Point Pinole

At the end of the pier
A fish raised from the water
Placed in a bucket
Without words expected by a spectator
Because they are not thought by the fisher
Baiting and casting
Then returning stillness
To the silence

Sitting

Sitting without listening
Placed a palm on the cool hardwood floor.
In a moment, rising and moving.

Transit

Infectious serenity, seated, sandals steady, poised with hands exuding comfort
And patience in posture, traveling.

Build

Stack two bricks,
one atop the other,
The friction of their baked pores
grinding and interlocking

Arrange three sticks,
bases resting in dirt,
Tips touching, balanced by
mutually necessary pressure.

Windblown

Windblown eardrums compete with
rolling sunlight, led by
cloudy meanderings

This is a shape

This is a shape the world has.
Willless, drifting, dangerous, hungry, efficient.
Life and unlife strewn meticulously across abstraction.

Toes Touching

Toes touching
Eyes a-blue, starlit, sunny memories reciprocated
Breath marks time

Improvements

Time was, by running these hands through soil, however deeply, I infiltrated it with my ownership.
Now my hands never touch the earth.
Sculpting abstract improvements now, thoughts are commodified.
Ownership changes hands, minds.

Dawn

Out of hibernation, with great and morbid outline,
shapes cast their net past eyes slow from the
exhaustion of a journey unremembered.

Anticipation

My anticipation never hesitates.
Past pinched eye-obstructing brow I,
Neck inclined left,
Meanderlessly imagine following.
My hands hold each other.

Rain

Rain on my umbrella
And in the drainpipe
Distinct rhythms

Problems

From not always so, a collection of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki

Whatever [your] problems are, they are just enough. If these are not enough problems, Buddha is ready to give you more, just so you can appreciate your problems. Buddha is always giving you something.

Setting humor aside (almost) to conclude the point,

If you have nothing to cope with, your life feels empty. So I think you should trust Buddha. A life without problems is like sitting in this zendo for seven days without doing anything.

(the students had just completed a seven-day sitting retreat)

Eyes

Bowing
To the master’s bright blue eyes
With gratitude

Heartstrings

Turn the corner and close the door.
Find a quieter place to listen to your heart beat, beat.
But feel the undulating floor:
The pulse of the dancing,
Dancing.

Watch the lights in a reverie,
Sit and picture yourself dancing,
Meeting her,
Not meeting her.

Your life hangs by a thread
Now unbreakable.
But in the imagined past, intimately delicate,
Pluck the heartstring and be carried to a darker place.
To pain born of happiness,
To fear born of hope,
To a death that exists because it is what you live for.

Guitar

The guitar hides sounds of waves below
As I pull her to her feet
To dance

Dancing

Dancing madly, stirred
By otherwise undetectable winds,
My touch is combustion, and the
Glow
Is unimaginably beautiful,
Turning to ash. I seek
More fuel.

Moving quickly
To escape the heat
Simply ignites my soul
Like kindling.
Like gunpowder.

Flight

I fell.
The same fire I had flown towards incinerated my wings.
Screaming in pain and understanding,
I achieved a phenomenal velocity.

She shot.
Pushed taut until the wire snapped.
Launched with the force of a hateful ballista,
The ground moving so fast beneath her feet she could not place them to slow herself.

Our trajectories coincided.
The impact resounded.
Our carapaces shattered,
Littering our surroundings with shell fragments.
For a moment we beheld each other,
Held each other,
Directly,
Impossibly.
Our combined radiance was so stunning that we were blinded into unconsciousness.

We slept so deeply that when we awoke
A new layer of chitin had already begun to coat our vulnerable bodies.
Only our hands remained free, and
We joined them,
Gripping fervently,
Against the time when even that
Joy would recede.

Afterwards, we each walked numbly away from the scene of the crash.
I was trying not to forget, but not to remember.
She was mending the cord, stronger than before,
To restring the weapon which launched her into the night.

What impulse without suffering could have propelled us
Together forcefully
Enough to so fully annihilate the armor we rely on for survival?

But I feel unfamiliar gaps in my regrown shell.
Near each shoulder blade, the buds of small wings protrude slightly.
Their shape is different than before: They will be unfamiliar.
But perhaps it is time to try flying once more.

Sunday

Some quotes by Quakers.

“Forgiveness is letting go of the desire to change the past”

“When I am doing yoga and my husband enters the room, the movement of air annoys me. When people walk into this meeting late, the breeze feels fresh and wonderful. Now I see it is just my choice.”

“When you are sailing, you work with the wind, but you cannot feel the wind. If you feel the air around you moving, then you are not moving with it.”

Listen

Listen!
There is a whisper gliding
Under your half-open window.

No! Do not rouse
Your Self but carefully, stealthily,
Attentively

Listen!
Between entangled eyelashes will slip
Into your dream
A singular mote of pollen
Drifting silently past watchmen,
Transparently through fortifications
Inciting germination of the seed
Of hope you guard,
Even from yourself.

Dispossessed

Some more inspiration from The Dispossesed by Ursula LeGuin

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger.

Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate?

No man earns punishment, no man earns reward.

Free your mind from the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

Suffering

From The Dispossed by Ursula LeGuin.

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know of our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

More about suffering from Henri Nouwen, Christian theologian.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that a man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there… no God can save us except a suffering God, and no man can lead his people except the man who is crushed by his sins.

Romans

Romans 8:23-25

For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

My favorite quote from Paul.

