I think of recluse masters a century away,
I nurture your secrets. Your true nature
eludes me here, but taken by quiet, I can
linger this exquisite moon on out to the end.
—T’ao Ch’ien
quietness abounds,
unfolding breaths, touch-less silence
soothing shadowed chatter
to background
**
Shadowed bamboo
quivering, dripping
passing rain drops.
**
After days of following the ants
here and there, as they say ought be done,
closing each door as found,
they turn, on the other side, another way,
without so much as good-bye.
**
—after Simon Ortiz
we can’t speak ever
what words won’t say,
so, who speaks, poet,
whose songs are sung
in our singing—is it that we
just hum what’s heard ?
**
I’m old; but the old man
with long silver hair
says, “first say a prayer—
first make coffee,”
as if he’s waited
all these years
to say it
just to me.
**
Rains have passed.
Morning clouds break to white, lift
to meet the rising sun.
The universe has its own language.
The master threw the student’s books
into the river—the poems
never stopped.
What the river says
is what I say.
**
answerless, the crow drops
from the great eucalyptus
without a call
**
Two shots, one each arm—
the whole body aches its way
to health—no soaring here.
**
I stumble across an old poem today,
written ten years ago to the month,
leaning against rocks in the Sierra,
preparing to turn sixty-nine.
And I wonder, after cleaning the house,
where all the chance for wisdom went.
Didn’t find it there, can’t seem to find it here.
But the carpet’s clean, dustless floors feel good
to bared feet—and like then, I’m here now,
so I write.
**
First day of fall, the open saddle
of the State Park,
summer temperatures returning,
seed-puffs dancing
to what breezes
don’t say.
**
Can’t really say why
people working words
for reasons
they likely can’t say
catches me like it seems
it does them,
but it does and I’ve gone
and continue to go with it
as readily as rust
to an empty tin can can,
looking, I’d guess, for what
filled it in the first place.
**
—Morning glory
reaching tendrils,
tides of spreading green,
purple-white petals,
quietly playing sunlight.
**
Never-flowering fig trees
simply ripen round plump purple
fruit that droops among the leaves,
invariably beyond reach.
**
sparse traces of early stars
say big dipper says
which way
north is
**
Late September’s early fall
holds darkness longer, calls it
earlier evenings,
shares season’s shiftings
without claim,
opens October’s door
for longer, more colorful
considerations.
**
Being means breathing,
deeper, therefore,
more carefully there
at the breath,
where everything, for us,
always was, always really is
—all attempts to hold it,
wrong-headed, learning to go
with it, the holding of reason
beyond all reason.
**
**
Light requires nothing, asks nothing
of us, not even that we turn to it
as it embraces us.
