Keith Emmons' Poetry

what falls away is always

2010-07-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

what falls away is always

Keith Kapleau
Moondrifter
Marinship Marina
Sausalito, California

Acknowledgment is made to the following publications for poems which originally appeared in them.

Espresso:
Picasso's 91st Year

Loon Magazine:
Nothing can refute

Sun-Lotus Haiku:
howling and storming outside;
after the winds all day;
four blackbirds.

dedicated to my past; to the soul of my present;
dedicated to this future.

Contents

Sails Beautiful Sails 11
Evening on Houseboat Moondrifter
After Reading Robert Bly 12
It is raining. 13
Raindrop Soggy Raindrop Song 14
after the rain has stopped 15
Storm Tail 16
quiet on the water 17
What Gods Speak With Ticking Voices? 18
A Picture Frame is Worth a Thousand Turds 20
north wind choppy 21
howling and storming 22
Out Into the Nighttime Bright 23
Restless 24
Mountains of Buildings, Buildings of Mountains 25
even after a day of 26
am I a fool 27
now climbing 28
I would have written some other 29
low low tide. the fog 30
foggy morning 31
it is a long day 32
The Vanishing City 33
chewing gum 34
first drop of rain 35
I want 36
the heart is open 37
Slight Submission 38
ferry coming in 39
Young Summer 40
Afternoon 41
Nothing can refute 42
a brown dog barking 43
after the winds all day 44
four blackbirds 45
Rest After Chores 46
1776 : The Destroyer 47
traffic roar 48
Lunch Break 49
If only he could remember - 50
It Is Not Friday 51
let every day 52
Picasso's 91st Year 53
On a Sunny Afternoon 54
he could speak as strongly 55
reluctant to light 56
O I know 57
If I am mad 58
At the End of a Day 59
it's on an evening like this evening 60
this is when the tide 61
AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

Grandparents On father's side: carpenter-cobbler and seamstress;
on mother's side: landed farmer and Boston socialite.

Parents Harvard Professor and socially active housewife

Born April 12, 1948. Aries. Boston, Massachusetts.
Christened: Keith Howard Emmons

1951-1952 Lived in Briton, France

1953-1964 Schooled Elementary, Junior, and High School in rural
Sudbury, Massachusetts; attended a boy's sailing camp
on Cape Cod annually

1964 Summer, labored on a Swiss mountain farm, traveled in
Europe

1965-1970 Attended Harvard University; graduated Cum Laude in
Applied Mathematics

1968 Summered in California

1969 Summered in Arequipa, Peru

1970 Declined full graduate school scholarship at Harvard to
travel throughout the US with aimless intent

1970-1971 Wrote and read for three months solitary in a New
Hampshire cabin; hitchhiked Boston to Berkeley,
Berkeley to Boston - five US crossings; wrote with Daniel Sadhaka Moss, Every Now and Zen; hitchhiked to New Orleans; traveled between Mayan ruins; for three months managed "La Fraternidad," a Mexico City rock group; hitchhiked four months, one trip, Cambridge to Berkeley; wrote Visions of Perpetual Dawn, a work of haiku; took the name "Kapleau," after Philip Kapleau - Abbot of the Rochester Rinzai Zen Center - for all writings.

1971-1972 Berkeley, California - worked as a picture framer; first
poetry readings - Berkeley, San Francisco; affianced to Jane Dolores Amatruda; wrote The Creation with graphic work by Cyrus Charters.

1973-1975 Married; lived on Houseboat Moondrifter, Richardson Bay, Sausalito, California; worked as a picture framer, carpenter; wrote Bittern on the Post for Harvard Junior Fellowship Appointment by Leonard Bernstein; wrote Moondrifter, the second work of haiku.

1975-1977 Moved to Houseboat Fortune Cookie; first published: Picasso's 91st Year in Espresso; wrote The End of the Veil: A Few Facts Surrounding and Determining the Fate of the Richardson Bay Waterfront Community, a work of prose-poetry; wrote and compiled what falls away is always.

SAILS BEAUTIFUL SAILS

Sails beautiful sails! flowing white across the water -
effortlessly full, you fly. I will fly!
say the sails, to a weeping wedding day
and sadly to this sea I'll say goodbye.

Sails beautiful sails! you reach the foggy islands -
you appear, disappearing, whiter.
Pass by, says the surf-slap, keep your bow above the sea,
set your compass-eye for oceans that are wider.

Sails beautiful sails! you have left the far horizon -
the fog ambles and swirls, wondering.
Welcome! says the sea, whispering on its shores,
quietly hinting white where you are wandering.

EVENING ON HOUSEBOAT MOONDRIFTER
AFTER READING ROBERT BLY

sitting in my cabin-boat
I am still
and the whole world rotates outside my window.

the oil lamp is silent with it's yellow flame;
the houses on the hillside are specks of gold;
Moondrifter sways in the wake of a passing tug -
the gold-specked world is bobbing in my window!

it is peaceful here floating on the water,
the moon the loudest voice in all the sky.
the mimosa on the sill, two naked little twigs,
have folded up their leaves and gone to sleep.

It is raining.
It has not always been raining
nor will it always be raining.
But today it is definitely raining.

Esquire has articles about
beating up your neighbor
with an Oriental martial art;
about laser-weapons; about which team
will have them first.
I know nothing of these things:
I am an oddball.
I enjoy the weather.
My boat sways on the bay-water;
the wind howls about the hull
as though it were the only stump
in a desert of water.

There is water below me.
There is water
falling from the sky.
There is water in the bilge
below the floorboards.
I live with a moat
that enfolds the entire world.

RAINDROP SOGGY RAINDROP SONG

If it's a rainy day you'll find me
sitting swaying in my houseboat
sitting rocking by my fire-warmth
playing my finger flute
while the rain
trickles down the window pane.

If it's a rainy rainy day
you will find me
fogging my glasses in a teacup
by the window by my fire-warmth
playing jolly on my flute melancholy
while the rain falls on the rain.

