After all is said and done

 

moon pulls darkness

           behind the ridge

                      —light arrives

**

—May Day Morning

Pulling the blinds

to let the light back in, the hills,

the green, the gathered fog,

canyon’s crease, pushes of blue

and scattered glints of window, 

pulling the blinds again

to let the music in.

**

Your fingers are cold. Listening 

for your breathing, cant’t tell

if you’re squeezing back.

At the fence on the street, fragrance 

lifts from the roses, 

a jay from the wire above.

**

the half-moon seems half the way

to the sky’s top half, that half below 

the horizon, not seeable from here

**

From purple centers, 

open-faced petals reach

the softest pink 

to the rounded whole

we know of flowers, 

bobbing morning’s chill.

We like to say they know no pain

or suffering, as we know,

but they do know change, 

and they age just the same.

**

co-creation

blurs lines between

to lines belayed,

blends two to we

**

Corman 

counted 

syllables,

each one,

because

each one counts,

each one

counting whole 

moments,

each one

critical

in the roll,

the sense,

the sounding

of the whole.

**

—Cid Corman, again

direct poems,

written for all

for their speaking

connecting us—

we are “of” this,

in the saying.

**

Without complaint, 

sunlight finds its place,

a’top the altar’s dust.

**

Wooden Buddha watches,

the quiet room waits—as if

nothing’s happening.

**

Five-petalled blossoms,

purple to pink, settle, stilled.

But roots never rest.

**

Wondering about

a life-time, where it might go,

breathing just one more.

**

When it comes, my time,

will readiness elude me

or just come with it?

Or do the masters

see this readiness one more

fancy of the fool,

one more gripped-at adornment,

worth only its moment passed.

Life-in-death, the way

moments pass into the more

of the same living-dying—can we 

be ready for any of it, even so ?

**

Lamp-lit shadow

shows the page

where the pen

will fall

well  

before

ink falls.

What more else 

might linger in this

ephemeral 

bone

of a body

waiting the stroke

of lighted life

there.

Lamp-lit shadow,

show the page

where.

**

What else to call them,

if masters won’t work in today’s air—

those who come like phenomena, 

who come in ways that pull us in ways 

we want to go, even when pulling away.

Maybe it’s not so much what we call them

as how it is we call 

back to them

that matters most, 

     in this thinning air

          we know as today.