Friend to Friend

Arrogance—yours or mine no difference—

always misguided, rarely instructive of anything

other than itself, and often simply meanness

cloaked in good intentions,

like building character, in someone else.

Though at the lake that day, it clouded

crystalline waters so, what might have been

rebuke, instead glowed with the clarity

of genuine kindness, a flash amongst shadows,

not so much unexpected, as from one unfamiliar,

now known from the inside, out—a gift.

**

We cannot know for certain,

but the effort, beyond all reason,

the effort so fruitless reveals nonetheless

continuous, even uncalled for delight

and richness—reason enough then,

reason enough.

**

Take your teacher by the throat

and listen—it’s the gurgle

that’s most important.

**

We think

as we live, the promises

we make ourselves, vows,

intentions, grand plans, sweeping vistas,

like so many heart-felt leaves blown

to tremor, even before their saying is done—

bud to spread to color to mulch,

all returned to the earth sustained

and richened within the blanket embrace

of the myriad workings of the sun in its sky.

**

Place specific, local,

as in heart beat—how the universe conspires

continuations of each and all throughout their time,

questions of purpose, intention, of direction,

value added, or allowed, all implode

right here—seamless, seem-less wholeness,

each complete in place and time, rightful roles

forever fulfilled—inevitable—amen.

**

They say, just before death arrives, life

sometimes surges, energies push the furthest

reach, new horizons replace the old, space awakens,

shadows fall, imagination stretches to follow the light

to the other side...

**

In the steadied silence of a Sunday morning

begun before the promise of a spoken sun, the roses

on the altar slump, and the two of them, cloaked in clouds

of circling smoke of incense burned to dust,

take their turn to cry—for Buddhas forever gone

and for those about to come.

**

The way it is

There are times when, despite myself, I raise my voice,

when the thrust of my heart pushes through the words and past,

leaves them limp on the empty air, only to fall

to the floor, ill-spent.

And I know, it’s the breath

that words ride that makes them all they are

and its absence that undoes them.

I know.

**

On trust and praise

It’s the urge to engage through syllable and sound

the shadowy horizons of awareness

not simply our own.

It’s the desire to use all that we have

and all that we cannot hold, to articulate the wish

that we cannot speak.

It’s the depths of our need, though not so clearly seen,

to affirm the connections, to return as community,

as is already given.

**

Thresholds of sorts, arise

as we identify what is no longer essential.

Letting that go, of itself lightens

the next step and wherever it may lead.

**

As the chest rises and falls

almost imperceptibly, we conceive

the body alive with the flow of breath—

Buddha’s Name as utterance

makes real the potency of language

as a vehicle of awakening…

NamuAmidaButsu

**

The desire to make something happen

will make

something happen—while all the while,

the world

inevitably delivers

the inevitable, 

making us wonder,

perhaps,

which end of the effort

we’re really on.

**

The ancients speak

of clear and certain vision

amidst that most certain ambiguity

that is the foundational reality of our humanity.

How to live unruffled in a ruffled universe?

Allow each answer its flutter

before letting go…

**

Morning fog rolls in over the ocean

that lies west of here,

shoulders inland hills,

then tips and pours toward the bay,

leading puffs tinted pink.

Notes to myself--August 2013

Notes to myself—August 2013

To say “forty years” now is no stretch, saying Buddha’s Name, inside and out, steadily sporadically, at times spontaneously, one way or the other all these years, as so this morning along empty streets, nembutsu readily rides each breath through to release, leads place specific into this body-moment that leads to the unknown next, all held and all moved, single breath on single breath carrying living voice homeward.

My Dad used to speak of the “second wind” that long-distance runners experience, when body overtakes will and running turns into a kind of riding, a place of effortless confidence in something other—today it feels like that might feel, in it for the duration, never alone, somehow easy.

**

I’m American in the sense that I have no definitive link to any soil other than this, no family memory of any “mother land” outside North America. Whence then, the powerful influence of nembutsu ?

**

Reading selections from Albert Saijo’s, Outspeaks to the poetry workshop at the jail last week, the men loved the power and simplicity of his work.

Some have said of Saijo, an American original by my way of thinking, that he always looked both ways, then went straight ahead—by “both” they must have meant inside and out.

Saijo went from the camps into WW II, from the war back into his country. He traveled it. He chewed peyote, as I recall, sat Zen and fasted. In later years, he lived on the edge of a volcano (so as not to take up too much room). And although he eschewed literary recognition, he was a writer by vocation—all caps and dashes, no other punctuation. In  his own words, he wanted to be a “field preacher,” in the way of John Muir’s father.

And it works. I mean, I can only imagine a field preacher, but Saijo’s words are anything but indecisive—he was a slight man, small of stature and photos suggest, quiet. But his words, the thinking and passion that pushes them, are large and clear—no equivocation here—he knew where he was headed, and that’s where he went.