On a rainy rainy day you will find me
listening to my roof
tapping time to my flute-tune
while the hills are wrapped in tea-mist
out the window by my fire-warmth
and there's water all around me
sitting swaying in my houseboat and the rain
falls on the rain falls on the rain.

after the rain has stopped

a single drop

drops through the roof

STORM TAIL

on the water scampering the sun
in the sky brimming
with clouds scurrying
to the sea silent with invisible sea folk,
I on the stern cross-legged inhaling
the north wind lifting the pelicans
splashing for anchovies while the shore people
slumbering awaken to another blasphemously beautiful day.

now the nighttime has receded. the dinghy
no longer rubs restlessly against her mother-boat,
Moondrifter,
swaying on the undecided bay.
now the morning flames lick in potbellies afloat
and sea-sleepers lean against gunwales
stretching away sleep-sack drowsiness.
now they must reorder the lines,
protect against chafing,
assess the erosion of the storm
seeking with the sea
to make everything its own.

a fisherman with a yellow cap
puts the tide to his advantage.
behind him the hills burst into the air
whisking with cloud-puffs
in the dawn warmth scented
with smoke of fresh pine
skimming the water flecked
with the tails of white-lipped breezes
abandoned frantically scurrying
searching for their north-born sea-gone father.

quiet on the water
oil lamp, waking,
fresh air on the bow.
gulls call for the sun to rise
but fog covers all.

O! would I could stay
to watch the morning
warm the fog away
but my hands are full of oars
dunking their heads
through circles Jane
has classes and I
monday morning -
go to work.

WHAT GODS SPEAK WITH TICKING VOICES

the great white god of prospect
rises on the horizon saying:
nothing is as simple as we first expect
and sometimes simpler
for what could be simpler than nothing?

to live on a boat
is not enough our feet
must feel the ooze of soil between their toes -
mushrooms sprouting
tasting of earth
we must pluck them trusting god of opportunities
that they must be unpoisonous but
no mushrooms root in the hull of my boat
the bilge sloshes senselessly.

buy acres of mushroom dirt god of incentive
and when the multitudes
are dying for their taste
sell them dearly
the horizon
is silhouetted with pulpy umbrellas -
caps of dollars and cents
pluck them
god of timeliness
for the kingdom of clocks is upon us
and we are ticking.

go to the lord of records
and find where fungi grow;
look into the eyes of clerks
to divine what secrets there;
let no cost deter you O god of investment
for we are less important
and our blood thinner
than the voice of a single watchtower
ringing with the bells of ritual gears
diverting the lives of thousands now
we must wake
eat
work
sleep

for the kingdom immutable turns its metal teeth now
we must feed ourselves feathers
digest pastoral tunes
turn our feet into tires
and sing the psalm of traffic
for the sun is a pendulum the earth
is a small ball
soundlessly rolling in space -

rolling with a mushroom silence
pushing its cap through rotting leaves.
O god of transition, perpetual companion,
which way now?

A PICTURE FRAME IS WORTH A THOUSAND TURDS

this is where
when the bosses arrive
I must work
advancing the argument of rectangles.
the only remaining circle is the sun.
O! how the framers of the world
would glue their brick-a-brac about the sea,
would tame the fish in tanks,
would file the teeth of the barracuda
one by one.

the hands of the king approach the nine!
my cigarette shortens,
the hum of the transit bus
hurries its cargo to be corralled
in boxes for the day. then
the yellow sphere
will roll through the soulless streets
poking its head disinterestedly
into barrels of trash.

the rat
rules the alleys;
the moon
is hanged before dawn.
the steeple deafens the passersby,
indelicate poodles
defecate on the pavement,
policemen tell us when to stop and go;
the palm of the king is ticking;
when the shop door creaks
this morning
will self-destruct.

and the eyes of the fresh-born day
will squint to a razor edge.

north wind choppy
Moondrifter bucking
pots and spoons
jingling as swells hit the bow
swells from Canada swells from Alaska
wind from the Arctic
chilling bay-dwellers inside
harboring the small warmth
of galley fires the air
flings too many spray-darts wave crests
are pointed and reckless even the cormorants
can't bear the water's surface today
and for peace must dive
deep to where winds are made of water
blowing in liquid slumber.

howling and storming

outside, I pour myself and drink

a glass of water.

OUT INTO THE NIGHTTIME BRIGHT

moon
is an old word
playing accordion music on the water;
moon
is a pinball
popping into the sky,
a gumball of wolf-cries,
and fish beneath the white-stroked
circles play tag among the weeds.

moon
is a one-eyed car
driving straight across the night;
is an old word for a man whose face
wears the pocks
of a million breathless years.
round above the hill.
dissolving in ripples.
buttering the waves
with sequined snakes.

now a waterbug
rowed by two people
plies across the moon;
the moon flees
in a giggle of children -
minnow schools are out!
it's a holiday for gazing
and houseboat howls
raise aloft the hills
rustle their fir and the moon

old useless word the moon
breathing the oceans inward . . .
outward smiles a silent smile
for those who come out to see.

RESTLESS

all morning long I have wandered
back and forth inside my boat.
a storm is coming, but that's not it.
I look into the water
seeing patterns of ochre. slate-blue. gold.
pink under the island.
chiffon of melting clouds.
wandering to and fro I stand
looking off the bow at the open water.

MOUNTAINS OF BUILDINGS, BUILDINGS OF MOUNTAINS

just a few words . . .
just a few words among
real estate, houses,
downing a dollar a day.

(take him to the cliffside -
take him to the cliffside
and let him drink.)

this automobile
needs a transfusion, this lass
needs company for at least an hour.
but stamps must be stamped,
slick glue on your tongue,
the thousand envelopes yawn
and the typewriter crackles chatters
like a flock of mechanical grackles.

(let him go forth
where the pavement ends,
the butterfly is a flower
without roots.)

and this is all to . . .
the purpose of this
is to slay the future
and drop it in our pockets
with a jingling sound;
to bury our chipped fingernails
in the soil and let them grow strong;
to lie splayed in the afternoon
with our hair entangled in the grass.

(go back!
and fly in the cities
with your flesh of concrete,
rub the corners of buildings
round.)

even after a day of
hammer and
bang those nails!
he could sit across from his Jane
and his woodstove flaming
so thinking:
ah beans
boiling in the belly of a fasting mind
perhaps tomorrow I'll work
hammer bang but
tomorrow, perhaps,
I will say, "today
is forever" and wander
in the woods.

where the redwoods grow.

am I a fool
sitting on a mountainside
in a volkswagen painted with stars?

