1/12/09
Light
Neither day, nor night.
the moon glows sunlight
into star-swelled skies.
Light. Only light.
**
1/22/09
Mary Oliver
The effort
she could give, she said,
this giving of herself.
And so she did, a devotion
of patience and of will
and observation, of which
come the poems.
1/24/09
Writing the world
Rethinking, remembering
the marriage of intellect and experience
reordering, or is it ordering
the world in such a way as to see
anew, the silvered thread
that’s joy run through.
**
Taking refuge
It’s not technique,
nor the other things
the learned might bring,
but the coming itself that most counts,
the coming back and the deepening listening
coming of that.
1/25/09
Rereading Carruth,
looking more closely than before,
looking for the how
that is his, seeing sentences,
full sentences not prose,
but poems.
Unmistakably so,
but how so?
1/27/09
True Nembutsu
Resolve eased away,
unclenched and opened
within certainty and song.
Namuamidabutsu
**
Unexpected gratitude
In real friendship,
studded with acute and sustained observation,
a few scattered words
will sweep doubt with such sudden ease
only laughter’s left, standing naked
and unbruised in truth’s spot light.
1/29/09
Over time
I began to understand the universal
as not mine to apply
but something ringing resonant in others
for me to hear.
2/7/09
From DT Suzuki
so clearly spoken a koan
from the Zen soaked tongue
to become
not the poet, but the poem
to become
Naumamidabutsu
2/8/09
Sitting in the quiet chill of morning, remembering waking
in the drift of horizonless and distant calling held close,
the gentle start and ease of recollection murmuring recognition
and the smiling spread of gladness.
Namuamidabutsu
2/9/09
San Diego, Hotel Row
It rains big here. Scowling tumblers unfold
splashing tropic drops against cement walkways
strung in sporadic sections off the portage road along side the hissing stream
of headlights. I celebrate
these stretches of safety from passing morning traffic,
looking to the clouds as the rains ease a bit.
Sweat trickles and a distant stoplight blinks
suggestions of the mid-point of my walk,
a time to return
to my temporary home,
cloud hidden blue at my back.
**
Breezes play,
trees rush cold through clear skies,
the full, slow falling moon,
a certain signal of new things already come.
2/12/09
Awakening at dawn
hearing more deeply the voice
that speaks of its own calling being heard,
resonant of praise and response, of the shift and pull
of the softened tears of the opened and settled heart.
2/13/09
Counting one’s blessings suggests something missing…
And complete, a week smooth through mornings away
to jagged evenings soothed over time to rounded returns
to beginnings never really left behind.
2/20/09
San Luis Obispo
And how in time
through unfamiliar windows
framed inclinations where once was flow
find trees on line on hills
once open and free
**
The mystery continues its quiet way,
wintered hills soaked green under a clearing sky
and the last receding drifts brightened white
2/23/09
Something Matthew said…
suggests I’ve been looking in all the wrong places,
thinking all the while I’ve been right
about the light, seeing now
I have not seen even a single thing
quite right
no ideas but in things, say the poets;
no light but for things, so shining
yes, light is un-seeable, except
in the myriad things, which as such
so reveal us to ourselves, so shown
mutually luminous within imagination unbound without horizons,
spontaneous release in unlimited, unending possibility
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