Look out, look in—then keep going. Kind of like a life of nembutsu.

**

Once a motel, the b&b sits off the main road below grade, under trees, adjacent wide spread ranch-like work buildings. Plentiful green and blue, a pleasant place, where water running through the walls signals the neighbors showering, and each closed door resonates through several units either side. But it’s quiet. And a slight adjustment to the vertical blinds on the sliding door, lights the room with morning, lets the ordered shades of beige pateo stones just outside extend a sense of comfort and calm, both sides across the sill.

I remember a journal entry by Cid Corman, ex-pat American poet living in Japan in the 1960’s, capturing the moments of an entire day as he sat overlooking the garden space outside his kitchen. He observed, and he wrote his life, the day unfolding in shifting tones of light.

And comments by William Stafford, on the way it is for him in writing. Not writing poems, but writing, the active engagement of giving oneself over to the process, poem or prose.

The difference between the two for Stafford is a matter of signals; neither content, nor form, so much as certain signals from writer to reader that a poem is underway; the lack of such, signaling prose—grammar, syntax, line length.

And for Stafford, the poem is not just about signals sent by the poet, but certain signals the poet receives and transcribes—a poem then is not merely personal statement or  personal expression; at its best a poem speaks to, speaks of, source rather than sender.

This subtle shift demands of the writer certain careful but easy handed attentiveness to his or her own intentions in order to determine whether the nature of engagement is prose or poetry, or both, and to send it out as best they can, as such.

The ambiguity here rightly defines the writing way Stafford enjoyed, as a humble one.

**

Shinran, prolific writer, unwavering in the certainty of the source of his liberation, at age 86, cites Honen: “ ‘Other Power means that no working is true working.’ ‘Working’ is the calculating heart and mind of each practicer. As long as one possesses a calculating mind, one endeavors in self-power. You must understand fully the working of self-power.”

Thoreau: “Good writing as well as good acting will be obedience to conscience. There must not be a particle of will or whim mixed with it. If we can listen, we shall hear. By reverently listening to the inner voice, we may reinstate ourselves on the pinnacle of humanity.” 1-26-1841 And: “We are constantly invited to be what we are, as something worthy, and noble. I never waited but for myself to come around; none ever detained me, but I lagged or tagged after myself.” 2-3-1841

**

Awareness, inner and outer, careful listening, learning and consideration. Appreciation for all received; for the continued receiving, wonder and praise. And the personal determination to attend the quietude required to continue this way of humility and gratitude.

Borderless, boundless, all and ever-inclusive.

Every question, any question, indicative of too much self--Namuamidabutsu. 

Heart Beats

The Heartbeat Sutra—for Sandino,

                                                  July 2013

I’ve heard it said, Grandson, that Buddha once said,

as he sat at sun’s rising, that heartbeats transmute

and all else follows—and in that gathering

of waiting leaves, of night let go, Buddha paused

to watch the words and all they were

return to the wonder of beginnings,

then turned his hand to raise a flower 

to meet the gaze of eyes been raised

to meet the bluing sky.

And so it is with you, in the ease and offering

of your infant sleep, the same

throb and promise.

As half-finished darkness holds silent the house

and all around us has paused,

the gentle curve of your open-cupped palm

reveals the assurance, the articulation

and the wonder of the beginnings

of our beating hearts.

**

           

Silence allows hearing,

stillness permits sight and touch

and the generous capacity to speak

enables navigation of the oceans of words

that define our humanity—left, right,

up, down, beginnings and ends—where

would we be without this ?

**

Turning in ever-tightening circles,

trying to site the source of the blinding cacophony,

I finally find its voice 

to be my own—and in this startling release,

relief and ease, begin to discern

its song…

**

flowers dance…

stems bend to winds

afloat with fogs

and dew

that gladly coat

the needled pines,

got drunk

on the breath of gods…

**

About attitude

Not so much to write poems,

but to write to see what comes—music or dissonance,

though not the same, are of the same mouth

and worthy of similar considerations.

Like time, the time to trace,

the time to witness the turns the words

will make to reach the page, line by line,

word by word, the world revealed, itself remade.

**

And of writing the day awake,

watching the light come in

where none had been,

unfolding across the sill

and on to the page poured over all over

with lighted words,

writing themselves awake

in the way of the coming day.

**

there’s been this voice

--all along I suppose,

         low-toned, unobtrusive, 

a most constant companion

         I’d taken to be my self,

and rightly so, I’d say—

but not the one I’d had in mind

**

Bodhisattvas everywhere

Slowly rising out

of the swirl of indecision,

of seemingly interminable

bait and switch,  to view

through the window

soft pink petals

atop stems some five feet tall 

and perfectly still, paused

as if to wait, to hear

my heart beat. 

