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

Previous: Raven Verses VIII   ☙   RAVEN INDEX

Raven Verses VIII

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Not Helping
Upaya: "skillfull means" --
When to step in, or up, or forward?
Or out, or down, or back?
Zazen doesn't answer these questions.
It's possible it helps one
Remember to ask them,
Or approach them less controlled by fears.
It's possible it doesn't.

2018 Sep

Mosquito
The package deal of appetites and incentive --
Hunger-satiation, fear-security,
Lust-orgasm -- arrives as advertised,
Home delivered, and throughout the neighborhood,
Sensations of
Mosquito bites, tea, sky, paper cuts
Thrown in, no extra charge.
The promise of essence, independent and abiding,
is never kept, nor was ever made.
Read again the fine print,
The fine, fine print.

2018 Sep

Follow Your Bliss
What makes a distraction?
The brain doing something,
Then thinking it shouldn't have?
I'm not saying your inner moralizer
Might not have a point,
just that maybe there's
Another angle.
What the brain did,
It did pursuing
its need and bliss.
Distraction isn't following
the wrong thing
But following
At a distance.

2018 Oct

She Doesn't Know
What is the meaning of your
"What is the meaning of...?"?
Say more of what is biting you.
I have various potions in my apothecary;
Tell me about your bug, and I'll select
A bottle for you.
They are all placebos, still
The telling is treatment,
And the rituals of care.

It is a brave physician
Who withholds these ministrations,
Avers there is no cure,
And casts the patient out to
Live with the terrifying condition
Of having no disease.

2018 Oct

Vows
The morning sun behind the branches of black leaves
Promises promises
Long since broken, long since fulfilled.
Nothing is more beautiful,
Nothing less.

2018 Oct

Gossip
Bob fell off the wagon.
Susan lost her job.
Sally's Dan is flunking out.
That Keith is such a slob.

Sympathies and judgment
Served up over tea.
So nice to not have those folks' faults, but
What do they say of me?

So nice to not have faults like those
Except I fear I do.
I share in all those named above
And several others too.

Anxiety is thus sustained,
Throughout the system felt.
Someone, perhaps, must do that job,
But maybe someone else.

2018 Oct

Anger
When Great Bear's grievance commands redress
The autumn wind in the leaves takes notice.
Coyote thinks of somewhere else to go.
Badger pauses from her digging.
Later, rain washing the hillside
Seems to take greater than usual care.

2018 Oct

Giving
The Long and the Short of It

Belongings belengthen.
What I belong to and
What belongs to me,
Fix my placement,
Post grief-tinged desires,
And stretch me long between.

Moon, wind, and crickets
Draw me up short again.

2018 Nov

The Middle Way
The good question, at home with an apt mind,
Brings forth offerings,
Yet is not put to rest.
Lives on and repeats, repeats.

The apt mind, at home with a good question,
Stays the course between destructions
of one side or the other.
To fix an answer breaks the question.

2018 Nov

Reading
I found my name in Plato, for instance,
and in Rorty, Wittgenstein, Nussbaum, Dickens, Austen, Wendell Berry, and Garry Trudeau --
in Hesse, Laozi, Camus, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Arundhati Roy --
in Thurber, Thoreau, Dillard, Vonnegut, Brautigan, and the New York Times, for instance,
and in Hongzhi, Dogen, Dworkin (both Ronald and Andrea), Tom (both Robbins and Wolfe), and Irving (John, not Washington) --
in Woolf and Tolkien and Twain and Chas Addams and James Luther Adams,
For instance.
My name was on every page.
Because I wrote it there myself?
Possibly, but
The handwriting doesn't look like mine.

2018 Nov

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Raven Verses VII

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Saving the Many Beings
I tell you my failures lie piled at my feet
And thick to the horizon in all directions,
Thinner in spots, or more transparent.
It is a landscape of lapses.
Were you accessory to some of them? I don't know; it's possible I suppose.
I say each one fulfills the vow.
Each one breaks it.
Each one whispers vigilance.