I flick off the key
the windshield wipers stop, the rain
metallically taps on the roof.

what haste
halfway up the mountainside
to go up.
to go down.

the rain is descending.
the eucalyptus line the road
with tall arms reaching into the air.

when a car rushes past
the whoosh! shakes my little dry volkswagen
and I think:

I will make a note of this
and I will make a note of that.
the earth's green tongues are speaking;
the road ascending beckons and I go.

now climbing

here

where the bees

I would have written some other

but the heron floated silently

across my sight.

low low tide. the fog
has almost hidden angel island.
a few gulls call the falling dusk;
a man whistles
walking home from work.

now is a time of lighting lamps;
of stoking the potbelly into fire.
now is a time of sitting
hunched in a chair, sitting without expression
and thinking nothing.

the potbelly warms;
the new-lit lamp sways gently.

perhaps I will make
a pot of hot tea
over the hill the fog
slips slowly slowly it slips
down to the waiting water and by dawn
it will cover all as the sun rises
with the rising tide.

foggy morning
city invisible
shore invisible wake
and row away

it is a long day
beginning without sleep
the lumps in my bed the wind buffeting
seeping through the sashes
to feather my naked neck.

the hangers in the closet
clacked all night the dangling pots
swayed without a single kitchen sound.
the waves grinding against the hull
and the moon blown over the hill.

but when we arose
and brushed our dreamless hair
and coffee boiled and we rowed away
we knew that Moon upon the water,
and we would again be sleeping there.

THE VANISHING CITY

Perhaps I write best when I'm sleepy:
no thoughts, no worries.
The San Francisco wind is chilling -
who cares? the sun is warm.

The autos arrive at the intersection.
Pedestrians meet and pass.
Above, the white clouds fly before the wind.
They fly and pass quickly over city and bay.

chewing gum

arrow
on street

sitting
on
bricks
cars

wait
at the light

first
drop
of rain

I
will go
drink

wine

I want
I want
I want
I want

what do I want?

I want
I want
I want

the heart

is open
the wind

does not fall

SLEIGHT SUBMISSION

With darkness closing down the ocean
yawning into night I am frail
agitated at my work
smoke too many cigarettes
have too many obligations leaping out
rudely grating on the silent stars appearing.

It is a time to rest to drink tea sit
in a rocker by the fire,
my toes cozy in knitted mukluks.
now I must forget the day
and if throughout my supper I can -
not meditate tomorrow.

Dusk is not in a small man's power
creeps stealthily upon us
until our hands are invisible before our eyes.
it is time, then, to let our rush be rest;
to humble our gaze and step indoors,
patient for the sun again to rise.

ferry
coming
in

bittern
on
the post

squawks

YOUNG SUMMER

knowing that glass
sometimes penetrates the heart,
I know also that barefeet touch the earth
and willingly cast away my shoes.

AFTERNOON

sitting
on deck
gazing at
white sails on
blue water
doing nothing
with all my might.

Nothing can refute

three
red
peppers

on a tabletop.

a
brown dog
barking

seagulls
swarming

a man
throwing chunks
of bread.

after the winds all day

this perfect silence.

is that a horn?

four blackbirds

fly overhead. a long time

I watch them

REST AFTER CHORES

this boat
slowly
progressing from
boat
(where hull
dominates all; where grass
is all splash)
to curtains and
soap dish and
mirror
with pictures of babies both
Jane and Keith
to
heart to
house to
home.
(where home
is the night outside; is
the lap rocking us;
rocking us sleeping
into morn).

1776 ; THE DESTROYER

great guns!
floating by in the bay; thinking
of the cambodian victors.
ah, my horizon is exploding:
a great waterborne
machine of war;
a machine
to kill men
floats on my horizon.

"get that fucker outta here!" I yell.

meanwhile on a windy day
balancing in my dinghy
I am painting Moondrifter
red, white, and blue.

traffic roar.
gull squawk.
can you hear my song
rising from another land?

the plane scratches overhead
yet can't even fly the route
from ear to ear.

tea steam.
pen squeak.
it is monday morning.
the slumbering beast wakes up.

over the bridge
his groggy eyes;
into the city's belly
to be eaten.

spit up on friday.

LUNCH BREAK

drop robin
pop cloth
the mind is a naked caterpillar,
an opera singer,
a cigarette squirming upon the pavement.
this is all because all of us have forgotten
to attend church on Plum Sunday
and to receive benedictions
from the potato:

the ocean
is an acre of grass;
the potted gardenias
have fallen in the wind.

we must remember that all of this
is happening at a restaurant
where the Atlantic salad
has coasted onto the table
littered with aircraft.
roquefort is flotsam
and jetsam
is running out of gasoline at the airports.

the tomato
speaks with a tongue of carrot;
the neighbors
descend into lettuce with scuba gear.

and I, armed only with a fork
am assigned to devour sargasso
until the sea bottom is a porcelain plate
and the crab clocks are calling
go to work go to work
go to work.

If only he could remember -
if only he
could remember what he wanted to do.
and he was the only one to have forgotten,
who could he ask to aid him;
who could remember?

Actually
when he did have a flash of recollection
he realized he wanted to do nothing,
he wanted to try to do nothing
the only difficulty that
nothing could be accomplished
by wanting or trying to do anything.

He needed money, they said.
that was the cause of his demise because then
he barefoot entered the world asking:
where is this thing called money,
and where should I go that I might pluck it?

IT IS NOT FRIDAY

it is not friday
and yet
it almost is, knowing
friday comes
almost every week.

let every day
be a Picasso -

who can say what the mind brings next;

the old men were sages
the young men
fire.

PICASSO'S 91ST YEAR

Picasso arrives wearing many skins.
he loses a lamb-skin,
devours a wolf-skin,
plays in a goat-skin,
lives in a clown-skin and even that,
from time to time, he sets aside
to appear without a face, without flesh,
a bullfighter's cap floating above a cloak
flowing behind a suspended pair of shorts.
his invisible legs vanish into animated sneakers
which he removes while New York gasps.
his cap sails and his cloak settles
like a crow across Spain's dismay.
the shorts dance, mazurka and malaguena,
they jump, they spin. Picasso begins
to remove them! Obscenity! cries all Paris
turning its head, covering its eye,
peeking later to find
nobody there.

ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON

I would be peaceful today
if only today were full of peace, he said,
imagining for a moment not longer, hopefully,
than a lifetime, that a day
could be anything but peaceful.

he - this he being I - was not ready
to admit that what is
exfoliates from within and that what is without
must pass the borders of self
to be again what is;

and what is, he said
repeating all the creation, is not
will not be
what we would wish is were -
unless we wish it so,

and if we so wish, he said,
stripping off his pants to sit naked
in the sun, it is easiest
to wish what is
itself to be.

in this way, we being ourselves, we find
not one but many selves all true
and all some ripple of peacefulness -
and though the sun may seem
to wage a blistering warfare on our skin,

we slowly tan.

he could speak as strongly
as his resolve
was effortlessly true;
he found
he did not find himself at home
when he was out
looking for himself, so he sat . . .
and prepared a cup of tea.

gazing into the scent and steam
he saw
a small fawn by ferns
with moons in her eye;
a man piloting a boat
thousands of miles from shore.
he smelled
the salmon cooking for supper; saw
the sun sliding in patterns across the wall; heard
the wind whistling through cracks in the door.

the door
he had shut behind himself
and the world then disappeared
and his only task remaining
was to be that fawn that man that salmon
was to be
that cup of jasmine steaming
as he slowly sipped it away.

reluctant
to light
the lamp

I sit in the shadow
of the purple
mountain

O I know
I am mad to love this place
but when the cormorant dives and red sails
on the horizon slightly move . . .

If I am mad
(if I am permitted to be mad)
while my Jane
jibbers in the kitchen with the kids,
then I would be
a coconut
atop a tall palm, resting there.
about me
an only occasionally shimmering frond.

AT THE END OF A DAY

At the end of a day
the day is ending -
little more to be said than that.

is this life
is this life
I am living?

a mist sticks to the city-walls;
street-walks spot as pedestrians pass;
the traffic is voicelessly rumbling.

I am come a long way,,,
a long long way
I have to go.

a brown-bodied sandhill crane
flew to winter by my houseboat;
he stalks sopping logs for quick crabs, anchovies.

I am afloat on the water . . .
even on land
I list and roll.

he has feathered his roof!
his twig legs
never shiver in the rain.

I carry a mind full of sprouts,
my thoughts are green fibers
awaiting spring.

when he wishes, his wings extend.
he wafts above city and bay
silent above lights at night.

the sun has fled away
but I am by my lantern waiting
to assist the reticent dawn.

it's on an evening like this evening
the sun a yellow few moments
from the dark edge of the westward hills,
a radio melody rises - the big band sound -
from a board-shack dwelling behind
a congregation of one-eyed cars;
a dog yapping, a light breeze
with the faint moon risen in the sky.

it is on an evening
like this evening
I sit on a volkswagen bumper,
sit by a brown puddle, by tire tracks
and hear the shore sounds,
the idling hauler, the gull crying
behind me by the sea.

this is when the tide
is neither high, is neither low;
when reflections on the water which is not still
seem still; and whether the moon will rise this night as last -
still full - we do not know.

it is a time of which we know
in which to speak would only show
that we know nothing; in which to say
"ah moon," in a guise of recognition
would be a speaking soundless undersea.

the sun is at last!
this we know.
the sky will not fail
nor will the fraying rope
that moors us nowhere in particular
be loosed to leave us free
to wash upon the shore.

we know this.
yet listen though we might
we hear no sound; the tide is lapping
the ripples slapping on the stones
have voices without wings.

and we are left
yet neither on the sea, on neither shore
the moon flying gathers her tides about her -
mother! where are you going?
father . . . what will you be?

The Creation

2010-06-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

THE CREATION

Illustrations by:

Cyrus Charters

Poems by:

Keith Kapleau

Note: each poem is written to accompany a line-drawing by Cyrus Charters, not yet included in this blog entry.

THE WAKING

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

The stone. the source
from which the water came.
if there were no stones
there would be no oceans.
and if there were no oceans,
no great lakes or little ponds,
no tricklets dappled in the shadow of forest ferns,
then where would the imagination freshen?
if after rainfall no stone with a dent
held a brief palmful of reflection,
then where would the moon alight?
what white would we use for ink?
how would we know shadow from shade?
and would not every crater of our mind be black?
and would we not walk on a water as hard
as stone and would not stone be soft,
and white?

But these stones are black.
what stones are black!
this artist is a fool.

A twig of the imagination cannot be resolved
into counterparts of black and white,
into a code of lines and purposed specks.
What is, broadcasts itself;
what is broadcast, is.
in this way the grackle scrapes a tune
as sweet as any nightingale;
the nightingale sings sweetly surely,
yet who has ever seen one, heard one sing?
and who has ever heard the music of these leaves?
has felt their wrinkled slopes
or if their undersides are moist or dry?

Only the eye that sees the weight of a hole,
that weighs the face of the artist
to know it weightless -
only this eye knows the hue of blue,
only this eye has read these purposed lines.

Five - the withered stalk.
And yet we know no stalk
has ever withered, nor seed
has down-sent roots nor flower
turned to seed.
The cleaver of vision has no edge.
Yet still, it severs and five
rests proudly on its stem, its corners
intense, sharp with intellection, ready to impale
the delicate foliole of affection -
perhaps we have gone too far.

What is
and what is made
both are, and yet
birth is the berth
of death, and
perhaps if this five
does not appear the just fruition
of an immutable maturation,
then death is not what it is
but what we imagine,
and we have still far to go.

many eucalyptus died this year.
they approached from the far side of time
defined the present and disappeared:
the green sprays clustering on the hills;
the bitter knife of the season's night;
the peeling trunks, their brown arms shivering, quivering in moonlight kill
a notion of omnipotence.

In the stalled winter‑mind enthusiasm chills -
the blood flows backwards and the past
is a seedless memory best forgotten.
the rotten self on whom you stand
has a stinking sterile hand . . .
the soul balks . . . a blink is an hour
and the power to coach the crocus
is an acrid memory best forgotten, when -
sitting quietly, doing nothing,
spring comes and the grass grows by itself.

THE LANDSCAPE OF SPRING

In the landscape of spring
there is neither high nor low;
The flowering branches grow naturally,
some long some short.
Thus when we say,
"your time is up!"
We prove there is no time
and down is actually summer.

