Verses on Koans XIII

Responses to koans in Gateless Gate -- a.k.a. Wumenguan (Chinese), Mumonkan (Japanese),
Blue Cliff Record -- a.k.a. Biyan Lu (Chinese), Hekiganroku (Japanese), and
Book of Serenity -- a.k.a. Congrong Lu (Chinese), Shoyoroku (Japanese).

Book of Serenity 43
Between urb and sub-
An hour before dawn
A grey monk walks
the empty sidewalk
From her rented room
To the chapel zendo.
She sets out six mats in two rows
Centers a round cushion on each,
And a sutra book.
As the sky begins to lighten, I
On my way to a bagel and coffee,
Look in through a narrow window
See the small grey peak
At the end of a row, alone.
She has always been there
and always will be,
Just as I have stood and will stand
through all past and future
Looking in
One hand on the doorknob.

2019 Jan

Blue Cliff Record 66
How is it when the student wants to take the Master's head with a sharp sword?
Your teacher was asked this question a generation ago;
You were there, or heard about it.
Your teacher answered by stretching out his neck.
The Master's head has fallen, said the student.
Now you are visited by a young man who has traveled
From a city where a warlord with a fabled sword
was lately defeated and killed.
Did you get the sword? you ask.
It's banter, metaphor, and test.
Yes, he says.
You stretch out your neck
Like your teacher did.
Your visitor responds with the
Same words
Your teacher's student spoke.
Ah. So he's heard the story.
You laugh, remembering
Your old dear teacher,
The way he carried his bowls and
retreated to his room.
You laugh, remembering the monks of the hall
all those years ago -- and this fellow here
repeating the earlier one.
You laugh as your head rolls across the floor.

2019 Jan

Gateless Gate 5
Hanging by Your Teeth from a Tree When the Question Comes

It's a question about meaning,
It's a request for direction,
It's a classmate copying your answers.
It's swords or pistols?
It's the plea deal offered,
It's your false teeth slipping,
It's the taste of bark,
It's grieving what's lost,
It's the victory party,
It's how time and being are each other.

It's the absent friend,
It's the hungry carnivore,
It's the telephone.
It's a generous pauper,
It's the weight you don't want,
It's the craving of craving.
It's making a fashion statement,
Or using language,
It's not knowing what you said
Or knowing.
It's a question about meaning.
It's your false teeth slipping,
It's the taste of bark.

2019 Feb

Book of Serenity 97
Dear god of triumph and of wasted days,
Of résumés and of addictions,
I wonder at the worth of me and us,
What price would be our measure?
In such a market, as folktales tell,
The devil is the only buyer.

What we fashion from the years --
Fronts of patina, and backs rough-hewn --
Is only for giving away,
To what takers we find -- not
For the market. Besides, as folktales tell,
The devil is the only buyer.

Dear god of triumph and of dissipation,
Let me leave the market for market things;
Craft by dint of grace and years blindly
The gifts I cannot see yet must bequeath;
And wash off the sticky folktale conceits,
Of worth, and price, and buyer.

2019 Mar

Gateless Gate 12
Always the Master calls --
The voice of the green turtle,
Silence.
Always affirmation answers, yes
In every soundwave, every photon, every particle's
Stillness, the origin of every vibration.
Silence calls. Heed.
Stillness answers. Heed.

2019 Apr

Book of Serenity 41
Do not tell one dying
That mountains never stop walking.
Tending to what can be tended to
Neither affirms nor denies.
When the deathly ill are before you,
There are no dharmas,
Only a puke bucket or bedpan to empty,
A cup to hold up to the lips,
A facial tissue, or a prayer,
To offer.

2019 Oct

Book of Serenity 59
When there is no escape,
When all is irretrievably lost,
The deep grasses of exile
Are your ancestral home.

2019 Oct

Book of Serenity 81
That thing about everything
Depending on everything else?
The thing is, it makes each thing
whole and complete, dependent on nothing.
This is not a point about shunyata.
It's stranger than that.

2019 Oct

Book of Serenity 52
That Nietzsche's abyss would gaze back,
And plumb the measure of me,
Is most of why I looked.

What I see as we peer into each other
Depends on what the abyss sees.

Friend,
The party is not to be peeked at from concealment.
The festivities can only be viewed from amid --
Seeing by being seen; being seen by seeing.

2019 Oct

Ten Verses on Koans XII

KOAN INDEX

Raven Verses IX

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Essential
Urge and urge and urge . . . To elaborate is no avail. -Whitman

To no avail, yet essential.
Until, one day, not.
The uselessness of explanation
Must be explained, which does not suffice,
But to us afflicted with the rash,
the placebo salve helps us not scratch.

