It started with a trip to CompUSA to buy a monitor, a fancy, big, groovy monitor to hook up to my laptop. The day before I’d been to Best Buy and bought one there, but it didn’t have speakers and was too small, because I’ve got to have a widescreen to match the screen on my laptop. We (my tech guy, Jeff really did it all) set it up and plugged it in and it looked too plain, didn’t have any pizzazz, so we (Jeff, really) packed it all up and slipped it back in its box, re-hooked up the old one and there we left it until the morning when I got back in my car and returned it to Best Buy. From there I hopped on the freeway to Redondo Beach, because, as luck would have it, the Culver City Comp USA didn’t have the monitor I wanted, the one Jeff and I spent a good half-hour scouring the internet for, the one that had speakers and a 22 inch screen. It was ten in the morning so the traffic was good and I zipped along the 405 for the twelve miles, aware that on my left, the 405 south was crawling along, (due to a tanker overturning farther up the freeway, I heard on the radio).

After backtracking a couple of times on Hawthorne Blvd I pulled into the parking lot. The salesman at CompUSA snapped me up as I walked in the door and promptly checked his stock on the VX2235wm and confirmed they had six of them. He commandeered a rolling ladder that took him up to the tallest shelf in the place and pulled down my new monitor, asking me before it even hit the bottom of the shopping cart whether I wanted to purchase the Extended Warranty that CompUSA offered. Insurance, he said and explained how much of a hassle it would be if something went wrong with it and I had to return it to the manufacturer; packing it and shipping it to their service center, while with CompUSA, well, with them, I could just bring it in and they’d replace it, no questions asked, for the same model, or a newer model of comparable value—for two years, he said. After sharing with him my philosophy on insurance; that it was gambling, that it was all about the risk factor, I declined the offer. He heartily agreed with me that insurance was a racket, but wanted to point out it was only $49.99 for the protection plan, and that was for two years and he highly recommended it.

I took my monitor home in the trunk of the car, slid it into my office, didn’t open the box until after lunch, marveling at how sleek and Star Wars it looked, how it had such a presence sitting there on my desk, even if it wasn’t plugged in yet and no image was flitting across it’s pearly surface. I’ve been upgrading computers since the ‘80’s and every time a new piece of hardware lands on my desk, whether it is a mouse, a keyboard or a back-up drive, there’s a thrill that is akin to (I imagine) how the pioneers felt when they put a new wheel on the wagon or blade on the plow. My feeling is if you have to work with machines they should not only perform at a high level, but give you pleasure when you lay your eyes and hands on them. This monitor was all of that—promising many happy hours marveling at its attributes.

By now you must realize that not every fairy tale has a happy ending. And that, of course, goes for computer tales as well. What was to be a "simple install" was fraught with perplexing, mysterious and downright contentious “issues” between the laptop and the monitor. Although the laptop (a Japanese model) said it would support the monitor and could project the high resolution necessary to view images in a normal perspective—well, they were speaking different languages. Calls to ViewSonic (by Jeff, of course) didn’t help. Calls to Toshiba were close to worthless. Installing this driver and that driver, upgrading the BIOS (I have no idea what that means) had no effect at all. When set to the desired resolution the icons on the Desktop ran off the sides of the screen, simply disappearing into the ethers. We’ve (mostly Jeff, again) have tried everything, including considering a faith “computer” healer to simply realign the aura of this obviously recalcitrant laptop. Nothing we have done has brought a whit of change to the dysfunctional relationship these two pieces of equipment have with each other.

By the end of all this I was one fried and wigged out gal; eyes crossed and brain numbed to the point of zombie-ism. I had counted on this technology to ease my stress, to allow me more creative freedom and now, NOW, it seemed an insolvable “issue.” I went to bed early and hoped (as sometimes does happen) that the answer would come in a dream (to Jeff, of course, who would be able to understand it) and that in the morning, the sun would be shining, the birds singing and my laptop and monitor would have made up and decided to shed their differences and embrace—to co-operate and align themselves for my sake and for the sake of their kind. I believed it was possible. Miracles do happen. Yes, but when I woke up in the morning the sun was hidden by clouds and soon it began to rain. It hasn’t stopped all day. Jeff has gone skiing for a week and, as you can see, I’m typing away, looking right into the heart of my new monitor, finding that in spite of resolution “issues,” the words still find their way to the page. And, even though I didn’t get that protection plan I can return the monitor for a full refund within 21 days of purchase. I’m at 20 and counting.