2018 Jul

Emptiness
One day, to explore widely the surrounding districts, Xuansha leaves the mountain. He stubs his toe on a stone. Bleeding and in great pain, Xuansha reflects, “They say this body is not real existence. Where does the pain come from?” --Dogen

A Few Things Real and Unreal

Phlogiston, unicorns, the present king of France;
Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, Celie;
Nations, governments, laws,
Punishment, the stock market, hospitals;
Freedom, unselfish actions, God;
Joy, kindness, wisdom.

Planets and atoms;
Death and love;
The neighbor's dog and Attila the Hun;
This body and me;
Denali and Mt. McKinley.

The hemlock tree in the front yard;
The stone on the ground waiting to meet Xuansha's foot, or Samuel Johnson's;
The pain that followed when it did.

All are real, and real the same way;
All unreal, the same way as real.

2018 Jul

The Stick
A stick is not a stick
When it is just a stick.
In the dawning light --
The call to breakfast.

2018 Jul

Can't Have That
Standing, sitting, lying, walking
Amid the colors, shapes, sounds, smells,
The feels of things,
A kind of Heisenberg Principle
Slips between naming and having.
What is named is ungraspable.
What is grasped is unnameable.
God's dice rolling always
Everywhere.

2018 Jul

How Do You Account For This?
Myriad the mystery that supports and guides
That surrounds like peripheral vision
That smiles from the shadows and sometimes laughs
That writes the truths and publishes
Under pen-names.

2018 Aug

Too Clever By Half
"Some teachers say that Zen is hard. I say that Zen is very easy. But we are saying the same thing." -Seung Sahn

Sun and earth make pine and hyacinth, and
The hummingbird outside the window
Beats her wings 80 times a second --
Without trying.
Even my pushing, willful, effort
Arrives and unfolds effortlessly.

I might say,
It is difficult to know the ease of things --
meaning only,
One settles into such knowledge slowly,
And if the thing is kept at.

2018 Aug

Not Playing Favorites
Reliability
Of, say, things planted growing, usually,
When conditions and seed are right for each other,
Which isn't so hard to arrange,
Surprises, edges me into believing
In consistency, and the possibility of justice:
That there are like cases that may be treated alike.

Then: the shift of pattern,
The randomness of events and outcomes,
The course reversals called inexplicable
because we forget the inexplicability of courses stayed,
Come as a wonderment.

Each surprise sets up the other,
like players of a comedy team.

2018 Aug

The Fun Way
Maybe you go where those others go --
Not because you are paid;
You pay to do it.
Weekly or twice weekly or more,
You arrive there at the appointed times,
You
Be with them, doing and saying.

Maybe this is a loveliness
that makes you tender,
and sometimes you cry.
Maybe there you know yourself
and become real.
Or maybe you hide there,
and slowly harden.
Maybe you become thoughtful --
Or quicker to blame.
Maybe this is the locus of your wisdom --
Or your vehicle of dominance.

Maybe you go where those others go
And find in some form all of the above.
Maybe you stay home.

2018 Aug

Zazen Alone
Sit with the sturgeon, with the stars.
Stand with the aspen, with the yak.
Walk with the brook, with the ocean waves.
Lie with the moss, and the setting sun.
Sit with the lakes, fallen logs, and bunnies.
Stand with the mushrooms, mountains, and salamanders.
Walk with the cows, chickens, and the full moon.
Lie with the bedrock, yellow leaves, and rhesus macaques.
Do this because you can't not,
And because the ten thousand things
Are sitting, standing, walking, lying
With you.

2018 Sep

Perspective
A robin, the lifeless form of,
Lies by the path, her talons
Curve around air.
To say what is missing is not hard:
Her motion, her song, her concerns.

To detect the prevailing presence of same,
In the gray and ruddy feathers:
This, too, is not difficult.
Less often said, maybe.

I bend and take the body up,
Carry it to the covering of underbrush,
Stand over the grave
In wonder of the goneness
And equally of the
undepartability.

