For the One Teaching Dreamers.
Gifts at Dusk.
How many times can I step
into his wooden boat.
To meet his dreams,
my dreams? In how many seas
can I gather and hand out
his white roses, yellow violets,
pinpoints that flash like eyes?
I feel warm as his wider ocean.
My heart answers it. Streams
flow underground below the waters.
In dizzy miles above us
his wind currents
whisk across the tops of clouds.
Birds and fish hover
in their elements around us.
His boat rocks.
The boat is still as his sleep—
deep as sunset gold
or one gull´s curved flight. The lights
of stars are seen on the tips of waves
that continually shut their eyes.
The stars and I are waking up
as the breath of the master
sets us free to float
on the ocean of the only dream.
Nothing to Contemplate
Monks ring the bells,
arrange time,
watch the dry, single-winged fruits
fly. The far end of the valley,
the cradle of it,
puts its fingers to their lips
and helps us all to arrange
nothing in mind, eternity
being the sound—across scrubland—
of a gust against the ash trees,
a single wave hitting stones.
North Shore, Sierra Lake, Summer
In the dust-colored aspen,
these moments of wind
before storm. They
gather your life in. quiet.
Big
as the pounding in the sky.
Yen Mountain Moon
My body of granite and mica
would chase down crooked words
black as winning But oh my body
kill the ravens of speed and let
my other body go—
body of indestructible lights
Let it change the miles
on desert waste clean as snow
Let it glide and trace
the filament inside autumn
Moon
over Yen Mountain
a hook watching
Yes
in my body of lights
I travel fine thread
The gold in every season
Leaves curled
like the hands of messages
written for children I need
only sainthood to read
Oh body of lights
let the flower open in sunny air
Allow the sun to burrow
into angled old bones
silver eyes
Allow sun
into teh roundness of infants
Let the petals fall
Do not hesitate
Sunlight on the moon
sends daylight back
for any body I could name
I´ll fly among the trees
among moon pillars
that stream through
Rain
soaks a distant forest
I sit where sunrays
chant divine atmosphere
It is all daylight
It is all no day
A thread among the stars
My bodies have quite leaping I settle
in a leafy affection I spin out
layers of story for a fast runner
a motionless dreamer
a sea of crickets
Trees without end
Slate Colors, Fading-Down Reds.
Fresno River.
Watching night come down. Pickup tail lights
bounce up the gravel road across the river.
Evening kite dives hawklike on a stony sky.
Sparrow-sized birds make streaks across the view.
Cries of children. Rustle of river passing.
A man, hip-deep in the flow, the gray turquoise.
Frayed pastel clouds drinking the slate light.
Quick sound of a fish kissing the surface below me. Heron
riding the air into low trees down the bank a ways.
And scraping sound goes on behind me - crickets at work.
And haiku masters without sound—
or so I imagine - touching the shades of these things,
touching the finger-painted river that
tumbles in silver shimmers toward sunset,
the fading-down red beyond the sliding of water.
I start to remember my sadder friends—
how they talk on about being alone. Why
can't they sit on this bank and be
spinners on this sky? After all,
if I can stare into water whirls where my own love
turns in its cones
and spreads away through the whole of waters,
then I can be anywhere—back along the roads,
sitting with a man who lives in wheelchairs, and we're both
touched, our eyes brightening like any eyes
watching snow-fields on a mountain.
And here is the man, shoving at his wheels, rolling himself
down along the lineup of boxy midtown stores.
And here, the natural drivers of pickups,
the children with kites folded for the evening ride home.
They can be with him, be in his unexplained fire and forward motion,
be with us. Close. The sky disappearing in the end of sunset.
And things being right as other watchers begin musing in town:
Something about a drive tomorrow.
To go and sit. To watch night come down,
pickup taillights bouncing up the gravel road
after the dives and loops of evening kites,
hawklike on stony sky.