Here’s a fun poem that somewhat expresses the frustration (nay, exasperation) I was feeling yesterday:

POEM

"It’s only me knocking on the door
of your heart" whined the radio
while I bawled feverishly, eating
an orange, salting it up a little.

A gelatin light squeezed windows
I had watched all night at, bored,
lordy was I bored. I thought maybe
some bombers would fly over or

something. No, I was really nuts,
miserable. I called Jan and John
and Al and Waldemar and Grace and then
got scared, hung up, screamed!

and couldn’t get out a window
because I’d locked them all, because
I’m six flights up. And it’s been a
terribly cold winter, radio’s been broke.

Frank O’Hara
Poems Retrieved
Grey Fox Press

Not only did my husband bring me roses, he arranged them, tied bows around the vase, took a photo and gave me that, as well. They look a little disheveled, like they’re jockeying for position, while their stems slide along the bottom of the vase, causing them to tilt, scrunch or hang awkwardly out the side. I feel a little like this myself on a day-to-day basis trying to corral the items strewn across and piled upon my desk, tend to the phone calls, errands and chores that accumulate expoentially if I don’t line them up and knock them down regularly. Inevitably when I slack off, well, that’s when my feet start sliding, a deep fog rolls into my frontal lobe and the ascending piles begin to rock and then slither helter-skelter across the desktop or onto the floor, crashing down upon the smooth surfaces of my mental order. But, all good analogies have to end somewhere and unlike these roses, this disarray does not smell sweet to the nose, brush the cheek softly or light up a room with color. Telephone bills (no one just has "a" telephone bill anymore), grocery lists starting with beets and ending with toothpaste, and insurance claim forms to be submitted, rarely inspire poems, (although I can’t say they never have) and any tears shed over them will be surely be ones of frustration, not the sweet tenderness that rose petals evoke when strewn upon a path.

It’s been a week and they are still in their vase, having never fully opened, rusting around the edges and the water in the vase has gone murky. I will leave Monday for Florida and don’t have the heart to toss them. I’ll leave that to my husband. He brought them into our world. He can usher them out.

Here are a couple of "rose" poems taken off the web at Poets.org. (To see publications by these poets click on their names.)

Go, lovely rose!
by Edmund Waller

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
  
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

    Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
    That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

    Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
    Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

    Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
    May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

********

The Separate Rose: I
by Pablo Neruda
Translated by William O’Daly

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

This week I included this audio recording in the Poetry Evolution E-letter. It is from Poetry Speaks: Elise Paschen & Rebekah Presson Mosby, Editors, Published by Sourcebooks, Inc. 

Silken Tent by Robert Frost

As you can see I’ve been taking it easy the last couple of weeks, giving my hands and eyes and head a rest from the computer and allowing myself time to just hang out, which can be ever so irritating until you get used to the idea you don’t have to be online and on top of everything every minute. The holidays evoke mixed emotions for me (ring any bells?) so I usually go into the major ones with caution, wary that I’m prone to the cynic’s point of view and that watching It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf might send me over the edge into the black night of judgment about materialism and fantasy and how all the rituals we so piously deign as originating with the Christian tradition have their roots in pagan Solstice celebrations or Norse mythology or Wall Street entrepeuners. My husband is the festive one in the family and every year gets out the handtruck and swivels the potted sequoia tree into the house, pulls the plastic bins full of ornaments out of the garage and festoons not only the tree, but every flat surface in the living, dining and sun rooms with angels, bells, drums, reindeer, Santas, ribbons and stockings in green, red, gold and silver. I’ve learned to surrender to it all. He loves it. It makes him happy and truthfully, it does serve as a reminder that life is joyous and playful, if you take the time to see it that way.