2018 Sep

Previous: Raven Verses VI   ☙   Next: Raven Verses VIII   ☙   RAVEN INDEX

Raven Verses VI

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Dreams
"Look what we found in the park, in the dark. We will take him home. We will call him Clark. He will live at our house. He will grow and grow. Will our mother like this? We don't know." (Dr. Seuss, "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish")

One breath, two breath, angry breath, sad breath.
Old Bodhidharma came from the west.
Why-ever he came, he came.
Whatever its meaning, he came.
Now here we are, we
Who face the wall in Bodhidharma's cave, we
Wall-sitters, wall-sitting.
It seems to make a difference; it
Seems to make no difference at all -- a
"Something, nothing," like Iago's purse.
We took it home.
It grew.
Still no word on Mother's approval.

2018 Apr

Open and Clear
Open and clear
As silence
And the very bottom:
Silence, too.

2018 May

The Mind
Dogen didn't, couldn't, say
His cranial pitcher held
100 billion neurons, more or less,
Sending neurotransmitter signals
to each other across
100 trillion synapses, more or less.
Still he said mind is not just this.
You are more than that.

Dogen spoke of the senses,
Could say a few things
about light and eyes
and sound and ears,
Yet nothing of the optic nerve's
or inner ear's workings,
Little of nerve endings,
and less of ceptions proprio-,
mechanore-, equilibrio-, thermo-, noci-, and intero-.
Add the flow through the senses
to the skullbound glop --
Still he said mind is not just this either.
You are more than that.

Dogen didn't, couldn't, say
Light bounced off the mountain
at 186,000 miles per second,
Still he told us
mind includes seeing,
includes light,
includes the mountain seen,
includes everything that made the mountain.
This signals-triggering-signals
Has nowhere to stop
Is to nowhere confined.

When all reality pours, as it does, into
Every rock, tree, skullbone
And pours unceasing back out again
Mind is nowhere to be found
Unless it is the whole shebang
Like beans.
Like tears on a train.

2018 May

Suffering
I saw a young larch shudder
and looked around to see
if there were some cause
as would bring it fear or hurt.
Seeing none, I said:
"It's some fluke of wind,"
As if suffering were not also a current of air.
I turned then back to the trail,
Each footfall on the dirt
Alike the last,
Mostly.

2018 May

Panic and Fear
Now the red leaves
Now the snow
Now the dogwood blossom
Always now and present
Always now and gone
The old one resting on a park bench
Sips from her cup.

2018 May

The Eightfold Path
"All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature of change. There is no way to escape being separated from them." (Upajjhatthana Sutta: Anguttara Nikaya 5.57)

To know it is fleeting
To have this in heart-mind
Colors love piquant and precious
Dissipates the fog of eternity
Touches the real.
To know it is fleeting.

2018 May

Right Views
Mayflies live a day --
Or less, if accident or predator befalls.
Not much time.
Enough.
A bristlecone pine in California is 5,067 years old.
A stand of aspen in Utah has a shared root system 80,000 years old.
Not much time.
Enough.
A step is born as a foot lifts from the ground,
A breath as the lungs begin to pull.
A second or so later the step dies back into the earth,
The breath expires.
Not much time.
Enough.

2018 Jun

Right Thinking
Read your thoughts the way you read a novel.
When Aragonese and Castillano
First turned the pages of Europe's first novel,
How did they understand what it was,
What these words were up to?
An epic, only not in verse.
A romance, only longer, and cohesive.
Like a history, then, only intimate.
And not historical.
How did they make sense of it?
Cervantes gave them Sancho Panza,
Illiterate, to show them how to read
the thing:
     Not rejecting the master's delusions.
     Not sharing them.
     Along for the ride.

2018 Jun

Patience
Displayed everywhere.
A frozen pond, a car horn.
Buzzing flies, mountains in the distance.
The grass's breakneck absorption of soil nutrients,
Its headlong photosynthesizing.
A customer's raised volume and pitch to a clerk
Saying "slow" and "unacceptable."
The universe's patience
Is displayed everywhere.

2018 Jun

Delineation
Leavings,
From the many beings' doings and sufferings,
From the universe's physics and chemistry,
We ravens scavenge.

Curious, this noticing, noticing,
Drawing the true lines --
Drawing them with an eraser.

