For Marissa - New Year's Eve/New Year's Day

If you were to break glitter down
To the subatomic level
Do you think it would
Still shimmer all the way
To the bottom rung of
The ladder of visible light?

Of course it would!
The quantity of pixie dust
Is not strained
But is distributed
Roughly in equal measure
All through the universe
Which seems to consist
Of one particle glitter
For every million of grit

With certain exceptions
For pooling and puddling
Here and there
Yet even so
Wherever we see it gathering
In greater concentration
There we can infer
Lies the growing tip of
The homunculus rising
The very sparkle of life

All that glitters is not gold
Yet still it may hold far
Greater intrinsic worth
Than all the fool's gold
Locked away in the vaults
Across the vast glittering earth

Plot Summary for Next Week's Episode

Suddenly the story lurches forward

Along with a quickening of the pace

Concentric circles alone

Don’t make a champion

But hitting three rings on

Your first go is no

Cause for disgrace

You had hoped for
A golden scarab
In the dead of winter
But all you heard
Was a stink bug
In the rafters high overhead

This is one of the early poems from my new collection, which is being written in the form of notes that I'm sharing, in real time, with the show-runner for the upcoming season of my life.

For Mom - after a first visit to Academy Point

With a command view

Of the Mystic Harbor

End of life is a time of life

With an idiom all its own

As the fire banks lower

It shows us how to re-calibrate hope

Downward moment to moment

Taking comfort in the ebb and flow

Of the Mystic River itself

*  *  *  *  *  

It's all assisted living

From the midwife's first slap

To our dying embrace

The passions we lay claim to

As our own most assuredly

Are merely borrowed from

Some ulterior place
All the closer to which
You now reside

The Reprobate's Son - less than wholly transformed

It's not just anyone but
The reprobate's son who
Has been less than
Wholly transformed
Across several lifetimes of regret
In each and every case
Having waited patiently
To see just how long
Virtue was going to take
Before taking good hold
Still waking up stoned and
Occasionally dreaming of Zhuang Zhou
And otherwise alas still
Seemingly possessed of
A passably translucent
Pair of butterfly wings
For whenever they might
Turn out to be needed

Sitting in Chan

Sitting in Chan

Open to stillness

Is both the hardest

And easiest thing to do

It's the event horizon

Where discipline and

Effortlessness converge

And where intention all

But disappears while the

Center reigns supreme

Songs for the Here and Now (for Osip Mandelstam)

I

Here and now come
 Little magnolia buds

Set hard against

December’s frost

Saving their best

For springtime

In truth the future can’t

Come soon enough

Once they have laid down

Their downy nubs

II

As we journey along

We strive to be
Better attuned
To the here and now

Yet sometimes that too
Seems overly confining
 As if we’ve been trapped

Inside these two boxcars that are

Coupled together and rolling
Along a circular track


III

Peering out through the slats

 What we truly yearn for
Is to soar like the winter geese

Wherever they may be bound
We too ultimately belong
Only to the cloudless sky

IV


The noise of time
It comes and goes
The more we hurry
The louder it grows
Until it subsides
In times of repose

But even then
It will flare up again
And can't be denied
We must surrender to it
Like a tinnitus
Rooted deep
Inside our brain

Poem for a December Morning

A beautiful morning on December 1st.  The sun rose in the east much as expected.  Diadems of frost shimmered atop the spare stalks of winter grass. Was it a slug on its last prison walk that had drawn the dazzling paisley pattern on the sidewalk before me?  A troop of turkeys gathered and dispersed as I advanced. And for no good reason I thought about William Carlos Williams and composed this little poem.

The news that may be found in poems only

Faintly resembles the silence broadcast daily

By the blade of grass and ear of corn

So you may peruse some verse 

If you wish to be informed

By second hand whispers 

But only wordless in the presence

Of nature can you hope 

To be truly transformed

Photo courtesy of DeviantArt

  

Poem for Thanksgiving

Buried alive in the blues

All the ways you can choose

Wherever you look there’s

Bad news and thick smoke

Just hold onto some myoho

That may be the best

One can aspire to

Yearning bears the seeds of forgetting

Let the dying yellow bleed into pale green

Late autumn now looks indistinguishable

From early spring when everything

Is said and done

From the meridian

We stand equidistant

The trees all but bare

With a blush of hope

Either before or after

The most vivid colors

This is the point to

Which we have come

It’s all in the giving

The expectancy for tomorrow

That faint lump you feel

In the back of the throat

********************

On this morning's walk I was struck by the incredible resemblance of late autumn to early spring -- something I never noticed before -- when the leaves are all but stripped bare, it's the moment when the dying yellow bleeds into pale green.  That's what this Poem for Thanksgiving is all about.

Ode to Depression

Action begets action but

Inaction is its own reward

Without will or want

Stillness overtakes

The human heart

Settling down as
Ripples ambiguate

Across the surface
Of the pond

To speak of it
Is to loosen the spell
To admit the truth
To oneself is
To take but a sip
From a cool
Restorative well

But no less unceasingly
It's a flat expanse of earth
Where I have come to dwell
No more than a sandbar really
Sic transit the gulls and herons
From one day
To the next while
Clouds linger
On the horizon

Poem for the End of Summer

Where are you?

A cricket cries

Again and again

Under the light

Of the waxing moon

Over here

Comes the
Irregular reply

From the edge of

My perceptual field

Above the fan's
Whoosh and whir
Ever so faintly I feel
The heavens wheeling

The still point

Of the turning world

Is turning still

Every cycle and season has

Its beginning middle and end

Over parsecs and eons
Of continual forgetting
Every something becomes

Nothing and soon enough

Becomes something again

Nature's First and Last Green is Golden

Nature's first and last green is gold

The hue to which all life is beholden

With eyes open or closed the warmth

Within and without unfolds

From seed to flower to sheaf

Howsoever it may seem brief

We are transported beyond

The confines of a single season

As from dawn to dusk to dawn

It is gold alone that endures

Vincent van Gogh, Soir d'été, 1888.

This poem is in reply to Robert Frost's poem which I have copied below.  Much as I admire Frost's poem I think he rather misses the point, which Van Gogh captured on a summer night altogether much more clearly.

Nature’s first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold

Her early leaf’s a flower

But only so an hour

Then leaf subsides to leaf

So Eden sank to grief;

So dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay

A Poem for the New Moon (by Jiao Ran)

There are quite a few great Tang poems written to or about the moon, Li Bai's Drinking Alone in the Moonlight and Li He's cycle of twelve lunar poems being perhaps among the best known.  Here's a little gem by Jiao Ran that I came across this morning, which strikes me as somewhat unique -- a tribute to the new moon or the moon that isn't there.  Being on the verge of a new moon and a new lunar year, now seems as good a time as any to publish it here on my blog.

Poem for the Mountain Moon

Night after night

An old man

Always takes faith

In the mountain moon

Tonight the old man arrives

But the mountain moon

Is nowhere to be seen

* * * * 

詩山月

皎然

夜夜故人

長教山月

今故人來

山月知何在

It may be worth mentioning that Jiao Ran, in addition to being a poet, was a Buddhist monk, so I don't think it's overreaching to suggest that this poem can be read in a spiritual light, or perhaps better said, in the murk of the lack thereof.