In the evening breeze of summer
the moon is always at noon;
A yellow bee is humming,
he ferries illusion upstream.
This is when we say,
"ah! eternity -
Eternity rises as blue as the corn
and is subject only to fall."

Ah! fall ‑
Always arriving early,
Strapping men and moon indoors
to rest in sun-struck memories.
Death, death is as sad as a birth;
it's a long long growth to a seed
And a pod
is the home of a fool.

In the white husk that is winter
a man knows his own trail
In the untrodden snow.
In the cold he hears the smallest flame.
But if the windchime tings
as he stands in a dozy ignorance
And in his ears rings nothing,
perhaps he knows -
Perhaps he walks upon the snows, is wide awake,
and sings of spring's appearance.

THE FACTS OF THE MATTER

the leaves will roll
and the ocean rustle

a birth at dusk
at dawn: death

the leaves will roll
and the ocean rustle

a man with a beard
a man without a beard
two women without a beard

the leaves will roll
and the ocean rustle

1.

Man will not survive his own future;
he will not survive.
Look at him now for now -
for now is his future
and his future is already past.

I was a man and will be -
yet I tolerate no man.
it is too facile to live among men,
to live among thieves manning the ramparts
of yes and now, of no and then;
for in dichotomy confusion lies to prove all things;
and truth, the only truth,
the truth beyond this or that,
which is between sea and shore
also lies . . . and again lies.
The truth is before men
yet they do not see it.
It is above men
yet they trample it to fiction.
The truth is indiscriminate, embracing all men,
yet they shun it and brand it foul.
and the more it reveals itself
the more they see themselves
the more they fear
and flee.

2.

I dream of an isle. (I am a fool.)
I dream of a splash of sand
in an open receptive sea lapping to caress
not to crush. I envision a land
in which a man may meet the eye of a man
and inspire a smile in both;
in which a flower's whisper is heard,
is breathed from ear to eye to arm
and leads men to invoke their sense
so flowers are tended
and may tend the mind of man.

3.

I dream of a society impossible
for it is peopled by men
and today can show no man.
Its people tend themselves and do no injury to others. No man hides from what he sees.
Each man values himself as important as any,
and every man as important as he.
Each seeks the advice of his fellows
and offers no word without request.
No man aims to control his brother
but strives to be a brother to himself.
Each looks to the yes and the no of himself,
improves upon himself,
shares his best with others
and does not waste himself
abasing others for what frailties they may suffer.

4.

There is no race like this I imagine
where each man and each woman
and each child and each elder
again enfeebled to childhood -
where all open their hearts
and where each looks direct
into his brother's eyes to read
of joys and woes, and to celebrate
with him
cherishings of love and to weep
with him
if any be lost in sorrow.

I dream of a land where this is not true
and that is not false;
where facts are not facts unless they are loved;
where what any man loves is declared true by a11;
where everything
and nothing
are true.

He dreams of an isle.
yet what isle was ever dreamed
but of oneself, surrounded by one's personal sea?
Those three palms, swaying, rooted in yellow sands
are they not his hands that stay the dreamy calm?
and are not the gentle breezes tousling the fronds
his fingers, pleased, tickling those palms,
edging them toward his own fruition?
Yet what fruit will appear
save the nearest bloom his heart will bear,
on the closest beach which accepts beyond wear
the clashing booming sea?
What will it be - a sprouting of crescents,
a bunching of inedible moons?

He devours himself.
he consumes his costume,
eats his appetite, slakes his thirst
yet parches on the sands, dreaming
of the milk of impossible coconuts.
His thirst dries his eyes, denies
that the sea dashing upon his shore
caresses his dream-shore more.
Let him not dream, not think.
Let him lower his palms
to raise to his lips to drink
the ocean of dry division until
the mirage has vanished . . .
and he basks upon that isle
as an isle no more
while the yellow sandy sea
crashes on every shore.

Intrusions of reality -
as if reality could ever push itself aside.
What is
is not
cannot be
what we would wish is were;
even creating is, we do not modify.
So here we are.

a man in meditation
sits amidst sorrel. beside him sits
a yellow‑shirted yogi.
the single‑centered sun
now shares its center into pairs.
it shines itself - as if it could - upon the sorrel blooms,
beams itself as if it cared upon the hairy fly
who zooms the air
until it reaches perfect silence there, sunning
on the sole of a man in meditation.

The fly arrives
and will depart
in perfect abnegation of desire;
his wings are windows stained
with strains of
some fuzzy buzzy cathedral choir.

we do not believe the stones are green.
we are keen on truth
but do not listen
unless it is we who speak.
we are sword fern
lancing green syllables toward the sun;
we are sod speaking to sod.

What merit has this artist?
why, no merit at all.
His purpose is not to appear
but to become invisible;
to work hard and accomplish nothing.
This is why his failure is such success,
why finding friends is to be hindered:
With no friends on whom can one rely?

The more we see
the greater is our burden
and we need lose more
until our blindness is complete.
Then, life slips from our grasp like water.
For the first time seeing all
we are alive.

So much effort
to repeat what is.
If only we could naturally grow from the rubble,
but no, we trouble ourselves invoking stones
to dance, finding them here
hauling them there like ants
carving a home
deeper and deeper into darkness.

slowly the stone dissolves to water.
the water is in the sky;
the water is in the stream.
it wets the mountain iris
and the mountain iris dies.
what better way to stay alive than die?

And when we are done
we see our only error
is what we have begun
and that is nothing.
The water wears the single stone in two.
the brooklet splashes about the roots of sorrel;
it slips to an inside vein,
and creeps steeply toward the sky.

a stream nudges pebbles downstream.
the moon reflects till we die.

Welcome

2010-02-05T10:32:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

This blog presents most of my Works since 1970. They are collected within five categories representing my life’s progression: On the road; Waterfront writings; Hard ashore; In the world; and Leaving the world.

I’m not so far from leaving the world, statistically, even though I told my children I hope to live to be one-hundred-eight. Wish me luck!

The next life category probably is Three Year Retreat: I and my Spiritual Partner will enter into a three and a half year silent meditation retreat in November of this year, 2010.

To prepare for the Retreat, I’m collating and posting the poetry you see here, bringing it to a point of some completion, so my mind can be less distracted by unfinished business during the Retreat. My sweet Lama and Guide, Geshe Michael Roach, says “It’s so he won’t be pestered by poetry demons during retreat.”

