New Poems 2011

Face to Face

There are certain silences, distinct.

The weighted air of descending fog

that floats luminous shadows under street lamps,

that covers empty sidewalks

like loneliness resolved, that warms

the singular sound of our own footsteps.

And that most intimate relation, most likely

ignored relation, where relation is

everything: death--the only face the mirror ever projects,

the push of reflection, the pull of creation, companion

ever-present,

death breathes the collective and the singular,

the vital sigh we call life,

extended to every, to each, to the fullest.

Our fears are unfounded, the whole is not fractured

but seen piecemeal, a pulsing relation

merely presumed severed. A rightly sensed presence

in the silence of a fully open gate.

1/29

**

Doves in the acacia

do not relent—darkness leaves,

light slips in, all at the call

of waiting wings.

1/21

**

Owl Canyon Lament

Noon and the hills are still in shadow,

season’s moistures quietly working

grounded sprouts skyward, to green.

The gurgling creek too, sustains,

but barely heard, under the heartfelt labors

of a distant woodpecker.

Were I half as attentive to the human hearts

all around, all at work,

what different face might all the world

then show?

1/20

**

That glow in the west, the sun,

in the same spot the falling moon

illumined morning’s breaking clouds.

**

thoughts of other lives surface

periodically; but then

I’ve not yet learned to live one

**

Careful listening suggests

nothing to fear,

no one to be saved.

**

For the grand daughters,

Kawayan

Eyes a’flame with allergies,

tears flow, the nose runs

and she sings

her way through dinner.

Zarah

The warmth of the past few days

prompts the fruit tree to small white blossoms

and the grand daughter to shed her clothes.

Neither knows it’s still winter.

This young girl walks an earth

that always meets her feet. Eyes like light

in love, she seldom cries,

is never alone.

**

As dark settles, the moon turns its bottom just so

and lights the whole

night sky.

**

“Hard is it to be born into human life,

now we are living it.”

From the Shin Buddhist liturgy.

Report from the poets:

Buddha’s wish, as best I can tell--that we learn

to live fully, completely, and die

without doubt.

The American poet, ex-pat in Japan some forty plus years,

Cid Corman wrote, he had no need for belief because

he had no doubt.

This is not ego-speak but lack of ego speaking

from thoroughgoing trust in the movements of moments

as given, as fulsome, as complete.

“No doubt” leaves us right where we stand--Corman continues,

the critical issue, not who you are but THAT you are. Beginning

with this reveals the rest.

Every event reveals the fully possible, writes fellow ex-pat

poet Edith Shiffert, the critical question

--Can I see well enough from where I am

to step carefully over my own time

to trust in “my own” life-death

in the world’s time?

*Cid Corman, from letters to Louise Landes Levi, 1996 and ‘98

**from Shiffert’s poem, “Looking”

Speaking peace

New Year’s Wishes 2010-2011

Friends and family, your continuing love for the world is my inspiration.

Here’s to doing just a little bit more, together, a little bit better in the days ahead.

Speaking peace at year’s end

Mists of incense thin

in the silence of a single lamp.

Outside, barely discernable

from here, drips

recall the night rains, street gutters rush

to overflow and underground basins gurgle

with abundance—real-time sutras

spoken on the native tongue of peace,

broken by a single pane of glass.

Stitches of sounds, of disquieting voices,

somehow from somewhere

out there.

**

And yet, and yes, praise is due. And when offered

there is no end to possibilities

yet to be conceived…

…where despite

all we have done wrong

the golden light of October

falls through the turning leaves.

from Wendell Berry's "Sabbaths IX"

Musings 2010

Winter Solstice

All but alone

in the wintered sky,

all but alone, the fulsome moon

breathes—wandering sisters,

lingering dreams.

**

Days with names

Days with names pass so easily

as to be completely missed, brief swirls in streams

marked and forgotten in an inhale.

Some carrying implications true enough for our living,

a loose curve or a sharp one, rapids,

long smooth stretches of quiet—you know

Mondays are not Wednesdays, nor are they Thursday;

Saturdays and Sundays, a category all their own.

But as we’ve seen, as all has changed,

the arcs and turns of time have their own way.

The days I have in mind have real names,

taken of themselves--unforgettable.

Like that day in Jersey, in fall

we buried my dad--that crisp sky, the distant blue

touch of sun. The snow outside the window

the evening my mother left.

