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Archive for November, 2011

can’t have it but can’t live without it tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on November 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

the sun will go down anyway
will go down soon
regardless, I move
across the street
one last stroke of warmth

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Losing the Self

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

The boy tugs
on the tooth,
it hangs
by the root,
I hang
on his joy
oh gaping
beamish budding
boy.

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The Skate Skier Talks to the Coyote Willows

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 27, 2011| 2 Comments »

You will remember how two weeks ago
I skied into you, right through the tall center
of your many red stems. How I fell.

I was transfixed by you at the base of the hill.
I forgot everything but willow. But
today I remember to train my eye

to corduroy snow, to follow its parallel
grooves through the gulley.
See how I slide up the other side with no effort.

It is not that I did not notice you,
your whispers, your slight bend
in the almost breeze, your tips waving

like sirens, your long slendernesses,
how easily you rise from snow toward sky.
I noticed and then curled my body into the curve,

looked ahead, became drift, became wind, became
current and passed you, slipping myself into
the next moment which is always, always passing.

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Reluctant Student Tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 26, 2011| 1 Comment »

Be still.
—Lama Surya Das

It would be easier
to walk ten hundred miles
through swamps
than to do what you ask of me:
nothing.

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Love is Like That Tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 26, 2011| 1 Comment »

all night
the train hurls
itself forward
inside, I don’t even
hang on

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Vast though it is tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 25, 2011| 1 Comment »

our fire may be small
but even
a small flame
holds back
the night

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Because

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 23, 2011| 2 Comments »

Running south beside Mission Bay,
one comes to the place where the city
has stenciled, Courtesy Please,

only it looks to me as if it says
Curtsy Please, and so I do, to the whole
majestic world, and to the joy of mistakes,

and find myself overwhelmed by the wish
to bless everything in sight, and so
with the power in me—inherent

and equal to the power in everything else—
I bless the short man with one good eye
and the pelican as it keels then dives,

and I bless the fish it catches. I bless
the sky above me and the worn concrete
below me, the old men walking slowly

and the beautiful beautiful women.
I bless the ones who built the pavilion,
utilitarian and new. And I bless the short grass,

the playgound equipment, the water,
the mallard ducks, too. I bless each thing
for the pleasure of blessing, imagining

everyone else doing the same,
all of us blessing each other, ourselves,
one elation, indivisible, slivers of god,

with hilarity and just us for all.

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Note to Self

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 22, 2011| 1 Comment »



Even night is not night enough.
—Franz Kafka, in a letter to Felice, his fiancé, 1913.

When even the night
is not night enough
nor does salt seem
salt enough, and the hole
in the looming who am I
is enormous,
but not enormous enough
to gulp down the damn ego whole,
perhaps that is the time
to sit very still
and forget about writing.
There is nothing,
nothing the words
can do then except
not enough because
nothing is enough,
which is to say
only nothing
is enough, and perhaps
in that inadequate night
we are sufficiently vulnerable
to really know nothing.

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go ahead tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 21, 2011| 1 Comment »

draw a line
in the sand
with your toe—
just see if the ocean
cares.

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chicka chicka chicka tanka

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 21, 2011| 2 Comments »

and the train
trundles through
the darkness
leaving in its wake
the most amazing silence

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