Walking home...

—February, just past mid-month

A quarter moon rides a clear sky

high in the south west

well above the street a young skunk

skittles across

to slink beneath a small tree

of full-blossomed petals

open for coming sparrows, 

while all the while

well above my moving feet, 

my mind remains buried

in the nettles of an argument

yet to take place.

**

Cloud-cover blown past, 

morning light opens

early day’s promised hum

of glanced refusal 

of any claim or mark

but its full but passing 

attention—giving

cleansed by clinging’s absence 

engendering trust.

**

Sedona’s February sky

this second morning waking

is bone-crisp blue. 

Frost blankets.

Junipers flourish.

Blue-berried cones 

scatter mountain slopes

and fissured gullies

of rust red earth

like the ice pellets 

from our first night,

like so many word-seeds

waiting their tasting

into poems.

**

Multilayered faces

of earth’s understory

rise in silence

for the first bird to call.

Still inside, I think to chant,

but hold my tongue, 

remember the feel of breath

on outside air,

temper the urge

until then.

**

Poetry asks of the wonder 

of the power of words—not just some,

but the inexhaustible whole of language

in all iterations—the histories of being,

moment to moment presences, 

transformations of spoken thought-life

engaged in the world, always 

here and now.

**

Prayer flags

round the stupa

flutter wind-flow

murmurings,

asking only for listening.

**

—Metaphor is real

Walking this wild red rock 

reveals the deeper intention

repeated foot-falls hold central:

planting

—earth seeding to flower the word,

that is not the thing, 

working tensions unfolding 

meaning—

more and more and more.

**

The teacher did say,

the foundation of the Mahayana 

is the great earth—daichi.

**

That pink heat preceding 

the coming sun

confirms whatever all the earth holds 

well before shadow casts

nuanced suggestions of difference

even it doesn’t believe

for reasons antiquity knows

better than to look for.

Sky, having its own conversation

with clouds’ persistence,

lingers as always, 

but does not ponder.

**

For an entire week of mornings,

Juniper Pines spoke their names.

I mistakenly heard only one.

Berried cones did their best

to correct this blindness, finally going silent,

but never taking back their storied shades

of blue.

**

Looking back, I see a life long

on propitious accidents, slides of grace

and impulse resonant with unexplained clarity

as sure as the sun’s grip and the earth’s turn

within the stars.

**

We live in language.

We live linguistic realities

so closely concurrent with the world

about us, thoughts of interior-exterior 

are as misleading as the abiding silence

that holds it all is unknowable—each word,

a gifted extension of dimensions of being,

every word a phenomena of conjugation, 

regeneration, enacting perception within context,

each a gate opening meaning, allowing light

to the flow of unending possibilities 

of communal transformations, 

a many-faced, singular truth 

of rivulets and streams, ever making more

of our

 home. 

**

So, I try to remind myself 

to slow down, pay attention, 

say thank you.

**

Don’t know the name 

of that bright yellow flower

jutting from bulbs beneath

the soft dirt in the front—the wife

planted—five points, orange center.

But its bunches call aroma

almost as far as its colors sing.

**

—Three verses, after Han Shan

Scattered hillside flowers,

those cut and arranged in a vase—

which do you think knows better

the sense of the moon-lit night sky ?

*

Because it scratches the wife’s throat raw,

I’ve had to stop burning incense.

Aside from flowers, handfuls of words 

are all I’ve left to offer.

Both are borrowed, but both fresh 

every time.

*

The box is out along the road,

so even the mail man doesn’t come to the door. 

Late afternoons, sometimes we wave.

Threads

**

When lingering fatigue is simply given in to,

allowed, sleep willingly makes over our way

to its own, and rest finally takes root. So it is

in youth and in old age, 

though the cycles implied not only differ,

but for the latter, tend more and more to baffle,

which I’ve begun to realize is directly related

to the diminishing power of denial

to have its way, 

which leaves those of us now in an aging way

simply with the way it is.

**

The continued utterance of prayer-words,

mantra, if you will, 

a run of syllables, song or chant, 

even if denied as such, 

a handful of chosen words 

that of themselves uttered

trace the contours of the individual 

immediacy of finding one’s self as is, 

within the gifted arc of ancestral breath

that reflects, time and again,

the be-storied and unrelenting acceptance

to be heard there.

**. 

                                                                     

I can’t say I remember who said it

for me, but said why I study 

is to better understand what I’ve seen

and heard and thought and otherwise

experienced, so that thanks can tip

the end of the pen to show on the page

the teachers to be recognized as such, 

those threads in the weave

of this joyous way 

of the student.

**

—Ode to the folding chair…

Agape’, love in action

in the arc and swing of the folding chair

unfolded,

back and seat readied, 

legs claiming the certainty of place

in time-shown need.

Family, community, fellows.

**

Even in early February, 

morning lets light earlier, and evening

allows its lingering, 

more room perhaps for cold

to have its time before spring begins

to beckon,

though even so, I’ve seen 

on sunnier days, scattered blossoms 

smiling on the slopes, in certain trees, 

and seen bulbs sprouting vibrant green 

from beneath the moistened earth,

and not to forget 

the handfuls of words 

here and there heard humming 

melodies of the perennial.