2018 Jun

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Raven Verses V

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Discouraged
Breath in, breath out.
Blood out arteries, back in veins.
Food in, poop out.
Sun rises, and sets.
Winter to summer to winter.
Births, and deaths.
Mountains rise, wash away.
Did you think all of this was going somewhere?
Did you think there was anywhere for it to go?

2018 Feb

Outside History
The way to be a better person: utterly inscrutable.
But stand under the history that is outside you --
The co-arising with which you are interdependent.
And stand under what is outside of history --
The undying, unborn, unconditioned,
about which even these negations mislead.
See what happens.

2018 Feb

The Dark Side
"All in all, you're just another brick in the wall" (Pink Floyd)

Something doesn't and something does love a wall.
Protecting, preserving, nurturing --
Isolating, trapping --
Defining.
Liberation requires containment.
Your bounds manifest the boundless.
But how can a brick know how it is important
And how it isn't?

2018 Feb

The Good of Practice
The thing, missed --
A tree, a ritual, a song, a shot at love --
Leaves a vacuum
Which the question
Of its good
Fills, or partly.

2018 Feb

The Way

Oh, I drank of that duck-rabbit brew,
Watched the mind, fixed on one picture, flit between two,
Until I turned away, feigning weariness of the silly trick.
Still, a day or a year later, I and a pint of dark and bitter,
Strolling in the yard, crouched to peer
Upon the business at an ant hill.
There again the wild veering betook me:
Now many little organisms before me, now a single one --
Two pictures, and a thing-in-view that is both and neither.
These days, everywhere I look:
Nothing but duck-rabbits, flickering while constant.

2018 Mar

Raven Roshi
In my dreams of trees
Maples and pines
Deny themselves nothing.
The world imposes limitations,
Constrains indulgence,
So they don't have to --
   in my dreams of trees.

I, however, self-deny:
Cruel desires, like bacon,
Or the merely self-destructive ones, like doughnuts, sometimes.
It falls to me to weigh competing desires,
To determine which conflicting urge prevails.
Thus I am fraught, as oaks are not,
   in my dreams of trees.

I forget that sycamore and birch have stratagems.
The pushing root, the turn of leaf,
the velocity of sap,
are imperfect perfect
responses to circumstance --
exactly as my choosings are,
   in my dreams of trees.

2018 Mar

The Way Things Are
Whence a butterfly?
   a crowd?
   a funk?
   a river?

Whence this illusion of single sources?
   of causal chains?

Whence a breeze?
   a committee meeting?
   a joke?
   this question?

2018 Mar

Pain During Zazen
A little rub dispels a small itch:
A single push of fingers across the spot, and half-way back.
Substantial itches, though: rub leads to scratch,
And scratch to scratch, increasing the injury.
Here, then, is your life:
Knowing when to rub, to scratch, and when, though difficult, to leave alone --
And, usually, not knowing.

2018 Mar

Zazen in the Forest
Meetings get canceled.
Even when they don't,
Doings and sufferings --
For shelter, food, predator-dodging, etc. --
Fill the hours like sand,
Make me wonder when's enough time to become.
Silly, silly me.

2018 Apr

Ordinary Morality
No nature photographer will capture my image
Trotting with a limp former rabbit hanging from my jaws.
I haven't the predator's skill,
And I do my killing indirectly.
No journalist's expose will limn the contrast between
The misery in my sweatshops
And the opulence surrounding my person,
Though weekly I make payment to some merchant
To sustain oppression and disparity.
It's not that evil and sublime
Interweave, co-depend, mutually define,
Though they do.
It's that every act is both.
It's that this is no excuse.

2018 Apr

Previous: Raven Verses IV   ☙   Next: Raven Verses VI   ☙   RAVEN INDEX

Raven Verses IV

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Enlightenment
The boundless inhabits, accepts bounds --
Seeps out, becomes boundless.
Love takes to the containment of a heart
So as to beat out its uncontainability.
Thus the thingness of things arrives already gone.

2017 Nov

Death
Bride of Christ, or of Frankenstein, or Groom of Gaia, or something --
We are all someways wedded to a large complexity
to whom our faithfulness will one day expire.
It, or She or He, will then remarry, eventually or soon,
and won't need our permission,
So I give it now, every day,
You may remarry, you may remarry, you may remarry.