And the morning in the darkened hospital hallway,

the nurse extending to me our first born.

And that day in Hawaii, soon after we met you wore

that loose fitting shift, green pin stripes on white.

That day. And so many more.

**

Children’s voices,

up from the neighbor’s yard.

Twilight.

**

As the sun drops behind the mountain,

shadows race with twilight

to see which will carry longest

playing children’s voices.

**

prayer and praise

--spontaneous breath-play

**

I know nothing of the formal structure of psalms,

but believe I might tell them by their music,

the same, if not mistaken, that flowers sing to sun rise

on the quickened breath of earth’s return to light.

**

So why not just ride

the light-glittering stream

as what it so easily carries?

**

The point is joy

and joy deliverance

and the song understood

in the singing…

**

Though the chill has eased,

the furnace wakes at daybreak

to soft tapping rains.

**

so quiet the earth

in hours dark leaves

light returns so seamless

notes can neither touch

nor tell, so traceless

the earth in its way

and yet, and still

it is here

we have our place

**

Checking my own pulse

—how redundant!

**

Jane Imamura

Her words of the camps,

laced with love, pain strung through

with love of Buddha’s love,

page by page, pulse by pulse

in pulse.

Namuamidabutsu

**

The Wife

Neither difficult, nor easy, she said,

“it’s the way we live.”

**

Considering the unconsidered

The body knows, always knows and does its all

without prompt, within conditions given

Sending signals of every encounter, ever,

to all concerned

The body knows, as does earth and air and all else

--the restless foot reaching

Meets waiting earth’s harmonies heard

by everyone, then handed to habit

As so for air and lungs, heart and blood,

light and the eyes and the ears and all that whispers

All this, the stuff and sustenance of the mind

that finds itself there

All this work, all this play

for who?

**

Routine cataract surgery and a detached retina

How smug I was

in those corporate years,

so clear the entitled sense

of the young.

But for the ancients, far senior

to this one, clouds need only be illumined,

not removed, and the real fool

revealed here, not there.

This soundless morning

This soundless morning,

mid-month, November’s

clear-bright days

call the furnace to life,

wood-smoke whiffs to the sky,

and as our bodies adjust

to the change of clocks,

birds wake and fly

with the light

—this soundless morning.

**

in service of song…

chill crinkles the morning air

like water speaking of ice

a pitch beyond the reach of sound

yet not of that of heart-mind

and so we who are called to song

are turned as such

in the posture of service

**

For Eiko

Let’s chant, she says,

then go home.

We do.

**

Certain prayers remembered

Books hold to the shelves, the shelves

in place with the weight of what’s held—no ideas

but in things, it’s been said, as fingers

trace the page aside the words inscribed,

fleeting moments of sound-meaning, so concrete

as to belie both flash and forgetfulness,

always returning

with light.

Every morning, awakening,

things returning the lighted day, lighting the day

anew, the world made new,

returning reawakened.

He thanks this light, his life, the poet, with words,

the weight of the passing now,

whispers on the breath of gladness,

wrinkles about the eyes.

**

Approaching Buckeye Canyon…

San Bruno Mountain’s

crows, sun-lit pines,

hawks circle shaded slopes

of crystal-toothed sandstone

opened wide

with ancient song...

**

sparrows

in shadowed branches

against the blue

**

Only Buddha remembers

Sitting in fading light,

recollections like so many leaves.

Once forgotten seasons

do not return, but for Mind.

My teachers

having given everything,

even permission to neglect

the little I’ve held.

And the hours pass.

**

First companion, best friend.

Without her purposefulness,

what might be said

of this life?

**

At play in fields of light and shadow,

the acacia receives and reveals

the manifold mysteries of language,

the play of the silence and sound

of the human heart-mind.

Has Fall Arrived?

After the rain,

the patter

of children’s voices

**

I revise more now than before,

on the spot and after the fact

adjustments, little ones

keep things aright

on course

as best as I can

for now.

**

Across open pastures

above bluffs

crashing breakers

gulls

wind

**

In the rented cottage

the turned page crinkles

echoes of itself

the refrigerator hums

the room

dull pencils rub

words

and a settled heart

keeps prefect

time

**

the writing,

replete with lessons

for the poet

**

out of the dark

a train

a history

**

Words are the stuff of human horizons

and like all else can be used

as common currency

or to build.