If you wish to learn more about the Diamond Mountain Great Retreat, please visit Retreat4Peace.org, where you will find my statement plus entries by others of the thirty or so of my spiritual brothers and sisters who will join the incomparable Geshe Michael Roach on the 2010 Three Year Retreat.

The entry following this one lists the Works, showing an asterisk ( * ) before the title of those currently posted. Do a text search for the title to quickly jump to any specific title page you desire. If your search doesn’t find the title you seek, go to the bottom of the blog, click on “Older Posts,” and search again. Also you will find a “Chronological listing of works by Keith Emmons” at the beginning of the Work titled: White Dog Warrior and, for your convenience, as the very first post made below, all the way at the bottom of all the posts.

We don’t know where life takes us, even as we try to be in charge. My Teacher has instructed me, “No writing for a year and a half,” while in retreat.

Will I write after that?

We’ll see.

I hope you find value here, for your own life, in the poetry below.

Muchlove, Keith Emmons

Posted Works

2010-02-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

Works by Keith Emmons posted at KeithEmmons.blogspot.com

An asterisk ( * ) preceding a title below means this Work is posted below. Works are posted in reverse chronological order, most recent writings appearing first.

Title (listed chronologically) Dates Type Pages

On the road:
Visions of Perpetual Dawn 1970-1972 Haiku 48
*The Found Poetry of Keith Kapleau 1970-1972 Poems 108
*Kapleau Sonnets 1970-1972 Sonnets 24
*Before the Creation 1971 Poems 81
*The Creation 1972 Poetry, Illustrated 24
a collection of blippoems 1970-1974 1-3 line poems 153

Waterfront writings:
Moondrifter 1972-1976 Haiku 73
*Waterfront Hanshan 1972-1983 16-line Poems 23
*Waterfront Hanshan II 1972-1983 16-line Poems 23
Bittern on the Post 1972-1975 Poetry Textbook 177
What Falls Away is Always 1972-1977 Poems 83
Magnolia and others 1972-1983 11 Short Works, poetry 164
*The End of the Veil 1980 Prose Poetry 65

Hard ashore:
*Sausalito Interlude 1977-1979 Poetry 84
*The Developer’s Song 1977-1980 Poetry 68
*The Course of this Chaos 1978-1980 Poetry 47

In the world:
*The Joyful Oblivion 1979-1983 Poetry 52
(Ten years, no writing) -------------- --------- ---
*First Rain 1993-1996 Poetry 51
*All Day Is Not Too Long 1997-2000 Poetry 85
*A Month of Keith 2001 Poem-a-day 60
Two Candles on My Altar 2002-2004 Poetry

Leaving the world:
*Slayer of Death 2005 Poems 29
*Lady of Diamond 2006-2007 Poems 32
*Tsechu 2008 Poems 41
*White Dog Warrior 2009 Poems

From White Dog Warrior 2009

2010-02-04T20:19:00.000-08:00

WHITE DOG WARRIOR

KEITH EMMONS

Author’s Note

Dear Reader,

Most poetry books are “collections.” Such books contain poems the poet or publisher feel stand alone; these poems are seen crafted as individual separate creations. Possibly they are timeless.

The poems in these works are closer to a narrative. They are the music of a particular time in a particular man’s life.

Life has spectacular moments as well as missteps and sadness; it has exultation as well as annoyance and boredom. Together these moments weave the tapestry we wear, the personal garment expressing our individual life.

These works are meant to be read straight through, from the first poem to the last: from start to finish. This is how we live – dawn to dusk, birth to death; moment to moment.

Chronological listing of works by Keith Emmons

Title Dates Type Pages

On the road:
Visions of Perpetual Dawn 1970-1972 Haiku 48
The Found Poetry of Keith Kapleau 1970-1972 Poems
Kapleau Sonnets 1970-1972 Sonnets 24
Before the Creation 1971 Poems
The Creation 1972 Poetry, Illustrated 24
a collection of blippoems 1970-1974 1-3 line poems 153

Waterfront writings – Anchored Out:
Moondrifter 1972-1976 Haiku 73
Waterfront Hanshan 1972-1983 16-line Poems 23
Waterfront Hanshan II 1972-1983 16-line Poems 23
Bittern on the Post 1972-1975 Poetry Textbook 177
What Falls Away is Always 1972-1977 Poems 83
Magnolia and others 1972-1983 11 Short Works, poetry 164
The End of the Veil 1980 Prose Poetry 65

Waterfront writings: Hard Ashore
Sausalito Interlude 1977-1979 Poetry 84
The Developer’s Song 1977-1980 Poetry 68
The Course of this Chaos 1978-1980 Poetry 47

In the world:
The Joyful Oblivion 1979-1983 Poetry 52
(Ten years working in Silicon Valley, no writing) --------- ---------
First Rain 1993-1996 Poetry 51
All Day Is Not Too Long 1997-2000 Poetry 85
A Month of Keith 2001 Poem-a-day 60
Two Candles on My Altar 2002-2004 Poetry
Reunion 2003 Poetry 37
Songs of Samsara 2004 Poetry 24
Flight to Diamond Mountain 2005 Poetry 28

Leaving the world:
Slayer of Death 2005 Poems 29
Lady of Diamond 2006-2007 Poems 32
Tsechu 2008 Poems 41
White Dog Warrior 2009 Poems 26

Darkness wraps around
the naked tree
while he reads poetry
as if it could set him free.

The trains keep ripping through
the night. He calls his wife
to say, “Goodnight.” Then leans
in closer to the light.

Dickenson, Williams, Stevens,
Frost. He turns the page,
he seeks what he has lost.
The hands show shadow
on his face –

he’s lost his place
his eve’s delight
the trains keep ripping
through the night
they hunch his shoulders

while he reads poetry.
As if it could set him free.

She slipped in and loved me
although I didn’t know Her name
don’t remember how She looked.

A long time after, I lay awake
even through blessing all beings, the Angels
thirty-two dissolving into four

the One the mirage
smoke sparks
the single candle flame;

the white expanding, the heart
burst open spreading its wash
of orange warmth . . .

Still I didn’t rest until She said,
“Dawn’s far away for those who sleep.”
The three-thirty AM train.