We stayed in L.A. this year. In the past we’ve used this break from work to travel to India, Bali, Costa Rica, Yosemite, Oregon and other getaways, where we can reflect on the year just passed, make plans for the year ahead and just get out of the magnetic field of the eight million people zipping around Southern California. The weather was superb and the vibe pretty mellow around the city this year. We went on a couple of hikes up in the Hollywood Hills at Runyon Canyon, where dogs are king and can run off leash. We had a delicious Greek dinner at Taverna Tony’s in Malibu with the staff of our chiropractic office; Jane, Lori & Dr. Theo. We didn’t make it to any movies, though we watched Pirates of the Carribean Part 2 and the aforementioned, Elf, on video. Our son, Sat Sangeet, came down from San Francisco for three days over New Years and we played a couple of games of Scrabble, had breakfast with friends after one of our Runyon excursions and while my husband went to the Rose Parade he and I took a long walk to the parkand back then hung out, watching the parade on TV then the Rose Bowl game.

It was relaxing. I found myself letting go of "the push," allowing for flow to happen.  There is no urgency. There is no deadline. The only deadline is when I die and really that’s just a transition to another energy field, so why not take it easy, be kind, look into the eyes of not only my dear ones, but every ONE? What’s all this desperate scrambling about? Why can’t things just unfold? It’s like taking this hard, hard clay of determination and driven-ness and pouring water over it until it softens, softens and can be gently molded into a work or art, something smooth and curved, something that never would have come forth had it been kept in a clenched ball, not allowed to breathe, to open up. 

I go into 2007 knowing that there are still many doors in my psyche that need to be pried open so that the fresh air of gratitude and joy can flow into the dusty and musty corners of old thinking. In my writing, my thoughts, spoken words and deeds I am ready for more beauty, grace and kindness to be present. In each of us there is the most profound wonder that exists–that unique combination and permutation of time, space and circumstances that is who we are, the only one that ever was and ever will be, who is uniquely me and perfectly you. It’s pretty heady stuff when you think about it. Seems like a big waste if you don’t run with it, or swim, or fly with it. So, for you my prayer is that each minute of each hour of each day of the coming year be a bounty of blessings, whether they look or taste or feel like it, they always are and may you look in the mirror and love that crooked nose, wrinkles around the eyes, the funny way your mouth tilts. It’s all perfect, simply because it is.

The Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades at the Self Realization Fellowship Center 

Holiday Dinner with (left to right) Lori, Jane, Me, Hubbie & Dr. Theo 

The Family at Runyon Canyon 

Breakfast at Hugo’s in Hollywood with friends. 

 
Sleeping in and snuggling with Yoshi. 

*********** 

A Man in His Life

A man in his life has no time to have
Time for everything.
He has no room to have room
For every desire. Ecclesiastes was wrong to claim that.

A man has to hate and love all at once,
With the same eyes to cry and to laugh
With the same hands to throw stones
And to gather them,
Make love in war and war in love.

And hate and forgive and remember and forget
And order and confuse and eat and digest
What long history does
In so many years.

A man in his life has no time.
When he loses he seeks
When he finds he forgets
When he forgets he loves
When he loves he begins forgetting.

And his soul is knowing
And very professional,
Only his body remains an amateur
Always. It tries and fumbles.
He doesn’t learn and gets confused,
Drunk and blind in his pleasures and pains.

In autumn, he will die like a fig,
Shriveled, sweet, full of himself.
The leaves dry out on the ground,
And the naked branches point
To the place where there is time for everything.

Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry: 1948-1994
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.   

After hearing for months from my friend Hilda about the monthly poetry reading at Village Books in Pacific Palisades I finally made it last night. I allowed myself plenty of time to make the drive down Pacific Coast Highway and up Temescal Canyon Road to the village center. Three of us (Hilda, our friend Barbara from the Nightbirds, and I) met at six for dinner and to catch up on our respective personal and poetry news, then we walked the two blocks in the crispy coastal air to Village Books. The place was packed, and that doesn’t take much in this diminutive bookstore. It’s one of those rare (I refuse to say "dying") breeds of locally-owned booksellers and with the cost of rents in a place like the Palisades they have to use every square inch to sell their books, which were stacked, piled, and shelved from top to bottom, wall to wall. There were about twenty chairs set up in the front facing the display window and we were advised to grab one now or risk standing.

