Relationship true to the teacher never severs,
is never dormant nor forgotten;
even in sleep it rises, light-shown
shadows remembered.
**
“As a poet and contemplative” is the way the author speaks
of Merton, saying
Merton’s lived life was in essence the crux of his “dialogue”
with Eastern traditions,
the conversation of spirit he valued so; yet, says the author,
he neglected to formulate, didn’t bother to frame
“a systematic structure”
for this “intellectual and existential
spiritual journey,”
which to me means Merton’s natural inclinations
moved through him, moving him through
the world listening deeply—
structure-less, open, kind, caring.
**
The Ohlone peoples see Hummingbird
as the primary purveyor of unrestrained life-spirit,
unapologetically riding its own pointing desires
wherever led, no illusions of longevity;
each touch telling its own fullness,
each leveraged wing springing wide the next,
questions of self, or of other,
simply not keeping up.
**
—to David S.
After so many years of distracted attentions,
of inattentions, of demands for immediacy
I accuse so many others of,
I turn in your pages
slow as a dusted arc of trail that slants a canyon’s edge
to roll that open taking-in of silence’s quiet entry,
so sudden as to startle recognition of kin, of kinship
so certain as to pause every question before
any fumblings at the lips.
**
Injured hip, old hip, ligaments perhaps—all
likely yes—if not heat, maybe ice—and the wife
complains too, of some stubborn old man,
and I say what he says, that everyone’s stubborn
time to time—I mean, he said, look
at sunlight’s insistence
at the shade-covered windows.
**
Sun’s light unfolds through the window, over the desk,
down along the floor and climbs to quiet rest on the leg,
on the hand with the pen, on the papers there—
the warm-glow touch of knowing morning.
**
I’m here, so I speak, I write—they said,
and so say I—what is poetry, what the poem, if not
the gleam and recognition in the working of words
in tongues given, what we freely reap there.
**
Sunlight dapples the window.
Diamond shaped layers of dust-glow,
shadowed forms of trellis-caught light
that allow petals and leaves along the fence
venue enough, distance enough
to quiver under the strokes
of passing breezes.
Even the sound of a workman’s hammer-fall,
restrained.
**
The sun reaches in to play
with the white page, blue lines.
Shifting halos illumine whispered secrets,
the glow of softly held wrinkles
giving way before the advancing edge
of silencing shadow,
the surface face, crisp and sharp
delineations, hovering,
the almost indiscernible marks
of deeper inclinations
at work.
**
It occurred to me the other day
at the keyboard, at an email,
that I’d written really a letter,
an intimate telling to another
that I’d initially taken to have been prompted
by longing for connections somehow gone,
missing in the all-consuming isolation, of late,
of solitary heart beats,
only to recognize now,
it’s the resonant pull of shared strands
that allows the heart to allow the fingers
to speak.
I may well write for myself,
but sure and real telling is always told
to others, there hearing.
**
After all these years
and all the ways of knowing you,
the words still can’t catch up.
**
Fog lies along the ridge-line in layers
thick to thin, east to west, to disappear
behind slopes of grass and scrub—
wind-rushed limbs and wisps waving
in space held distant quiet
by smudge-discovered windows,
seemingly not there, yet somehow between,
yet still within reach
pulled close
through words.
**
—Where I go, when gone…
The first light to break free from beneath the east
stretches a sighed touch so fair
as to almost be breath making claim
by simple presence,
the slopes signaling response with a silent cough
of marbled clouds
just above their offering
of woven trails.
In the Sierra, these thousand-foot hills
wouldn’t merit measure,
but here at the edge of the bay,
are mountain,
freedom at the door, calling
anyone willing to wake,
to turn an ear,
to step.
**
**
—From Cid Corman
“With so much
personal
sorrow,
how take on
the world? Clear.
Bow, be-
side me. Must,
as we will,
share it.”