**

Where I come from, Friday comes for us

with its own feel, young or old, working, school, 

or not, comes a momentum’s surge at shore’s edge,

readying to spend the whole of itself

in the simple slide and spread of elation let go,

even if negative, even if only implied, 

seeming innate to the species, traced in the collective 

of cells, molecules, atoms—but actually, really, old story, 

told and told, agreed and passed down as true, 

to successive generations of the unsuspecting “we,” 

many of whom individually

will let pass unnoticed

tonight’s full moon. 

**

“Awareness of disappearance,”

the poet’s utterance

Not nostalgia, not of cycles

native to us

Not of blood or age or birth or death

but awareness of loss of 

the native

Of petals, roots, paw-print, of leaf,

of language,     of peoples

Of ways close to earth and sky who care, 

are cared for in return 

Loss of ways of seeing, of being,

for nothing more than

convenience, greed

Awareness of intentional erasure 

**

I’ve never seen myself as standing out

from whatever stream flows

about me—have been fortunate, loved,

have learned and continue to learn

through listening.

And although the moon tonight

is so bright, only Orion holds its own

in what seems a lonely sky, 

the moon still meets every eye,

holds every palm 

open to it.

**

—Porgy’s Dharma

      “I’ve got plenty of nothing

       and nothing’s plenty for me.”

                                    

point me to the countless teachers’

names too bountiful to recall

where communities of living 

abound without boundary

where

there’s nothing to sell

no want to be sold

no treasure 

 that can possibly be held

**

Cutting between the playground and the school 

down the street from our home, opens a view

all the way to the expanding financial district, 

downtown San Francisco, and the SalesForce Tower, 

a rude reminder of this neighboring proximity, 

this morning catching the rising sun’s brightness 

from the east of the bay 

and beaming it straight down that channel, 

right to where I stand—an amazing sight, 

indeed; but in the end, all the sun, and all the rest, 

as they say, mirrors and tricks.

And glancing over my shoulder, the moon, 

still high in the sky, appears to concur. 

**

It’s visceral, unmistakeable—at first, just a stirring,

deep in a dark-clouded sludge of dormancy, then sparks 

and charge that ignite the turn into sun-drenched daylight, 

that revives.

Dramatic, perhaps, but the feel, for sure, of that instant 

when winter’s grip slips from body-mind like brittled skin,

and nakedness greets the gentle breeze inherent there.

And the world, as perhaps it is for Brother Bear, 

the world re-presents itself in all its glittering entirety.

What a time to be alive, indeed—and too, 

what a time to die.

**

We planted this almond tree by the fence

along the street in the front, in a year gone now 

from memory. Each year since, the almond 

is always first to bud to flower, never forgets.

**

Nothing comes today 

that piques the pen’s fancy,

but I push anyway,

pressing the final pages

of the journal for clues,

whatever it was that freed

the morning of its earlier weight

seemingly having lifted with it,

traceless—no mist, no smudge,

no place to place even a single word,

other than the foregoing, of course. 

Winter poems

  “I don’t want to know how I write poetry.”

                                                 

                                                           —Margaret Atwood

And if, as the teacher says,

it’s language that speaks,

then all we have to say

is hear-say.

**

In the winter here, along with the rains

and brother chill, coyote bush pushes buds

to blossom, tiny bursts of fine-white plumage

that join the redness of bear berries in the rise 

and swell of the hills, singing promises 

of nourishment—all of this and more 

taking me in, like a cousin with a key, 

roaming in and out unannounced, 

as if having never left.

**

Only a few days since, and the rains, for us,

now seem but a dream. 

And those streaks, pink, gauze-like blushes, agree, 

claim their cloud-ness to the entirety of the sky.

But the weeds, the weeds remind us

that our feet were not first to meet the earth 

and do nothing for anyone’s thirst, 

remind us that the roots, though unseen, 

aren’t anyone’s dream.

**

Oh, the ball dropped, I guess,

a flickering to the side of the room,

the small group of friends, good food, 

empty glasses.

But it’s that fulsome knowing

that speaks to the love that holds, 

that has held for so long—it’s that 

that brings us over, once more.

**

The moon is full. Ghost-light

cast through west facing windows,

speaking a solitary tongue

darkness appears to favor, offers

softly lain shadows—a shared willingness

so clearly undisturbed by impulse

to explain, my breathing 

holds itself still.

**

To see through other eyes

the merged and merging becoming

meanings beyond meaning,

means, I don’t know

but what wonder tells me.

**

In the watershed of realization,

the streams are the manifestations

that will tell us not only who we are

and where, but how to go.

**

      “Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration

           of the earth

       Under man’s hands and their minds…”

                           —Robinson Jeffers, “Day After Tomorrow”

**

Eternity stripped of the burden of time

opens to bottomless depths of finer and finer

subtleties of workings of dynamics of energies 

of realities beneath realities—in this mirror, 

everything, indeed, everything…

**

Were this a different time, I’d stoke the fires

when rising, greet the coming sun with its own.

Although the sun keeps the old ways, so far,

the thermometer’s switch is where it’s at these days.

So I do my best to do my part each morning,

reach to the far back of the breath 

for those songs so ancient

the source is one and the same.

**

Poetry thrives as that body of language

engaged with the world engaging it,

mutually responsive charges 

at play with the music 

that lingers the sweetness 

that simply cannot be caught.

**

—After Jaime de Angulo

We keep speaking of circles, 

when in fact speaking knows no closures,

multiples of overlapping parabolas

of interacting realities

speak our reality.

Solitude, think again, 

let’s say, of the stars, of the leaves,

just there outside the window,

the neighbor’s radio.

And thinking as such, or is it singing,

cry a cry of joy.