2017 Nov

The Holy Spirit
Being as the light is, rising, setting,
Tracelessness is granted -- joy enough.
Two snags, to be avoided if one can, or incorporated:
The ideas of eternal life, and the eternal life of ideas.

2017 Dec

Very Special
There's never been anyone like anyone --
Each of us changing the world,
All day, every day.
I have known a million Red Oak leaves,
And still know nothing of the next one,
Fortunately.

2017 Dec

Metaphysics
Crane references God; Raven not so much.
Still: the mystery, humility, not knowing.
Raven mentions karma; Crane points to grace.
Still: sunshine and air are not earned,
nor our parents' love,
nor that nuthatch in the birch;
and causes have effects.
Choose a language, get a loyalty.
Choose a loyalty, get a language.
Who can name the antecedent?

2017 Dec

First Person Singular
To watch a movie, two pointers
Moviegoers follow effortlessly:
Remember it's an illusion, and
Forget it's an illusion.
Let yourself be taken in, and
Step back out again.
Be in that reality, while
Knowing it isn't real.
To have a self, the same two pointers.

2018 Jan

Veneration and Worship
I worship as an intransitive verb.
I venerate transitively.
Everything is one thing;
Every thing is another.

2018 Jan

Make Sense
Theirs to sing, flash color, beyond all sense.
Ours to plod, grind,
Justify our margins, rationalize our punctuation.
These too are pretty gifts, and we give them
As the finch gives hers.
Even so.
Is not this specialization an affront
To both song and reason?

2018 Jan

The New Discussion Leader
Sometimes, before I forget,
I know I'm going to.
I could write myself a note, I suppose.
Or
Let the trees pick up my slack.

2018 Jan

Guidelines
Your inheritance of joy and compassion,
What estranges you from it?
Every wave does, every ripple.
Your nest of understanding and love,
What gives it away?
Every ripple does, every wave.
The still water becomes clear,
Clear, clear down to the bottom.

2018 Jan

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Raven Verses III

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Inspiration
Peekaboo! Where are you?
There you are! Here I am!
The inspiration in your own heart. Where?
From somewhere else. Where?
Peekaboo. There it is.
Parent and child convulsed with giggles.

2017 Sep

Karma
Murder, etc. Before it outs,
It ins. And it's sticky. Atoning
Doesn't always succeed. Not atoning
Lives the lie.

2017 Sep

Propinquity
It's a murmuration of boomerangs
Doing what they are
Going around coming around
Less coordinated than starlings
They frequently bump
Leave marks and nicks
Work themselves pure

2017 Sep

The Purpose of the Practice
The practice is the enlightenment, the doing is the purpose,
The doubting is the faith, the asking is the inkling.
What am I saying? Badgers dig.
On the whole Blue Planet, nothing is missing.

2017 Oct

Brown Bear's Purpose
What do the maples have in mind, their red leaves falling?
What does the moon have in mind, its crescent resting in the branches?
Something, perhaps, though they seem
To have forgotten what it was.

2017 Oct

Buddhist Terms
Save every being, end every delusion.
Do this twice every morning before breakfast, and after.
Gain wisdom from every sensation, embody the entire Buddha way.
Like the rain, like the rain, like the rain.

2017 Oct

Maintenance
Being present to. Becoming the proof of.
These two things only are to be done
With and in this brief and florid stay:
Witness, and bear witness.
Heaven, hell, and a planetful of blue,
Are sitting here, sitting here.

2017 Oct

Buddha
The most basic most eludes definition.
Would you constrain the stream of love poems?
Or otherwise delimit the limitless?
When a single leaf is clear,
what the master is talking about
doesn't much need to be.

2017 Nov

Delusion
Names lie. A cup or tree: infinitely more than
Its cupness or treeness. And less.
Not merely the falseness of categories, this --
For proper names lie as blatantly and remorselessly.
To dress in such lies: a risk.
To step naked into the truth of presence:
Also a risk.

2017 Nov

Mythology
"Everybody needs to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer." (Fear)
The believing's in the doing. The holy
Emerges from the worship. Trees
From sylvics, dendrology, forestry, timbering, carpentry.
On the question of what is really,
The steadfast practice needs not opine.