This living...

This living…

June--July 2013

In the end, there is no answer,

only song—songs of momentums

of moments of resonance,

passing.

**

Awake

It’s not so much that “I thought”

but my thinking was such

that my living was so

that the world as it was

seemed a constant nuisance,

endlessly interrupting, forever

intervening in the story

in my mind.

Then one day, it got through.

And now I see the reverse is true.

**

Voice rides breath that ride winds that ride

seminal vibrations that sound—say the teachers:

follow just one thing, all the way through.

**

the depths of the working of breath

may only be discerned by mind made quiet

as it follows where it leads

**

Voice of course is breath embodied,

breath, the wind’s wish for a rounded earth,

whispered amongst myriads of limbs.

**

Poems in morning

And in morning’s quiet,

the house still, is only the chill

that drifts, that lets the window opened

feel the pass of night, feel the blessings

bared and at rest in the calm

of the heart at home.

**

the density…

of lived experience is such

that moments of clarity and calm

are like quiet clearings

stumbled upon in the wilds

—a bit of a stretch

to claim too much credit

**

Attending

After a long absence,

returning to work the garden

—it all comes back.

**

A scattering of haiku—for Fritz,

thinking of transition

Fallen leaves make the earth.

Ideas, seasoned by light,

cushion every step.

*

Mature growth, rich life:

always in proportion to

how well we let go.

*

Cautionary: trees

sometimes hold their leaves too long—

like us, still survive.

*

Age gifts pure practice,

ready or not. No cushions,

no bells. Only change.

*

Even seclusion

is in relation—how else

to breathe, but for leaves.

**

In the meadows of Lyell Canyon, Yosemite

July 2013

Promise floats in the air here, lean, immediate,

without presumption; and this high mountain dirt,

rich, abundant meadows spread wild with color

for any who will come this far.

Chanting ancient songs across these meadows looking out

at glacier-covered peaks, seems more than just appropriate, more

like an act of the wind, itself lifting voice above the stream,

through the grass, into the pines and along the rock-faced ridges

at rest at the gates of heaven.

Humility sprouts in all who plant their feet here, even for awhile,

unfolding on the breath before thought, as natural a grace

as the cloud-traced contours of distant glaciers,

wind-blown, light filled shadows

passing among myriads of hints

of healing and wholeness.

**

Mornings

he sits at the altar,

incense wafts,

breath settles, light falls,

wonder unfolds

to sustain

like the pulse of the out-stretched hand

that pulls forth the praise that follows the prayer

that opens the heart,

that gentle persistence, the softest scratch

that pulls each page, as it pulls each breath,

to the fullness of its turning.

**

July 4^th

The Big Dipper,

large and low in the North.

Here in the South, we too get up

in the dark, to pee.

More with less...

More with less—poems

from May 2013

There was once a man who wrote

each day, pen to page to swirl and to scratch,

to press into meaning the meandering lines,

to trace the tracks along the shore

or traceless futures of untellable trails

that lift into the sky.

And some mornings of summer’s longer days

when dappled sun light reached to touch the hand

as it touched the pen that touched the page,

he’d pause, as always pleased to bow his head,

then again begin to move the pen.

**

It’s that we love, that

we love, that moves us most.

**

Dimpled to opaque,

the colored sheet of cultured glass

hung from the bamboo trellis,

sways with the weight

of captured sun beams.

**

To Jonathan and Victoria

Phrase was the term she used,

the recurring theme in the piece he played,

not passage, nor line, more the rhythmic murmur,

the sounded pulse insistent of ought but itself,

self-contained, readily moved where best received,

but best understood in the gathered hush

of pass and return,

over and again.

**

To wake in darkness before stirring birds

to find winds finally quiet,

fog but broken mist in chilled air

as the first of the sun

lights into the clearing skies

and yet to walk almost blind

with churning argument—it is this then,

it is this, is it not, that condition called human.

**

Like those tall pink blossoms in the garden

jostle and sway, thoughts too speak

of what’s being said.

**

Call it meditation

if you will, if you must

call it something,

but know the quiet mind

is itself already

the work.

**

The ancient masters do not quibble—joy

is real, as is travail; life is rife with both.

Skillful negotiation is key,

compassion its natural associate.

**

Brief auto-biography

Having come to know, this alone leads.

Not hope nor fear, not past nor future,

but this now, this sounded song,

this trail and curve of the breaking wave,

the spread and swell, the articulate turn

of each and every word.

**

Sandino David

In the park at the top of Fruitvale

with the grandson asleep,

each at his age in grass in sun

and all that has occurred

and is done—breezes rush,

leaves tremble, grasses crease at our feet,

and the sky that whispers its mark

on this time in this place as right.