Sunset

The light to lead me home nears extinction
But I cannot leave
Alone on the summit
Sunset

Chirp

In darkness, you chirp, and hear your best friend chirp in reply.
From miles away, you connect.
Not with the artificiality of the telephone,
But with the natural aesthetic limitation to messages consisting of
A name, A word, An unarticulated cry.

One day, you cannot hear the familiar beacon.
In denial, you wonder:
Am I too far?
Has she changed her call?
No.
She is gone.

Leaving

In anticipation of leaving, I step out,
Adjusting my coat and bag for the rain.
Saying goodbye with my eyes
To a now-familiar fragment
Of the visual opportunity
Unexercised.

Outside

Finally stepping outside
My nostrils fill
With the scent of abated rain

Warmth

Standing near a railing near the sea
Freezing in the wind, under the sun
I don a coat, it flaps with my hair
The rhythm of the waves; my earth
Sailing past the bay.
Sitting to recover heat
A wave of goosebumps distributes
Warmth.

Dawn

Hearing seagulls in the predawn
Non-embrace
The light, sound, waking
Open internal eyes
Looking at one another
Unfamiliar
Once more, drawn, inescapably
To learn

Clouds

Piercing the soft layer of clouds:
Above, more clouds, harder

Curve

the tops of autumn clouds
retreating around the curve
of the earth

Stalagmite

How does a stalagmite form?

Within subterranean waters, small crystals of marble are dissolved into invisible uniformity by stifling gases mixed with the prevailing flow.

When the stream inadvertently, but inevitably, leaves its burrow, falling through open air, the freshness immediately relieves the liquid of its solvent, freeing tiny, pure white particles.

Rarely is the airborne flow great. It drips slowly, leaving some larger unmodified torrent to make its way down, down to deeper stones through unlit caves.

The drops hit, and hit, and hit, leaving behind their crystal impurities; eventually the point of departure constructs a monument to itself.

Through the gradual piling of discards, it attains a height which cannot be ignored.

Ink

Two writers walk
A path irregularly obstructed
By monstrous roots.

Arguing over the meaning of story,
Not a word is written.

At a junction, they hastily
Choose. Divergence.
Leaving trails of unread pages
Dripping with ink.

Filling

I cannot say that music fills me, because I cannot believe in my ability to receive without distorting. Music casts a beam on the crystalline structure of introspection, scattering in colors. Through internal reflection, the energy saturates my cavity beneath the flesh. I am a vessel into which is poured a concentrate uncontainable. As my skin is finally perforated, through goosebumps undulating down spine and arms, I dissolve into radiance, blending into light that was all around, but unnoticed, until now.

Sleeping

Sleeping is the hardest time. It isn’t the vacancy beside me – that emptiness is tempered by the refreshing honesty of solitude. But in the confines of a borrowed room, I am cut off, by modern privacy, from the umbilical threads of companionship that, unbeknownst to their sources, are keeping me alive.

Shadow

With back turned stubbornly to the light I see you, honesty, retreating before me. Why do I feel such envy, hardening into a throbbing ember of hatred, towards you, featureless doppelganger? Your unfailing darkness is free. You do not suffer the love of friends to lift you to unsustainable heights. Staring hard at the cavity which should contain your gaze of malice to match my own, I find that even my greatest emotional exertion is easily contained, absorbed, and forgotten.

Fleeing

Fleeing the sun’s glare for the shade of the pines
and the comfortable glow of friendship.

Light

Light filtered through pine needles
Lifting her sunglasses
And squinting upwards

Words

Love is a word
A word is an impulse
Passing from my lips to your mind
Through smooth perturbations
And reflecting

Speak it! Speak it!
Free it! Free it!

But don’t forget to protect
To capture, sequester
The touch you’ll remember
Is all that lasts forever

Exhaustion

If, of the turbulence,
Of currents competing,
You tire,
Seeking relief,
You grasp
But are denied purchase.
Trade your jealousies
For abiding meloncholy.
Rather than fight, wait.
Pass your fingertips
Over mildewed walls in the gloom
As you slip free of the winds.
But with an open hand
Let go.

Beard

My beard retains water.
How queer! How discomfiting
That a part of me
Could be so compromised
Unexpectedly.

Yet moving on,
My idle fingers
Brush my lips and nose and eyes.
I find a surface alien
To my recollection.

Should I explore further
The extent of familiarity
Of the parts constituating me?
Considering the possibilities,
I hesitate indefinitely.

Weaving

steel
fibers woven thickly
about flesh

Snow

Stepping in one another’s footprints
Sledding on one another’s trails

Conversation

changing seats on the bus
to sit next to a stranger
I strike up a conversation

Mist

morning mist
settles atop pine trees
in spiders’ webs

Dragonfly

straight, cutting
dragonfly wing-glow
I blink

Tears

手に涙　桜気付かなく 顧みる
てになみだ　さくらきづかなく　かえりみる

tear-soaked hands
cherry blossoms unnoticed
looking back

Lab

温かい　研究室で　冬はない
あたたかい　けんきゅうしつで　ふゆはない

In the warm
Laboratory
There is no winter

Sea

青海や　岩棚に座り　遠く見る
あおうみや　いわだなにすわり　とおくみる

Ah, the blue sea!
Sitting on a rocky shelf
looking far away.

Window

窓の外　松葉が交ぜた　細雪
まどのそと　まつばがまぜた　ささめゆき

Outside the window
lies finely powdered snow
with intermingled pine needles.

Ice

せせらぎの　氷の割れ目　践み越える
せせらぎの　こおりのわれめ　ふみこえる

Stepping over
a crack in the ice
of a frozen stream.