Bay Avenue Meditation (每精通五行)

 

Along the crook

Of Fourth Neck to

Its most easterly extent

Proceeding out on

A thin isthmus

Of asphalt and doubt

To a wooden bench

At the end of the pier

Where only tenuously

Connected to the

Sandbar behind me 

I sit and reflect upon

The sky’s reflection

And surrender to

The still wintry air

Watching daylight ascend

In layers and columns

To a higher redoubt

A dog barks

Down the street

A serene breeze

Stirs the red

Bandana affixed

To a pole

In the mouth

Of the Bay --

A slight tremor portends

Elijah and his fiery chariot

May finally be drawing near

Each packet of wind

Has its own trope

This is no projection

Or sympathetic fallacy

Merely an observation

Of the tendencies

On clear display

Out here in the harbor

As reality goes about its task

Defining a clear smooth path 

Out past the No Wake zone and

Through the Bay’s fill and chop 

Clear beyond the Point of No Return

As the waters continue parting

With a slight nod of the crown

Drawing us onward

Into the far greater depths

That lie straight ahead

Another Year

It’s Christmas day

And anomalously

Just now I plucked

A dandelion from the

Front lawn with a white

Plumose Crown

And my mother said
To me: You can’t
Be too sure otherwise

Those seeds will be airborne
Before we get to New Year’s

And I thought to myself 
Another year another war

But it seems as if

This time around

With trowel close to hand
And a new Moon sitting
Two fingers adrift in
The western sky

The spheres have turned
And the growing season 

Is already here

 

On Hold Christmas Day - 2014 (每精通五行)

-->

for Frank

  

It’s Christmas Day

And just now when you

Asked me to hold

I noticed a few

Snowflakes

Drifting by

On the computer

Screen as if scattered

By some Java script

Onto the email below and then

I overheard you speaking

With the X-ray technician which

Didn't exactly fill me with

Holiday cheer and it being 50

Degrees plus out here on 

The East End I figure

That virtual snow is all

We’re likely to see on

Christmas this year

Frank on Christmas Day - 2014

On the Five Phases of the Spirit's Journey (每精通五行)

How robust life is

In all respects

The rapid recovery

Truck sits just beyond

The front lawn all day long

Capable of addressing

Present disasters even if  

Woefully inadequate

When it comes to  

Those we imagine

 And how our continued

Sense of well being hangs

By the slenderest of threads

Through many harvests  

Through regime change

And bottoming out

In short through

All five phases of Being

When at last we emerge

From Reality’s cocoon

Our term of imprisonment

Under Five Phase Mountain

Having been abruptly commuted

Upon the arrival of

A dragon with wings
Tipped with pennants of fire

A rapid recovery truck outside the window

A Wintry Mix

For Christine Stansell

Chongyam Trungpa

Steve Davis and all

The other mentors

Real or imagined

Who taught by example

 (good and/or bad)

About the dangers

And rewards of

Mixing the personal

With the spiritual

And political realms

How the Lotus of Life unfolds

In the most intricate of ways

Please understand

From now until

New Year’s more

Than a fortnight hence

I have no frigging idea

On any given night whether

I'll end up in bed alone

Gnashing my teeth

Blessed or utterly stoned

Which was the very same

Wintry mix displayed

On the streets

Of Midtown yesterday

A surcharge of the craziness

We’re lately awash in

Anguish and insight  

With an antic twist
It's a two-step line dance called
The Armageddon Shuffle

In this case arising as a

Column of protest marchers

Chanting that Black Lives Matter

Made its way up 6^th Avenue

Into the heart of Herald Square

Where a phalanx of Drunken Santas

Had already laid claim to the turf

In their riotous good cheer

They careened about

Under the street lamps

Swaying and cantilevered

Undeterred as the

Marchers proceeded

Uptown and East

While helicopters

Hovered overhead

And a cordon of cruisers

With blue and red flashing lights

Sealed off all alternate

Routes of escape

Hemmed in

On all four sides

Of the barricades

We were laid bare

In the urban grid

 Drawn and quartered

By the same police power

Those of us angry

And those of us willing

And those of us

Besotted too

All of us could

Suddenly see

Exactly where

Things stood

Finally - A Reply to Meditation #17

God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war,
some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all.   