I used to be so happy
imagining myself as Hanshan,
hair disheveled, communing in no-thought
with mountains, brooklets and stones.

I was free as a cloud.
I never gave a thought for anyone.
Alone on Mt. Tamalpais, whenever I wanted,
I sat cross-legged to write a poem.

Then Geshe Michael came along
to tell me this messed-up world
is all my fault – my past deeds!
All this suffering, the wars, the genocide,

the home of all the flowers and birds
collapsing around our smog our cities –
it’s all ripening from me.
Look at this mess I made!

I used to enjoy life;
now I work hard all day.

It used to make no difference
if he lived or died.
That was all right, for that time.
The wind chime rang again and again
its one pure note;
the misty smoke from his fire
drifted lazily among the pines.

Dear Love, one more time I walk
from the lower to the upper house.
It’s tsechu. The breeze casts cherry petals
ahead of me on the graveled way.

Today the Chinese kill more Tibetans.
“Deeply lost in love,” my poem began.
“It is age that forced us to stop.
The same goes for making love,”
Picasso said. “You still want to
but you can’t do it any more.”

What will stop the Chinese?
Struck down with a club;
struck down by time –
is there a difference?
The slender shoots bear flowers, then fruit.
Let me kiss you, one more time.

slow moving hearse on a

mountain road . . . pulls over.

the living zip past.

Throw out my back
while making my bed;
just a matter of time
until I am dead.

Whatever the hell
what month it is;
since “just in time”
I’m a little bit late.

Teaching the word
on wobbly legs;
speaking the dharma
from a mouth full of pegs.

Being Buddhist
I left the upturned roach
immobile on her back
where her crab-shell legs
must have pawed the air
in her last vain moments.
And I reflected each time
I walked down the long hall
past the vinyl laundry floor
where she lay how
I too one day
and you too
will one day gasp our last
and slowly settle into our stiffening joints,
our heap of decaying carcass.

My kids’ Great Aunt Imogene
died today, they say.
Her son phoned to tell me so.

It’s the end of an era –
her memories of Boston sophisticates,
hats plumed with Egret on the Commons,
elbow-length white Kid gloves;
then the Roaring Twenties,
the Depression, World War II;
and her husband’s suicide.

Later, on the phone with my own son,
“So she’s done with all that,” I said.
“Or just beginning,” he replied.

No doubt
they’ll burn up my aunt.
I pitch the roach
in the trash.

I move that dog poop

out of the walk. Dried in the sun.

Hard as a rock.

We witness
the heart-wound open;
the bull roars out
goring the passersby.

How many times
do you lose your family?
Yama rips and
burrows in the chest.

Talons
rend water from the eyes.
Breath has no purpose . . .
until the bull cries

and She appears
all around him soothing:
“Weeping is the birthing
of My heart.”

Heart drives the mind.
Without heart, nothing.
Please, lend me Your hand.

Do I ask too much?
I give You my life:
without heart, nothing.

Perhaps I am worthless.
That’s why I ask – please
lend me Your hand.

I sit blank in the morning.
Breath lost it’s purpose. Heart
drives the mind.

I know Your love is not to take,
only mine to give. Please
please take my hand;
my heart, without Yours, is nothing.

White Dog Warrior cannot be stopped.
The heart may stop.
White Dog Warrior cannot be stopped.

Do not let me see Your love –
I will love You anyway.
Strip me of my friends –
I will bow to You anyway:
White Dog Warrior cannot be stopped.

There is no answer in the morning;
and night cannot take it away.
Your love is not Your gift to me.
Though I stumble in how –
I know I give this love to You.
I told You I came to pester You.
“How?” You said, knowing that’s impossible.
White Dog Warrior pesters himself;

his heart reignites –
he hears it drumming –
White Dog Warrior cannot be stopped.
I

Not much thought.
Fall into ritual, rhythm.
The gods are asleep –
they wait while I awaken.

Altar in front of me
I turn my head to the left –
gaze out the window.

The trains are still;
the spring leaves on the pistachio
are still; the candle flame
on my altar is still.
Smiling from the photographs . . .
my Lamas, and Irene.

Practicing tummo
the First Incidental,
leaves stir on the pistachio;
a bright yellow and black songbird
flits from twig to twig
nibbling at the blossoms.

II

Six weeks between terms –
Vajrasattva recitation, sutra study, transcribing,
paying bills, on the phone, construction business –
even washed my truck! no time
to practice tummo.
Irene and I did practice
and She, as red element,
and I as white said prayers
hand in hand,
stretched in yoga many mornings
a few nights, our condition of our bodies,
our vision of ourselves,
our toleration, our expansion
our wonder
as well as our dismay
at one another.

First morning
returned to Shantideva House
I arrange water bowls
I pray, I write
I visit the shimmering
crimson column –
The Channel of Dance –
awakening in emptiness and flame.

III

Second Incidental.
Returning to the heart
to the present
to this
without that.

Thank you Lamas
for Your patience
with this
so so kiewo.
The bull lay down.

It’s good again
to reach the beginning –
an old friend –
two lovers meeting
after a long absence –

determined
to try
all over again.

warm morning breeze pink

roses blooming our sweet love

is in Spring again

In the mirror I see You showering
as I place a rose on our bed.
You raise Your arms and water and soap
sweetly scent hidden places and folds
in Your pinkness only my hands go,
wrapping You in my arms as morning
gently opens Her eyes Her warmth
Her heart Her soft mounds pressing
along my chest my heart my cheek
caressing Her cheek Her sweet breath.
Not a day younger – I don’t care:
Spring is in love again.

She sings to me –
He and She
in Union at my heart.
He and She
hold court
with Angels.

Angels
dance from every pore,
winds whirling
and playing
are my Buddha field,
my Paradise,

the Redwoods standing,
Buckeye flowering,
the Mourning Dove,
Jays squawking,
Juncos pecking crumbs;
a purple butterfly

floats breezes
bloom to bloom.
She
is his heart of hearts;
She is in everything:
of this

I sing.

It’s me she takes inside her –
silent slider, darkness hider –
on Her inner light
I ride her.

She gives me who
I am I know;
she gives me wings –
to her I go.

On Her wings then
we’re the rider –
the darkness glider
the light inside her;

Her song they sing –
their darkness hider –
set free inside her
Her light their wings.