Everything depends upon bullfrog call, raven caw,
(and a red wheel barrow, if you've got one).
The signs may be divined
-- not for meaning, for beauty --
When symbol subdues symbol,
Colonel orders Captain to retreat,
And the battlefield is clear.

2018 Dec

Still Lonesome
On the path,
First comes everything.
Second, everything again.
Third, return to first things.
Ordinal numbers
Mark ordinary time.

2018 Dec

Too Busy
Busy, as a swift brook,
As cirrus clouds, striping the sky,
As glaciers are, melting,
And as they were, before that.
Busy as the owl on her night branch, listening.

Life and history make of me
A bearer of mostly futile love.
Seven generations hence,
Justice will mean something else,
Or maybe nothing much at all.
Perhaps the struggles and projects
Of my fifth-great-grandchildren
Will not invoke justice.
Perhaps, for them, it will be a
Dusty classical virtue, like prudence.

All the strands of the world flow into me
And out again, some a little stronger,
Or weaker, or more refined, or less.
When they arrive at the late 22nd century
With unrecognizable textures and weavings,
Will their time spent weaving me
Be more help or more hindrance
To the aims and needs of that time?
About equal measures of each, I guess.

Busy as a cheetah's tail,
As a cow's four stomachs --
Busy as soil erosion,
As the silent moon and the Sahara dunes.
Busy as Rigel at Orion's knee, so
Busy. Oh,
Too busy.

2018 Dec

Trust
That joke about why the dog:
The punchline, Because he can,
Answers a lot of questions.
To exercise a capacity: reason enough.
Why does one love? Why trust?
Why study and follow a teacher's direction?
Why does one hurt so when any of these goes awry?
Why does one bother with sadness and happiness?
Why read the paper on the commuter train?
Toast the New Year? Sit Zazen?
Why does one grow present to one's life,
Or want to?
If one couldn't, there'd be no reason to.

2018 Dec

The Self
This mouth opens, and out I come:
A draft of air and jetsam.
The air: warm, moist, de-oxygenated.
The jetsam: vocabulary, syntax, accent, tone, and
Voice that could be no one else's,
Tossed from foundering meanings.

This mouth opens, and out I come:
A current of particularity and karmic goo,
Not at all the luminous seaworthy universality,
I dreamed sailing into port.

When I'm not thinking this way,
When dreams of absoluteness are wakened from,
Or the wreckage recognized as their realization,
Then this mouth opens, and out I come, and
Maybe my eddies of debris and yours
Dance.

2019 Jan

The Essence
Compassion is not a quality.
I put it to you,
Didactically, as if it were
A thing you could believe
Or that I could.

Yesterday I did, and tomorrow will again,
Speak of the quality of compassion --
Of a person, or an act --
As if compassion were a moral virtue
That might not have been there,
That could disappear in a mean moment,
That the discovery of ulteriority
   could render fraudulent.

Today I tell the truth:
Compassion is ontological, not ethical.
It is the stuff reality is made of.
I say it
As if you should be taking notes,
As if I should apologize.

I say it, and outside is the winter mountain,
Made of rock and soil, trees and snow.
No qualities there either,
I whisper. Or was that you?

2019 Jan

Hearing
Let yourself hear the dove
Let your mouth eat
Let your fingers read my face
Let your feet count the blessings of toes
Let your ribs hold galaxies
Let your tongue perceive the silence
   inside its words
Let your fears embrace the frightened
Let your house slide on shifting sand
Let the stones be igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic
   and all yours
Let rivers flow through your veins unto the sea
Let yourself smell the sunrise
   and taste the sunset
Let yourself love
Let yourself hear the dove

2019 Jan

Unhappy
How happy is the little stone --Emily Dickinson
the trees...give off such hints of gladness --Mary Oliver

Mary's trees, Emily's little stone,
Cheerful stars, a merry brook,
Shy gemstones, humble dirt,
Lugubrious rain, angry thunder,
Cruel frost or oppressive heat
Vengeful flood or punishing drought
Sanguine dawn and pensive dusk --

Ask any of them, "What do you want?"
They have nothing to answer.

2019 Jan

Honesty
The stream occluded or not;
The fox hungry or fed,
The star shining steadily or exploding nova,
See how they never lie?
How they tell nothing but the truth,
Never concerning themselves with honesty?

2019 Jan

Method
I.
Nature's method is none.
Profligacy is not methodical.
Survival of the fittest
Might be a method if nature
Had a measure of fitness
Other than surviving.
Survival of those that survive
Is not a method.

II.
The stars of Orion know about method, and what is evident.
The broad, slow river knows.
Though there are no crannies, and no kernels with which to fill them,
They are always full.

2019 Feb

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