John Donne, Meditation 17 

Enlightenment 

Entails a stutter step

Or a stammering

Thanks to the absurdity

Of the Brightness

If you're unprepared

It can be hazardous

To your health

The equivalent

To a stroke or

A Richter 10 quake

But how unlike

A beast is humankind

That we can lift

Our hind legs upward

In prayer (not merely

to urinate)

Over our heads

In submission

To the laws of

Anti-gravity

And while sitting

On the mat if you tell

Me not to ask

For whom the bell tolls

Or the siren wails

I’ll take comfort

In knowing that

It wails for me

Celebrating the
Not-self's return

A Poem for Bodhi Day

For Jonathan Stalling


From Emptiness to Enlightenment

Is but a short step (or leap) off

The end of a long dark period

As quite suddenly old Gutei

Lifts a single finger and

The first Nen clears its throat

Ready to speak of its own accord
 
 

A Sur-reply to Wallace Stevens

I wrote this stanza answering to a double prompt - (i) a photo (copied below) that I saw posted on Facebook of footsteps trailing off in a field of snow, which basically looked like a calligraphy for half of a Chinese character or so, and (ii) Wallace Stevens' great poem The Snowman.

For the wanderer

Who treks through the snow

And beholds the Nothing

That is there along with

Various other things 

Paled by abstraction
And contingency 

The title of this poem is a cross-reference to a few of my earlier poems that were addressed to Stevens, including one which you can read by clicking here.   But what this new stanza reflects is how lately I've been considering whether The Snowman reflects a Buddhist view of Nothing (as a number of American critics seem to think it does)  as opposed to that of an American modernist insurance executive?  There are many types of Nothing and Stevens, for the most part, seems to stick to thinking about it in a spare positivist framework, at least that's how his mind of winter strikes me - not quite yet inclined to see Enlightenment as the ultimate payoff of Emptiness.

The mind of winter may also be the least of it.  How about this as a further sur-reply: 

For the wanderer

Who treks through the snow

And beholds the Nothing

That is there and even more so

Knows not just the sheer abstraction

Of the landscape but also

Endures its coldest contingencies

Must contend with something

Much more severe than

The mere mind of winter  

A Poem Written in reply to Don Share's Tweet

 

This poem is the result of an exchange on Twitter prompted by Don Share's tweet (in which he quoted the novelist Ali Smith as saying that poets should revere translators) to which I then replied reverence has nothing to do with it -- which as a translator I feel entitled to say -- and he replied he reveres his masters and so on....

And so we tweeted

Back and forth the other day

About the aptness of reverence

For poets and translators
Masterful or otherwise

Yet there was one more thing

I still wanted to say

Because even for poets

I’m inclined to revere

-- like Neruda Akhmatova or Blake --

I would be astonished

If any one of them 

Had ever intended

For their words

To be fetishized thus

Or construed so as to impose

An anthropomorphic gloss

On what is and always

Remains a matter of

The poet’s deepest

Abiding faith

To say nothing

Of the greatest sages of all time

Such as Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zhou

For whom meaning subsumed 

To the messenger  

Would be inimical 

To the Dao itself

And so it goes with

The best of poems

As with any testament or sutra

That it may be understood

More as means to an end

Or an expression of striving

Rather than exalted as

An end or meaning that's
Been fully attained

Words Spoken to a Muse in a Hotel Room in Syracuse New York

 

So no one can accuse me

Of not laying it out on the line

Most of the time

From the very title of it

Leaving little room for doubt

About with whom I'm speaking
Or where I've been

That’s what you call

The network effect

Of modern life

Filling in the story
The way the eye likes

To complete the arc 

Of the rainbow's glory

From only a hint of color

We laughed and drank and talked
And then like a couple 
Of old ghosts draped in muslin

We danced in the moonlight

At the end of the hall

While Marissa took a short nap

*  *  *  *  *

 

--> Marissa crashed out on the bed not long after we checked into the hotel – it had been a long day’s drive, and she’d spent more than 3 hours behind the wheel.   The traffic droned by on the Interstate that ran parallel to the parking lot just outside the motel window.  I sat and after a while fell into a meditative trance.  Then I went downstairs to change the air freshener in the car.  A puff or two later I was all set and went back upstairs.  The drapes at the end of the hallway billowed in the breeze.  Or was it something else, a dust devil perhaps or the exhalation from a nearby air vent?  

Because life is inherently interesting – that’s what I told myself – that’s reason enough to keep writing, even if it only means that I continue scribbling things down in one my little notebooks.  With a memory so porous as mine, there is simply no other way to keep track of all the amazing things that happen in the course of an otherwise quite ordinary day.

Poetry entails a sort of scientific inquiry into the nature of the universe – its spiritual dimensions.  I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the edge of the desktop.  I listened intently to the hard drive whirring hoping I could better discern and transcribe everything it said.