It’s not a matter of which ones,

but how we meet them

--shallow currents carry traces

of the deeper--

it’s all in the way we hear.

**

Misguided, we wonder what to do,

yet how to be

suggests the peace we seek.

**

late summer

open widow

childhood memories

**

Scratching at the window,

a Jay in the flowerbox—

up and gone!

**

Mappo: a Buddhist term, suggestive of a time when gifts

that sustain are barely recognized.

Poetically, it might point to the voice that can only hear itself

and never once considers

from where its words, or its capacity for speech, come.

Street lamps cast shadows

in early morning, throughout

evening time, and late

into the night—is there need

at all for moon light?

Summer poems

For Paul—

Hiking the Oakland hills

behind the grown son

--strong back and shoulders

the smell of dust

the high reach of redwoods

and the slow turn of greying skies--

breathing together

evening’s muted silence

**

As if the thread…

The end of August, September,

summer’s last burn to autumn

and the long reach to winter sleep

before spring dreams.

It’s the writing, the gathering of words

poems offer,

the sorting, shifting and listening,

the breathing and the watching

for that certain readiness and release,

as if poems were the thread…

**

Some things, are just left.

The rest, no matter the weight,

never a burden.

**

To be here, with this

in the hours before day break,

star light falling

in northern skies

in the stillness of meadows

under towering peaks

colored with night

in the mystery

of disappearing stars,

the returning lake

carrying sky-lit mountains

and silently feeding ducks,

the myriad questions

tracing the unseeable working

rising the darkened depths

to the surface

to be taken whole and relished.

**

Though the window might be better cleaned,

the the light moves smoothly down the morning sky

to the ridge tops

and across the many-housed slopes,

quietly, clearly,

announcing its return.

**

9/20/2010 and counting down,

or is it up?

With a birthday on the near horizon

taking me closer yet… to zero,

what can numbers really tell and about what end

can any direction ever advise?

But the poem, yes, maybe only the poem speaks

to how I am now

with the world at large.

Namuamidabutsu

**

In our eyes, the moon

Silver slivered light in the blackened sky,

premonition of certainty

Rising tides

within our very own hearts

**

So certain

the summer scents,

thick on morning air,

the mist hovering distant bay waters,

the salmon skies.

So certain, this urge

to make it somehow more

pales

in the face

of the all-embracing silence

of the open page--

so certain a measure

of the true pitch of every voice,

I cannot but bow.

Notes from North Yosemite

Along the trail to Laurel Lake

Resting,

with the back pack

leaned against a tree

in a shadowed stand of pines

beside a mountain meadow

filled with wild flowers

and fern.

We’ve bitten off a real challenge this time.

Wind rushes the needled limbs

and looses a dead cone that falls

from a lifeless top

to a thud

and burst of sun-lit dust

that glows

in its slow return

to the earth.

Between here and there

an orange and black butterfly

dances

across the trail.

*

Below Vernon Lake

We camp just off Falls Creek

in a slight semi-circle of small ponderosa pines

and a single western juniper, surrounded by miles

of scrape and moraine

--high sierra granite--

all of us held to this rock

by the same pull, each of us

giving all we have

to be here.

The steep ascent

and ten rugged miles

keeps the lake’s numbers of visitors low

but this trail-less stretch of stream demands more

and sees few beyond its long-time residents

--bear, rattler, rainbow trout.

Followed down stream,

its cuts and crevices, falls and bowls, gorges and pools,

the work of hundreds of years, thousands,

all still underway.

There’s intimacy here,

borne by the water, the light and the air,

a shared bond with the granite

that carries a message of passage,

of acceptance through participation

in a larger work

that reveals

a glistening streak of grace

in responsibility,

that speaks not of obligation,

but of responsiveness

and of care.

*

On any mountain

at some point,

no matter the company,

it all comes down to you

on the mountain,

on its terms.

Oh, I do not climb, just walk,

but even then, over and again, I arrive at that place

of listening--me listening

to my response

to the mountain’s entreaty--

without words,

through an inconceivable, yet somehow completely received

multitude of signals,

a totality of unmistakable, and yes, unavoidable

presence

that both overwhelms and embraces,

completely diminishes

and simultaneously offers

horizon-less possibilities

of unspeakable

beauty.

To respond repeatedly to the repeated call, these,

the movements of love,

where those who demur

may clearly articulate their many doubts,

but those of us who respond, cannot

adequately explain, except,

perhaps to point.