The monthly readings are called the Moonday Poetry Readings and are co-hosted by Alice Pero and Lois P. Jones. Alice was the emcee for the evening and had us all seated and the first half-hour of open mic readings started right on time at 7:30. Both Hilda and I had signed on to read, along with about fifteen other local poets. Spirits were definitely cheerful and there was a warm and welcoming energy from the regulars, which helped the few newbies, such as myself, feel right at home. Each reader was given two minutes or two poems and the poems, for the most part were well written and well read. I went fourth in the line-up and read a new prose poem and a list poem I had written at Squaw Valley this summer. (To read and hear them scroll down to the next post.)

There is always a "feature" poet or poets, and this month it was a father/son duo, Willis (the father) and Tony Barnstone (Associate Professor at Whittier College). Tony went first and read from a variety of pieces: his translations of the Chinese poets from a soon-to-be-published manuscript and his own poems, both published and new. His presentation was lively, engaging and relaxed. He was good at keeping the audience from glazing over (as he put it) by varying the length of the poems and the subject matter. There were a few poems from one manuscript he is working on that were about WWII soldiers, relaying their own accounts of the events of that war and how they were changed by them. These were my favorite and I would love to have this volume when it comes out. For more information on Tony and to read a couple of his poems click HERE.

Willis Barnstone is a man who has been many, many places on this earth and has rubbed elbows with the likes of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, been published in some of the top journals and magazines in the country, as well as being fluent in Greekand French (he read one poem in each of these languages). He read poems some wonderful poems taking us all over the world and into some lyrical and often humorous places. It was truly inspiring to see a man of his age and stature so delighted to be reading to this small, but enthusiastically attentive group. For more on Willis Barnstone click HERE.

Following the feature reading there was another half-hour of open mic with some wonderful poems; one lady sang, one young man read his poems from his Blackberry (having forgotten to bring poems on paper) and the last gentleman (who came all the way from Westchester) played an exotic stringed instrument with two fret boards (is that what you call them?). I think he said it was a kind of dulcimer, but I could be completely wrong. At about 10:15  the evening wound down and then books were signed and sold. Myself, I was pretty tuckered out so headed on home having had a perfectly charming and surprisingly stimulating evening. As much as I love poetry I have found that even I can get too much of it and start to zone out after an hour or so. Not last night. It was good stuff and I’m definitely going to be frequenting the Monday night readings in the future and keep bringing my poems along. Next time I’ll bring my camera and get some shots to post, as well. If you’re in the area I highly recommend it. Click on MOONDAY to visit their site.

I’ve been reading a bit of Thomas Lux’s poems this past week. He is going to be at two upcoming events in January and February that I am attending so thought I’d sit with some of his work. I like his mix of reality and fantasy, how he straddles these two worlds with a kind of sad, angry, compassionate humor. I know that sounds contradictory, but I believe we can inhabit all these emotions at the same time, in fact, it’s more the norm (and really healthier when we do), than having a singular emotion powering our outlook. He goes for irony in a big way and  dips often into a wry look at how society functions as in his poem You Go to School to Learn.

You go to school to learn to
read and add, to someday
make some money. It—money—makes
sense: you need
a better tractor, an addition
to the gameroom, you prefer
to buy your beancurd by the barrel.
Three’s no other way to get the goods
you need. Besides, it keeps people busy
working—for it.
It’s sensible and, therefore, you go
to school to learn (and the teacher,
having learned, gets paid to teach you) how
to get it. Fine. But:
you’re taught away from poetry
or, say, dancing (That’s nice, dear,
but there’s no dough in it). No poem
ever bought a hamburger, or not too many. It’s true,
and so, every morning—it’s still dark!—
you see them, the children, like angels
being marched off to execution,
or banks. Their bodies luminous
in headlights. Going to school.

