Your round face, scarf
and wide-closed eye –
I’ll never see the Buddha
another way again
For Maya
Your round face, scarf
and wide-closed eye –
I’ll never see the Buddha
another way again
For Maya
I don’t watch zombie shows but know something about what
emerges from thy dank wood in the boonies, Lord –
have as need be hid behind equal trees,
backing and circling ever outward, dodging
hands and cool blank eyes, upward yes
into the air, “free” of it all, now, over there.
But you, wide and ghostly, neither leave nor solve
but hang, steady as the mist, as drops on ferns,
spores of the underside, your heart
rotting out the log. Till when? – we change?
Your breath is gone, but hold it still.
For we’ll not, ever, no matter what we’ve got,
(hell if we will)
change.
We could throw away all the clocks
and move freely through time,
get ahead of our sufferings
and swerve round them,
circle back and laugh.
Impotent suffering.
Fool.
But wouldn’t we then, even then
carry inside what we’d lost
and know it
and die?
It seemed like a fine plan,
writing Himself into His own work,
to taste and be tasted –
descending in scarlet,
sinking to flesh –
but who knew the life of man
was a brutal current turning,
slow and wide
then swifter and deeper
till the sky
became
a little white circle climbing
I close my eyes and try again
Of iniquity
starts with the usual
shift and give –
O God! –
a shudder under
some distant sea
that jumps to run invisibly
to slap and scatter
and stink and stay.
He dropped to where
there’s no dropping lower.
She lays her eggs
in a gravel nest,
crowns them with rock
and flees.
Another lost single.
Sometimes
someone
will pick one up
and stick it on a branch.
And then it waves
wanly.
It’s like he’s in a cave.
He can’t leave the cave.
But sometimes he can
come up far enough
to see the light.
And sometimes I can
go down to where
I’m still not afraid.
And we meet for a time.