**

The ripple speaks

of current

that moves it

to speak of

its movement—

thus, the stream.

**

to Irma

colored glass—filtered light—glinting

silver—shifting shapes—passing

eyes delight…

Spring poems

April and May 2013

Watching the inmates

The open page takes

everyone, just as they are.

Heads bow. Words begin.

**

By example—a haiku with commentary

Like leaves pulled by winds

hold tight to branched extensions

of roots holding firm.

Even before our fingers form, culture

begins to show us how—but different grips

are possible--some even letting go.

**

Wonder:  heart freed of thinking.

Calculation stretched to snapped

does not prevent fulsome release

for those who’ve come to see

the more

that makes it

what it is.

**

Dove calls alone

in early light.

Clocks pulse

the empty kitchen.

Reflection gifts

ever-embracing space

and silence.

**

Somehow the first of May has come and gone

a mark on a calendar unremembered 

much like myriad single breaths thoughtlessly taken

then given away that pass nonetheless

through traceless minutes’ days—but for that

slight attentive pause, just there passed.

**

Days stretch in summer,

lighted lingering coming

slowly to night stars.

**

Chanting Buddha’s name

Unfathomably vast a matrix of realms of truths

carries our each and every muttering—resonant thereof.

**

Coastal grasslands, swelled prairie bluffs,

tales of ancient oceans outlasted.

**

Saint Francis, oh, Saint Francis,

how many, many times your

image has moved me.

Your saintly qualities though,

they’re human,

aren’t they.

**

It took some time

to see the time

to preach

is done—so let

the poems come.

**

While some words say,

         poems do,

participate, engage.

Written or read,

        spoken or heard,

poems move…

**

What part of nothing more to do isn’t clear? Snakes,

over time, leave their skin behind. The screen-door

out to the back porch, it slams every time—mornings,

over coffee, I write; evenings burn incense and chant.

**

You

swoop in

like a boardwalk gull

to snatch up guarded bits

of joy…

then lift off

in dust and tufts

of disregard

for those

who would but share,

not swallow.

Sad.

So, so sad.

**

Altar incense burns

a barely visible thread

of tenuous tie

to tradition

nearly faceless

save the solidity of voice

and so we mutter and chant

and sing affirmations of foundations

of living breath.

**

Soft pink streaks sky clearing clouds to blue.

Garden flowers toll stillness.

**

No one to wake

at this hour,

the barking dog

celebrates

with everyone

within ear-shot;

even passing cars slow 

to hear

and not break

this living stream

rarely heard

as music.

Wind blown

Wind blown…March into April

Low fog lifts, day light

descends, moist leavings tracing

each step into spring.

**

Big Dipper—floats in

dark skies, turns, tilts, never fails

to point the way home.

**

Promised fog arrives,

blanket-shadows morning light.

But for one west-placed window,

ablaze with a different dream.

**

Breath as sound…

suggestions of elegance, to be sure,

but the old masters took note

of a certain radiance—visceral, joyous.

**

What we offer over

in the world

is the whole of our living,

every time—our mistake

is thinking

it’s not.

**

The poet strives

to make words say

as much as he would

have them say

and trusts 

that desire they ride

that makes them say

all the more.

**

what winds of circumstance

pull from our hands,

frees us

**

Glow burn—a sudden rush of rightness

splays light through dark

disappeared—forgetting words

that would write this right,

I draw these instead.

**

Studies in light ask

for light-handed inquiry.

**

Watching the inmates…

the open page takes

everyone, just as they are.

Heads bow, words begin.

**

The body drags itself

out of sleep these days, full

with windswept pollens.

Miniscule puffs of life

circulate, settle and collect—like

the weight of age.

**

Time bends—deep purple

strokes in the wisteria,

darker than before.

**

April 8^th and already

multiple pages,

meanderings of a mind

set free at the tip of a pen

to simply speak—simply

to speak simply, of itself enough.

**

April 13^th

The celebration

The day opens on tides of quiet light

and shadowless blue—hushed bird calls

echo blessings already underway.

*

For Erin and Edwin

The range of light

attributable

to laughter,

to smiled embrace, 

close-knit warmth,

to the firm press of lips

and casual words of tenderness

spoken in witness

of the tenuous reach of darkness

as eyes meet in the glow of love.

**

To  Leslie—afterthoughts

To think—this spontaneous

ingenuity so troublesome

holds unopened avenues

of collective salvation,

one whole one at a time.

*

Sincerity—effort

to make inside meet out.

*

Faith—trusting sincerity,

wherever we find it.

*

Amen…

for even just one voice

among the many varied turnings

of that light that outshines the sun

just so.