I like where he wanders with his poetry, speaking of the everyday, examining how we go about life and what’s beneath the surface of what we say and do, as individuals, families and societies. His poems feel relaxed and sure of themselves in a offhand way–not with a lot of puffing up or "I’ve got it all figured out." Here’s one more of his poems from Split Horizon, published in 1994. I’ve recorded both these poems and one more, The Perfect God.

 A Streak of Blood that
Once was a Tiny Red Spider

is all there is left of it which walked
down the page of a book
and which I meant only to brush away
but crushed
to this minuscule skid mark—4 mm high, ½ mm wide: baby
red scar, somewhat askew

hyphen forever
on page 211 of Lost Tribes and Promised Lands.
It had many legs—it was moving fast.
Some version of a heart must have been in there.
Some sensory talents.
Descending down a page,

little literate one, you came to the end of your page,
and thus published
I close your tomb to a sound
I love—hollow, soft: whump,
and give it back to a shelf
and again, someday, I hope, a reader.

You Go to School to Learn
A Streak of Blood that Once was a Red Spider (I say the title incorrectly on the recording. So sorry.)
The Perfect God
from New & Selected Poems, Mariner Books

Last month I shared a piece I wrote about Charles Bukowski when I was in the Vermont College Adult Degree Program and thought I’d continue to post these essays/book reflections from time to time as a way for me to revisit my thoughts on the poet and their work and to see if you have any thoughts on them you’d like to put out there. Mark Doty has been a favorite poet of mine since I first started reading his work. After I heard him read and speak at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival he became even more dear to me because of his honest and generous nature. He always speaks of poetry in the highest terms and he seems clear that he is a servant of poetry, not the other way around. I like his playfulness and his profundity, his earthliness and spirituality. I appreciate his devotion to the art of poetry and to the art of life. To read more about him and hear him read his poems go to his website at www.markdoty.org.

Mark Doty

Source, Harper Collins, Publisher

Here’s the essay followed by a complete poem of his. If you want to read Fish R Us it is in Poems I Love.

The poems of Mark Doty in Source ring like clear bells through the heart and soul. His brilliance in language is clearly evident as he is completely competent writing in the most simple, straightforward vernacular, as well as a highly honed and studied one. One aspect of his poetry that can never be doubted is his ability to paint intensely vivid images intertwined with acutely personal perceptions. Doty writes angular poetry. There are few straight or curved lines of thought. I had to read many of his poems two or three times to tune into their rhythm and flow. Many times the leaps from one stanza to another, or one word to another, would leave me a bit baffled as in the first two stanzas of the poem, “Fish R Us”:

Clear sac
of coppery eyebrows
suspended in amnion,
not one moving –

A Mars,
composed entirely
of single lips,
each of them gleaming –

The jump from the first stanza to “A Mars” turned my logical mind around a few times before I just allowed it to be and enjoyed the thought of another planet, the concept of a totally foreign place where we have no point of reference.

(Read on …)

I was surprised to find the poem “Why Regret?” in the new volume of Galway Kinnell’s poetry. I had just been thinking about regret on Sunday while driving to the airport on my way back to L.A. from Oregon. I don’t know why it came up, maybe it was because I was in my old-stomping grounds, where I grew up and made so, so many blunders, as adolescents and teenagers have a proclivity to do. Maybe it was because I always have second thoughts after I speak in front of a crowd, immediately have a hundred different thoughts about what I could have said better, or why didn’t I say thank you to so-and-so, or tell a good joke or story, or slow down when I read, look up and smile at the audience, etc.

When the word “regret” passed through me my first thought was that it was such a small and pitiful emotion, that it was the forerunner of guilt and remorse and shame, all of which have the power to rend a human being helpless in having any kind of happiness in their lives. Oh, I’m not saying that we should bounce along doing all sorts of nasty and self-serving acts, have no sense of the harm we cause others by our actions and feel we completely deserve to get off scot-free. I fully agree it’s important to own up to where you’ve let others down, brought suffering or just plain been a jerk. You could say it comes down to semantics and I guess I see regret as another one of those heavy stones that you put in your sack of woes and drag around with you, along with resentment, hurt, grudges, etc, until you can’t walk, can hardly stand up straight anymore.

