Poetry |

“Lost Rakusu,” “Episodes From a Crisis (2015)” & “Leading a Tired Horse Into the Years”

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.

Contributor
Alan Williamson

Alan Williamson — poet, short story writer, and critic — is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems, Res Publica and Love and the Soul. Critical writing includes Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identification,  Eloquence and Mere Life: Essays on the Art of Poetry, and Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a grant from the Massachusetts Arts Council. He recently retired from the teaching at UC Davis.

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