A poem that first started out as a tweet

So here is a new wrinkle in the way I've decided to play around with Twitter.  I started writing a poem as a Tweet.  And then I hit the 140 character limit and I kept going.  Oh well.  I guess this twitter poetry is a rapidly evolving form of art in which we make and break rules with abandon.  In any case, here is the poem that started out as a Tweet:

A poem may

Be nothing more  

Than a moment in time 

That brings heightened command

Over the King’s English and 

In which insight waxes greatly

(in other words, a tweet)
Only briefly to transpire

And no longer suffice

For the expression of whatever

Meaning it was that
Was initially conceived

Ode to Nothing (or a brief note jotted down while examining the vortex)

How the vortex shows
Nothing may be such an active

Presence in our lives

Like the drone of bees

Gathering around

The hive it is an

Effusion we give off

Collectively as a species

As we go about building
Out the honeycomb and preparing
For our own demise

 

The image above is by the artist Brian D. Cohen and first appeared in his book The Fools' Journey, which is filled with striking images based on Renaissance cosmography. You can learn more about Brian's great work on his website:  www.bridge-press.com 

A Note of Thanks to Francois Jullien

I jotted down these lines after first opening up the pages of a revelatory text called The Great Image Has No Form by Francois Jullien.

The ineffable remains

A frontier by rational

Intellect largely undiscovered

Reachable much more readily

Via the Arts than Sciences

Not easily susceptible to

Measurement or dismemberment

Or remembrance in daylight's glare

But in embracing it

We ourselves are subsumed

Ode to the Cherry Street Inn

for my nephew Austin

 

There are so many ways

To kick the bucket

Without even trying

Some involve stupidity

Some serial bad luck

But easiest of all 

Is succumbing

To the living death

Of the day after day

Whereas living in grace

Entails a far simpler plan

If you can only whistle a bar 

Or two of the Hallelujah chorus 

While sipping at your morning coffee

If you can keep an open heart and mind  

In the face of all the sameness

That lies directly ahead

You have to persist in this

Notwithstanding the shadows

Lying in wait outside

The front door

Shadows that seem to impede

Your forward progress  

On February 2^nd much as

Any other day

You have to figure out how

Not to let those shadows

Get in your way

Groundhog Day tells a story

That’s easily misunderstood

As a simple allegory whereas

It's actually a realistic account

Of the pact each of us

May choose to renew in response   

The alarm clock's summons

Each and every day

No matter what quadrant you start out in  

Whether at the Cherry Street Inn 

Or down at the Blue Lotus Temple

Snug at a table at Papa G's

Or across the Square

And out at the old homestead

Sooner or later your lifetime begins

To spin around the coordinate points

Faster and faster in a disorienting way

It's powerful enough to fool GPS 

And it can certainly confound a foolish

Old man like me

*  *  *  *  *

For those of you wondering about the title of this poem, it's a reference to the great Harold Ramis movie Groundhog Day.  And the picture above is the view from the shade of the front porch of the Inn where Bill Murray stayed for almost an eternity and where Marissa and I were lucky enough to stay last night - as guests of Karla and Everton Martin.  Now called the Royal Victorian Manor, for those of you passing though McHenry County Illinois, I recommend it highly.

Poem Written While Sipping a Cup of 7/11's Finest

 

Even the candy wrapper 

Approaches perfection

Sitting at roadside as the world

Spins and strives to regain its balance

***************************
Every cause seeks out its effect 

With longing and finds bliss 

In the attainment from 

One moment to the next
*******************
All ten thousand things
Fit snugly in the pocket
Of emptiness

Ode to the Barrista's Fedora

Just the other day
I reread a favorite essay
By George S. Trow
In which he lamented
His demographic fate
As outcast to his
Patrimony only fit
To wear a fedora
Ironically

And then again today
In a coffee shop
I noticed this barrista
Named Sarah who was
Wearing her fedora
Most fashionably and 
Without a hint of irony

And I realized it all adds up:
No context has been context
Enough to trace our progress
Over the intervening years
As fashions came and went
The hat got passed from
Clark Kent to Jimmy Olson
And now to Lois Lane
And all the while
The goat continues
Tabulating

Under a Gibbous Moon Rising

-->

A dog barks to leeward

I am so in the mix of

The west wind rising

Uplifted with the tide 

And likewise enthralled 
By a milky gibbous moon 

Which has pulled Time adrift 

And so I slip a little too 

A Short Poem for Wittgenstein's Ghost

The punchline to the best jokes
Lately sounds exactly the same
As we figure things out
A minute too late or else
Our sizable cash inheritance 
Only becomes payable the day after
All currencies have been abolished
And or it turns out even words come
With an expiration date
As a medium of exchange
For expressing matters
Of utmost importance 