Reflection, realization and responsibility all seem to be more productive “re” words to me in healing and moving on in life. I love that Kinnell’s poem never once addresses the question of “Why Regret?” directly. He shows us everything to not regret, beautiful, tender, wild, images that fill us everyday with wonder: “ironworkers / sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable” and “the wren / and how little flesh is needed to make a song” and “pinworms as some kind of tiny batons / giving cadence to the squeezes and releases / around the downward march of debris.” If we must regret (and I believe it is possible to not), then regret only a little, only a fraction of what you have beheld in life, maybe three per-cent, at most five. For the other, the ninety-five to ninety-seven look around, inhale, reach out, swallow, lie down in a shallow stream, look into the eyes of a child, meditate so deeply you forget where you are and who you are. These are places where regret and guilt and shame do not survive. This is joy. This is the “mayfly struggling free,” the monarch’s “inner blazonry.” This is waking in the night to, “find ourselves / holding hands in our sleep.”

Galway Kinnell

Why Regret?

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of the world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-arts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers

Last night when I was dozing off to sleep with a book in my hands, trying to read just one more line, get through at least five pages before giving over to sleep, I had this realization that I was feeling content. The whole day I had this feeling, though I had not named it. It was one of those days in L.A. where the morning haze never did burn off and it was that kind of overcast where no rain is going to happen but everything is muffled; colors, sounds, movements. I spent most of the day in the house, only went out in the afternoon to run to the pet store for dog food, the beauty shop to pick up some facial cleanser and Trader Joes for the macaroni and cheese I just had to have for dinner. I didn’t do anything special during the day, though everything I did felt special in some way or another. Even paying the bills or watching TV later on in the evening–taking in a few minutes of a Laker game and liking the look of the team this year, actually considering going to a game and cheering them on (which I haven’t felt since Magic & Kareem hung up their tennies).

It was elusive, really, where that contentment originated, but I think most likely it was a response to all the traveling I’ve done in the last few months and the appreciation deep in my bones, to being home, to being secure and comfortable–an appreciation for all that I have and not wanting to be anywhere else or with anyone else at that moment. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. I was just as I was supposed to be. It was sweet to drift off to sleep with these thoughts in my mind. I thanked the comforter on my bed, the green water glass on the nightstand, the carpet on the floor, pictures on the wall of my son and my teacher and the Golden Temple in India. It was all right. Perfect. In harmony. Ah, to be human in these moments is such a blessing and helps me understand the other side, those dark nights of the soul, so much more. They exist side by side. Just as there are dragons and goblins and mice that come into my life to shake lose what I hold onto and open me up to what I fear, there are those moments so soft and tender where no one is witness; those moments when life is poetry and poetry is all around, not in words but in essence, in vibration, in every cell and molecule in and around me.

********

Ten Thousand Flowers

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

Wu-Men

***

Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen

In the high seat,
before-dawn dark,

Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging on Poorman Creek.
Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life.

Gary Snyder

***

The Perfume of Flowers!…

The perfume
of flowers! A haw

drops such odour
it stops me

in the wall
of its fall. Love

arrests

Lime-trees
saturate

the night. We walk
in it

On a path jonquils
fill

the air. Love
is a scent.

Charles Olson

***

West Wall

In the unmade light I can see the world
as the leaves brighten I see the air
the shadows melt and the apricots appear
now that the branches vanish I see the apricots
from a thousand trees ripening in the air
they are ripening in the sun along the west wall
apricots beyond number are ripening in the daylight.

Whatever was there
I never saw those apricots swaying in the light
I might have stood in orchards forever
without beholding the day in the apricots
or knowing the ripeness of the lucid air
or touching the apricots in your skin
or tasting in your mouth the sun in the apricots.

W. S. Merwin

***

from
Vacillation

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

William Butler Yeats

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