It’s hard to tell for sure if winter’s gone,
but spring has indeed begun to arrive.
Buds and leaves push, light lays soft
and long, and that distinct morning chill
simply is not. Whatever the vows
and promises, I’ve long forgotten.
Whatever this is, is more than enough.
**
With the coming dark,
we pull the bamboo blinds
that veil the scattered lights
that spread the blackened hills
that close, close around
in circled glitter, like close-kin.
**
Swimming along the trail this morning,
through waves and streams
of barely perceptible puffs
of seed-stuff
traversing currents of air
it’s hard to tell are even there,
wondering, how,
in the face of all of this,
how I can even begin to think
I can know how I have come to be.
**
The bright round moon hangs
well above its darkened horizon,
looks out over our heads, past the ridge
that protects our back, past the crests
beyond the bay, beyond which
the sun will come
to greet its silvered sheen.
**
This shifting out from winter torpor
doesn’t have the voluminous feel of unfolding.
It seeps, slowly, somewhat like a timid child,
who misses nothing, trusts less, and so waits
some small signal of womb-like warmth.
**
“The dharma of poetry is hard
for heaven to keep secret;
All you do is add your own labor.”
—Yang Wan-li
Just before light begins to arrive,
high clouds’ suggestions of rain
seem too reticent to take serious,
air too weightless to have voice,
so large wet drops are a real surprise,
singular and scattered at first, then
an hour or more steady fall.
Though I can’t see sky now, clear light
and a neighbor’s power-saw, tell me
the rain has had its say.
And I, for one, am glad
to have been around
to hear.
**
—San Bruno Mountain
Our place is on the eastern rise of a sheltered valley,
where our looking west at the ridge, some three miles
long or so, wrongly suggests it runs north-south,
when an arial view would show it more than less lays
east to west.
Further back, from some orbit perhaps, individual states
would show neither red, nor blue; and from the moon,
where human negotiation is moot, none of this
is likely to be noticed at all.
But for us, whether rightly or wrongly understood,
the mountain maintains a presence in our lives here,
a steady understatement of certainty
that speaks as clear and as sure
as do the tides.
**
Pretty much everyday,
I sit in the same chair, looking out
the same window, at the same
framed fence and plant-life.
How is it then, that the words
winding their way day-to-day
across so many same
blue lines
seem so utterly determined
to so consistently see
so many things
so differently ?
**
—Sheltering in place
Buddha followers take refuge
in the so-called three treasures of truth,
an often repeated abstraction
of the very concrete practice
of accepting the reflection the teachings
offer, slowing enough
to be, here-alive, in the moments
and circumstance now at hand.
Poets, I believe, writers, who write
for the finding there, take shelter
in the words’ passing offerings, at their best
a pure reciprocity
understood as such: syllabled breath,
pulse marks of living place and time.
The governor’s order to shelter,
a helpful reminder of “we.”
Place and circumstance shared,
vulnerabilities and strengths honored.
**
—After Robert Lax
A quiet turn through the street-run hills,
another morning of rain-wet promise—
winter’s words, the silent house,
rustled pages, pen’s scratch
and the hallowed voice
of the old poet hermit
resonant with whispers
of humility.
**
Vernal: spring, fresh, new
Later today,
our world will tilt
from the equinox
more toward the sun,
a celestial bow
into the sun-cast light
of extended days
once again.
Having cause to pause,
may we see better
which way to go.
**
**
—“If you are yourself at peace, then there is
at least some peace in the world…share your peace….”
—Thomas Merton
