Arriving Home When I cross the harbor bridge, I’m home. In awe of intersecting sky, river, ocean, mountains sloping down to fields, wild roses, Queen Anne’s lace. I inhale them with all my senses. Arriving at the cabin, I catch my breath. We ran through these hay fields as children. Here my grandparents worked the land, sea and woodlands without rest. Now it is our summer haven. Afternoon sunlight streams into the kitchen. I look for the great bald eagle…
Inspiration from Cao Jun’s Hymns to Nature Exhibit Volcanoes are ancient teachers Rising up from the magma Core of planet earth The effluent bringing forth All the swirling elements of life Choking out gaseous Fiery energy and chaos Creating oceans and rivulets Mountains and savannas Landscapes for the tiger Spewing lava and ash For the delicate lotus To break through Reaching to heaven Painters and poets Are modern interpreters Of universal truths Written in calligraphy Hidden deep within the …
I dove like Gilgamesh Into the deep For the youth plant The one that got away The snake shed its skin Thousands of years ago Thousands of miles From great-walled Uruk Would this happen to me? Would I forget the gift Lay it on the ground To be snatched in a flash Like youth itself? There is no suspense To the journey We know how it ends But we act as if This time Because it’s me And not that…
AT THE PRIMITIVE CAMPGROUND IN THE GORGE A ghost cannot gather itself inside a tree, or a peregrine, or a creek, or heaven. It cannot draw stars through the window of a building in Beijing, or on a cabin near Woolwine with spring peepers chorusing music to fit the sky. It cannot revive its mind in a trout lily, as much as I wish. I can’t tell it my name. I can’t share one flapjack, smoke, or a sip…
The Monkey Climbs a Tree I. With words come the square, the block Of sound, time and space With words, you fill the square And we bounce you hither and yon The block of time and space, ex nihilo Becomes something you see, touch, hear Smell if you’re advanced Taste if you leap beyond the possible II. An image does more, because it is The thing in a sense A copy of the thing at least But words can never…
Some things are meant to be in pairs. They’re meant to be twinned, coupled, one and one. Not because dualism wins. Not because we’ve lost out to dualism, in all of its permutations. After all, it’s dualistic to think in terms of the pairs and us, of the pairs not existing and us. Even of the need for pairs in this world, as if it isn’t already that way, and so. Fix You and Run, by Coldplay and Snow…
I When Einstein was asked Do you believe in God? He replied I believe in Spinoza’s god And who is that, one wonders? All that is and ought to be Now and forever Blue waves without end Stars and green mountains and red rivers Dark roiling matter without end II The eternal reunions and disbursements of Nature As it is and ought to be Though we can’t see it Blinded by this and that Preset premade chain/anchor On rational thought…
It’s something we really don’t know much about at all. In our own lives. The absence of war. Even to the extent that we’re not involved, we see it elsewhere, hear about it, note its presence on the news, in books, in history, on film. It surrounds us, this absence, this lack of the presence of anything remotely akin to peace — again, whether or not we’ve ever experienced its opposite. In. The. Air. It’s with us wherever we…