A Poem Written While Waiting Online at Staples

So this is pretty interesting.  At least to me it is.  I went to buy myself a new notebook this afternoon around the corner at Staples.  And while standing in line I wrote a poem.  I've never quite managed that feat before - in one clean shot a poetic composition complete, ready to stand on its own, without further adieu.  Not only that, I went home right away and published the poem via Twitter.  I wasn't sure at the time I wrote it how many characters it would be.  In other words, it wasn't initially written pursuant to a formal notion or constraint of 140 characters. Rather I wrote the poem I wanted to only subject to the constraint of standing on line at Staples and it just so happened that it fell under Jack Dorsey's prescribed limit to be publishable on Twitter.

In any case, here is the poem I wrote and first published on Twitter together with the photo I took while standing in line.

Now once again
I've returned to
The scene of
Previous mention
In line at Staples
Except this time
I manage to go through
With the purchase


I imagine some of you well might think - it's not much of a poem.  And no doubt that's quite true.  But please bear in mind the circumstances under which it was written.  And also please take a moment to read the poem I wrote immediately prior to this (which you can read by clicking here) to which this poem directly relates if not answers.  So in a sense I suppose it may be cheating slightly - as this poem is formally constrained to being 140 characters or less but it does in part derive meaning by reference to a slightly longer prior poem.  (In fact Haiku originally developed in a very similar manner through a tradition of linked short poems known as Renku or Renga - so there is even good historical precedent for that poetic business model as well!)

In any case, whether it's a good poem or not is utterly besides the point.  What is of note here is that I have made a discovery for myself.  It's such a good idea I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a number of other poets out there exploring similarly how to really use Twitter instead of continuing to resist it.  So far I have only seen poets using Twitter in the usual ways - as a means of self-promotion, casual banter or snide asides.  But getting beyond such banalities there is no reason we can't someday hope to see a genre of poetry spring up here too, like a modern day version of Haiku or better yet Renku!  A new journal or two from some hipsters in Brooklyn is surely soon to follow and what more after that do you suppose? Just wait until next week ...     

Poem Written in Line While Waiting at Staples

   

A Little Lost Leaf

Far too long and

Deep into the weeds
Between stoned and not
There’s naught but

An exhale of difference
Except now the depression
Scuds low enough
To envelope me
Much like a riptide
Dragging my sorry ass
Far out to sea
A tiny speck
All but submerged

              *  *  *

At Staples just now
They asked 8 bucks plus

For a little black notebook
But why pay such

A high price
For poems that
May just as well
Remain thought
But unwritten? 

What an Artist Knows

This was one of the first poems I wrote.  It was on the occasion of my wife's 50th  birthday which we celebrated with friends in grand style at the Cafe des Artistes.  (It was back in the days when we still had money to burn.)

Tonight we'll be celebrating again (happily enough with both new and old friends) on the occasion of the Suffolk Arts Center's new exhibit where 3 of Marissa's orchid paintings will be on display.  So I thought it would be a good idea to dig out the old poem, dust it off and see if I could refurbish it in light of new facts and circumstances of our lives.  Usually I don't like to rewrite older poems but this one is slightly different because I knew at the time I first wrote it that I hadn't gotten it quite right.  More than that, love and marriage is certainly best understood as a perpetual work in progress so it is in that spirit that I offer up these revisions.


 
-->

What an Artist Knows 

              

                               for Marissa

 

What an artist knows
She knows in the flesh
With each turn of her wrist
Each inspiration and breath
She iterates space
With a knowing caress

Eyes open or closed
There’s joy in her bones
Or the sudden most sorrow
May stipple her marrow
So that come what tomorrow
The surer her vision grows

As with the tip of a brush
She enraptures the rose
And captures swift life
As it ebbs and it flows
Through all the harmonics
Of laughter and shade

Until by means
Still more enigmatic

From garden to pallet

She learns to transcribe
The orchid’s tuneful lyric
Onto the petals strewn

Beside and below

Restoring us into
Intimate contact

With beauty in its

Timeline aspect

Of the radiance that endures

Even as each blossom

Comes and goes

 

* * * * * *

Marissa Bridge from The Journey #22

This is one of the paintings from Marissa's new series called The Journey which chronicles the life cycle of an orchid in in bloom.  You can see more of these incredible images on her website here.


(You can also read the earlier version my poem here.)