Posted in Uncategorized, tagged meditation, poem, poetry, purpose, what are we doing here? on July 18, 2015| 1 Comment »
How soon I forget
the reason I walked into this room.
It is not hard
to walk back to where I was
moments before
and usually I remember.
Sometimes I forget
the reason I am here,
and I do not know where
to go back to, wherever
we came from,
to retrieve the purpose,
though sometimes
when I sit very still
it arrives, not as an answer,
not as a word, more
as a sense that I am being breathed
and that I have not
travelled so far,
that whatever I have come here for
is right here.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged alphabet menagerie, fear, identity, poem, poetry, purpose on October 7, 2014| 6 Comments »
In a snowstorm, the yaks know to huddle together,
calves in the center. They press the bulk of their bodies so close
to each other that their breath forms a column of visible steam.
Elsewhere, in burrowed colonies, the yellow jackets
work in concert to forage for food, to feed the larvae,
to expand the nest and defend the queen.
It’s hardwired in us, this will to survive. Just look
at the yucca with its cascade of lemony petals
surrounded by tough, sword-shaped leaves.
Just look at you. Just look at me. See how we
like to hide behind our identities—lover,
loner, baker, runner, singer, prayer, biker, child.
As if we could use the list of our interests
and roles as a shield against our greatest fear—
the fear that we don’t know what we are doing here.
So we shout to each other like yodelers—here I am,
this is me, who are you? And we hold up invisible yardsticks
to ourselves, to each other, in an effort to learn our value.
And our egos rise and fall like yoyos in the hands
of a child who’s just learning to play. We think we’re someone.
We fear that we’re not. And what are we doing here anyway?
Is this why some choose solitude? Choose to live
beyond the shoulds and masks? Live like the yeti—
unknowable, unseeable, known only by stories and tracks?
Today, the hummingbirds are gone, and the waterfall is thin
in its plunge. The hours are warm though the sun is low—
and I can’t say that I know what we’re doing here,
but I think it has something to do with noticing the missing birds
and the thin waterfall and the timber in your voice when you tell me
you don’t know who you are. Me neither, friend, but whatever I am
fell in love with the way that the first morning sun today glanced
the frosted grass, and I could see dozens of columns of steam rise across
the whole field before the yellow jackets emerged from their nest.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged attractors, loss, math, poem, poetry, purpose on January 8, 2014| 2 Comments »
Look out the kitchen window
into the night, and all you see through the pane
is a vague version of yourself,
not quite transparent,
but substanceless.
Perhaps car lights pass
through the shape of your head.
And then it is just your reflection
imprinted on darkness again.
*
I wanted to write you a letter
about the dream I had last night.
We were talking on the phone.
This is how I knew it was a dream.
*
A chained male dog
will strain his leash
when he can smell
a bitch in heat.
*
Try to listen beyond the window.
Beyond the refrigerator hum.
Beyond the sound
of your own breathing in, breathing out.
*
There was a necklace in the dream,
a strand of green diamonds,
one I lost long ago.
There it was in my hands again,
and I thought to myself,
as I balanced it in an armful of things,
you are going to lose it again.
*
What do you hear?
*
One can measure it,
the dog’s desire,
by the force of his tug,
the direction of his pull.
In modern mathematics,
in the language of dynamics,
we call this an attractor,
a purpose or motive that connects us
with our virtual future.
*
The point: it is not
the past that drives us.
Not even the greatest loss.
We are pulled toward that
which has not yet happened.
The future yearns for us.
*
The phone rings,
the plot thickens.
The woman in the window
reaches toward the receiver.
The voice on the other end
is not yours.
*
You have prepared
your whole life for this moment,
the one you let go
right now.
*
Machines do not have internal purpose.
The typewriter writes what the poet types.
The car goes where the driver goes.
The refrigerator chills what is put inside.
But everything that is alive
is pulled toward certain attractors
that help with growth, survival,
continuation of the species.
The honey bee moves to the flower.
The mud wasp digs a funneled nest.
The black widow spiders will eat
the other offspring in the sac.
So who could explain why,
though a letter will never arrive at your door,
I watch as the woman in the window
takes out her pen, consider how much
she must long to write you a letter,
watch her as she stares
at her empty page.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, goal, path, poem, poetry, purpose on July 4, 2013| 1 Comment »
The path is the last impediment to the path.
—Lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
The path had not ended.
We had not arrived
anywhere except in a stand
of spruce where a new path
sprung to the left, and another
narrower path led to the right.
The main path curved up and
around the corner. I did not want
to turn around. I wanted to
arrive somewhere—to have
a marker of some kind. A view,
perhaps, or a giant stone.
Or a field of pink Indian paintbrush.
As it was, we turned back down
at the spruce glade where the paths
criss crossed. We all know we can never go back.
But this path gave the impression
that all was the same, that nothing
had changed between the time we
hiked up and the time we chose
to hike back down. But everything
had changed in the way that everything
does. And we didn’t notice it.
As we seldom do.