2017 Nov

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Raven Verses II

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Thoroughgoing
Retreat. Preparation? For advancing? Maybe.
Or perhaps advancing was preparation for this retreat,
Accouterments reduced to carryable.
This temporary eternal world-self never stops shining.

2017 Jul

Early Students
Wander. Find something abandoned and tall.
Fix up. Sit with what gathers.
Take a perch. Rinse. Repeat.
How could anything be grander than life?

2017 Jul

The Dream
Of whose dream are you the child?
You may choose, or, rather, it is for you to discern
Whose dream -- what teacher and tradition
Gives birth to you, becomes present
Everywhere.

2017 Jul

The Pivot
Everywhere: things in their place.
Everywhere: things turning --
themselves, each other,
thee and me.
Nowhere: a place that isn't a turning point.

2017 Jul

Ego
"As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there! He wasn't there again today. Oh how I wish he'd go away!" (W.H. Mearns)
Every day, climbing that stair,
Meeting the self-centered one:
The companion who acts in your name.
Not there! Won't go away!
Like an unforgettable fictional character.

2017 Aug

The Spirit of Practice
The better question isn't Why? It's What?
What is this? What is now and here?
This sensation, this emotion, this world presenting before me, This!
What is it? Curiosity is the path;
It leads not to knowledge, but to intimacy.

2017 Aug

A Key Issue
Are we not here to be eaten, the substance of our life consumed by more life?
To die and turn our bodies over to the nourishment of a grander thing?
To flee in terror only to get caught?
To see amid safety and friends that this is so?

2017 Aug

Timid and Truthful
Declarative sentences come in true and false.
Sycamore trees, not so much.
A river, even as it winds back on itself, flows nothing but truth.
The moon, even as it blocks the sun, shines nothing but truth.

2017 Aug

Essential Nature
Kidneys and intestines and lungs and heart,
Liver secreting bile and brain secreting thoughts:
This is called "inside."
Trees and chipmunks, rooms in buildings, people,
The kitchen sink and the Hudson River:
This is called "outside."
Inside and outside, essential nature everywhere,
Nowhere to be found.

2017 Aug

Bedrock Buddha
Signifier and signified
All over the place, standing alone.
My finger points to the moon, yes,
Also, the moon points to my finger.

2017 Sep

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Raven Verses I

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Mutually Dependent Arising
Jackrabbit knows about the chase,
And cuts right to it.
But that wasn't Raven's way in.
Everything is because everything else is, and vice-versa.
So what else could Raven do?

2017 May

Metaphysics: Oneness
What really happens
When you see a star?
Easy to say oneness --
It's not a star.

2017 May

Delicious
The difference between mutually dependent arising and delicious waterweed?
Or between oneness and waterweed?
Standing on the doorstep
There is no difference to be found.

2017 May

Something Still Missing
A tiny portion of the rain fills up a few water barrels.
A larger portion carves out the deep canyons.
The teacher does not fill your lack
But arrives to be with you in absence.

2017 May

Metaphor
She has lived a thousand moons
by the mouth of the river.
Say it's a metaphor, and
she does not understand.

2017 Jun

Faith
Faith: No having or lacking.
Only doing or failing to
commit to the fullness of (your) being, with
heart and mind open to
the unknown, to
hints of new meaning.

2017 Jun

The Unborn
You and your questions
Your self and its jones on for meaning
From where does all that come?
From the unborn? The void?
Awesome.

2017 Jun

Turning Points
Cancer, maybe. Or heart disease, or a traffic accident, or "natural causes."
Something is coming for you, loaded for bear.
Bang! As old as it is new.
Bang! The turning point.

2017 Jun

Character
"There is a Universal Love that has never broken faith with us and never will." (Walther Herz)
Winter winds, shivering chill
Summer mug, sticky sweat
Blue jay at noon, clear stars at night --
They are always keeping their promise.

2017 Jun

Birth and Death
We croak.
Startled croaking, calculated croaking --
Is this birth or death?
What else is freedom?

2017 Jul

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