Lost Rakusu
I carried you through India.
“Are you monk?” the Soto teacher asked me,
and a real monk took my picture, there at Bodh Gaya,
all because of you.
Only to float down then
in a forgotten drawer, into the hands of
some work-study student housekeeper
who thought you were trash,
or a pretty curio,
or just something he didn’t want to have to deal with …
Did some karma tell me
I had to give you up
to deserve the Japanese scroll my student gave me —
the herons’ beaks and legs
the only black in a snowscape,
thin cloud beginning to cover
the still wholly visible moon?
Go back, I cry to myself,
back up the stairs, before time and space
have done the irrevocable …
But something had clouded my mind.
Am I forgetting that form is emptiness, if I write,
“The difference between things and ideations
Is that things can be lost”?
But this thing was for me alone.
John wrote my koan, in calligraphy,
on your mother-of-pearl white backing:
When you have reached the silver cliffs
and then iron mountains
and you cannot go forward
and cannot go back,
you are at home.
Then added some Rilke, Exposed on the cliffs of the heart
/ / /
“Rakusu: “a kind of inscribed black bib, worn by Zen students after they have ‘taken the precepts’–not monastic vows, at least in America, but a serious commitment to live by the principles of Zen.”
* * * * *
Episodes From a Crisis (2015)
1.
Since Jeanne and I don’t live together, I call her at 3 A.M.
Nothing is working—not the inhaler, not breathing in steam.
I count my in-breaths, watching the dark for her headlights.
No gunshot victims in the ER.
I’m helping her fill out a form, when a nurse hears my breathing.
Suddenly I’m on a gurney, rushing off at full speed.
I’m no longer responsible; I’m the center of many faces.
A pinprick; then, lights out.
2.
I wake after sunset. The evening blue is perfect,
and looks like forty below.
But there’s glass between me and it, and a kind blanket.
Nurses in the background.
No strength for worry, or self-reproach, or fear.
Never so nakedly floating.
3.
Two weeks later. I hunch on a sofa
outside the crowded restaurant.
Jeanne edges through to the bar to bring me a drink.
I’ve always done that for her.
There is a painting on the wall.
The forest has misty tunnels
like the ones our headlights hd lit up so often
on Italian back-roads.
* * * * *
Leading a Tired Horse Into the Years
(Basho)
(for Chuck Foster, who requested it)
You’re right, of course, that getting up in the morning
is worth a poem: how it can seem to take half the day,
like the light’s arrival in midwinter
in the Northwest, if your wife with early dementia
is sleeping in. Coffee, silverware
for a late breakfast, pills
from the seven-day pillbox. Then a shower. The same tomorrow.
As if we raised our own tombstone each morning, for the next
to knock it down …
But somewhere a mad young man’s
imprecations still light up filaments in the sky,
as he drags the heavy load tied to his back.