiting quietly
in the dusk?
**
The breeze this morning
so slight only spider webs
signal reception. My offerings,
some stretches, a walk
and this scribbling, while watching
webs quiver.
**
—Sculpted living…
The south facing branches of the peach tree
are vibrant and fruit full—the rest brittled
and dead. Fresh-cut stretches of bamboo
laid among the branches and limbs, delineate
and extend living and once-lived contours.
Where pieces meet, bamboo lashing; where
the tree lends support, just that.
This tree and I, this indifferent
and ever-receptive sky,
still sharing.
**
—Coyote…
we watch each other over slopes
of summer-muted grasses,
beige to quiet white—
shadowed shimmers
of morning sun, windless,
I almost missed you there—
then like you, stilled and stood
to watch and wait, slopes of grasses,
summer-muted, at our feet
**
I read recently
that the old masters
buried their zen
in carefully scattered characters,
looking for songs of aesthetic expression,
rather than philosophy,
well-tended roots eschewing pruning,
beauty a truth speaking for itself.
**
In his poem, Everything’s Speaking, Peter Minter
says, “Each act of will is responsible to life…”
stunned, I am, by the depths of the masquerades,
the bowels of government, of the courts, the stench
of deception, disdain and disconnect, laid bare
with the gall to continue the game
—pieces, we, just pieces on the board, are played,
not intended to play—
I choose Peter’s way.
**
In Buddha’s dharma the point is
the learning, not the teaching.
The consummate student
is never done.
**
—7/1/22
new day, new fogs, in a new month,
and still splashing around—
a note from a friend, words of a teacher:
“Our own life has to be our message.”
And I would say it is so already, our lives,
your life is the message
everyone around receives, including you
if you’re lucky enough to notice
what your sending—meaning, mostly,
unedited first-drafts,
editing being as much a part of the message
as what was first intended, or
not intended,
as the case may be
—there’s little more to say
‘bout this
and no place other to go
than where we’re now at,
you know, kind of splashing around,
and the joy of all that…
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