Dreams of being my teachers
have followed me most
of my adult life.
More recently, I seem to have
lost them—must have taken
a different turn.
**
The calendar says winter. Rains return
in the night for the last of the leaves,
each called by its earth name.
**
In the street in the dark in the rain,
storm drains warn everyone
who passes.
**
The quiet required of authentic attention
comes with it.
**
It’s pretty much dry
under the pine behind the school.
But I wouldn’t take the rain gear off
or tell the wind if I did.
**
Before the altar, nonsense syllables
sound truer—incense and fallen petals,
one for every direction.
**
Street lights hold intersections
ready throughout the night,
but stars have their own way,
scattered puddles
in darkened stretches
of roadways,
headed most anywhere.
**
Nothing ever happens more than once.
Let’s leave it where it falls.
**
Can’t fix the top of the chest;
but the cedar center breathes
just the same.
**
The subject is words,
those things things
bump into being…
some see a world
where no thing bumps
any other—things become
together, drift away, as they
do, words too, so,
don’t know
then, what more
might be said
about that.
**
The lamp with the shade
reflects windows
that allow lights outside
to come in.
**
it occurs to me now
how we know this silence
of which we speak—we hear it…
**
life-death, for certain includes
the occasional resistant encounter,
like a skein of sheerest silk jostled and shaken
unrolls of itself to its fullest possible length,
there and then naturally its lightest
**
I met Ho Tai face to face
there in the garden
under the fig tree
where he sits on rocks
that hold the slope, and wondered,
as I spoke to him aloud,
what he’d think,
if he weren’t like a rock,
what he’d say
to a fool clearing leaves
from under tree, speaking
to a statue,
and concluded he’d likely do
as he does as a statue—raise his hands
to the sky, and laugh.
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