They reap the light
they seed the sower
inside the night
they ride to know Her;

They join the light –
let him divide her;
he gives Herself
to fly inside her..

Frustrated genie stuck
in a bottle of flesh and doubt
and bully bombast –
sit – sit yourself down
and contemplate generosity.

“If you still think the key
starts the car,” my teacher says,
“you still don’t believe in karma;
you still doubt emptiness.”
After years of practicing
I understand practically nothing.

Where does happiness come from?
From joy in doing good.
From the first-pure-thing-space
our deeds ripen.
When our actions are perfected
the bottle falls away.

Save all beings?
Save all beings?
No problem.

Note: “first-pure-thing-space:” the literal translation of the Tibetan word often translated as “Buddha Nature.”

This thing, called Keith, will one day die.
When She enwraps me, let me keep my head.
Although all die, there’s no one dead.

We love to die; so many times we have.
This death like this is why I live.
Enwrapped in She, I’ll be “exactly there.”

Today, tonight, we don’t know when,
don’t wait before You take me in.
This thing called Keith, will one day die.

When I am gone, let me reside:
a whiff of bliss on air I ride.
As She returning, part my hair –

For you and all of yours I’ll care:
I’ll wake you when they’ll say you’ve died.
When I embrace you keep your head:
although all die, there’s no one dead.

Press my underpants and lay them in a row.
Then they’re ready when it’s time to go.
Don’t be saying, “O, I didn’t know.”

I put it off as long as I knew how
but all things finally fall in place.
Then they’re ready when it’s time to go.

Don’t be thinking what we should have done:
it’s not they didn’t tell us time is short.
Fold my under things and set them in a row.

We know we’re here but barely know the place.
Before I go I’d like to know it’s taste.
Don’t be saying, “O, I didn’t know.”

The sky alone will be my fate,
my breath will breeze across your face.
Lay out your wings so I will know
we’re ready and it’s time to go.

She lilts along the forest path
the oak leaves rustling
her sandals of crimson beads
idly kicking and musing:
"Tsechu. Perhaps I will be chosen
by the Lord."

Her pert lips
her breasts adolescent
her nipples tickled -
standing up -
the silk tunic teasing them
as she hops along.

"I will lead him to the edge
and if he can
from there
he'll fly!" She smiles
her perfect pearl teeth
a sharp sparkle

her lip sliding up
Her glistening fang.

Could She
Her lip curling slyly up
entice him, seduce him
into Union
with Her inner core and drop?
to drop his self-pretension?

Could She fool him -
let him believe he conquered,
achieved on his own -
Her gift
Her heart
Her door

to every dream imagined?

Each day
he prays She will.

Her renunciation
deep and profound;
her shallow - her renunciation
of renunciation:
she clings to renunciation
like a burning raft.

While he
a drunken sailor
leers and casts
his clumsy bouquets
enticing Her to sail
his uncertain sea.

From her window
on the hill she hears
His bell and incantations;
before dawn, into the night,
sober and calm
he casts off lines.

Her purity draws them
yet keeps them far -
until the Heaven of the Pure
calls Their Union.
And with the ocean far below
They fly.

from Slayer of Death, Lady of Diamond, and Tsechu

2010-02-04T20:17:00.000-08:00

SELECTIONS FROM:

SLAYER OF DEATH

LADY OF DIAMOND

AND

LERUNG

KEITH EMMONS

SLAYER OF DEATH

KEITH EMMONS

Why not pick joy?
Why not pick joy?

Appearing as this teacup
Shakyamuni Buddha enters all things;
this sweet amrita – I slurp it down.

The butter lamp sputters and spits.
Shakyamuni Buddha in Bodhgaya is
appearing as this teacup?

Dead twenty-five hundred years –
who could possibly claim
Shakyamuni Buddha enters all things?

The Tatagata enters all sorrow?
The Tatagata enters all joy?
There is no amrita: who slurps it down?

The unborn Tatagata never dies.
Who can tell bitter from sweet?
This butter lamp burns forever.
This sweet amrita – I slurp it down.

Why not pick joy?
Why not pick joy?

They say Yamari is the Slayer of Death.
They say The River of Deathless Nectar
tells how to defeat death how
death is an illusion, a fabrication,
a mistake made in the mind.

It’s all about emptiness, they say.
All things we see we cannot find
when we go looking. And . . .
they blossom from our root of deeds.

“Stop complaining,” Khen Rinpoche told Geshela:
“If you don’t like it,
do something about it.” Plant the seeds.
Plant the causes of your pleasure palace.
Don’t fear death – annihilate it.

Easy to say, easy to say.
I wake, make bag lunches
and meditate day to day.
One day I hope to understand my path.
Today I study, I contemplate, I meditate.
My projection? The road passing by my truck.

What’s that whistle? As I

study tantra four blackbirds

inspect my window.

"You see your Lama
as a Perfect Holy Being
because you need one
and you know
that's the only thing
that will bring them,"
I recalled Christiela's words.

"Cawrr!" rasped one blackbird.

This is no rock:

this is my love
my live and beating heart
streaming beams of my thankfulness
into your precious heart

this is my love
for your countless years of Teachings
offered so freely

this is my tears
when you revealed the nine
after I had sat, ignorant, for ten years
in subtle dullness

this is for the wisdom of emptiness
answering my questions
banishing my purposeless wandering

this is for the heart of Sangha –
your precious diamond realization –
and our sincerity to try to follow you

this is for your heart connection
with the ancient Sages, reconnecting us
with ourselves in the three times

this is for your Vajrapani Vajra Chedika Lung
without which I would never have met
my Diamond Partner

this is for the Incomparable Wisdom
of Buddhahood, which I promise to pursue,
following You, with your Blessing, in this lifetime
to reach Perfect Unexcelled Buddhahood.

Please accept this rock
and warm it with your hands.
May the love then streaming from it
reach out to embrace every living being

and may each and every one of us
know the purity and the beauty
and the incomparable joy and wisdom
just to know my Perfect Teacher.

Waiting in line to get bonked
I suddenly see the great sham:
what, did you really believe
in the Power of the Lama?
That the water transformed?
That it had to be kusha grass?

Of course, it does make sense:
do good deeds. Be good –
you’ll have a good life.
We’ve done the Eighteen
so now we know.
Behind the curtain, Geshela laughs.

Now he’s happy to grant us
every power we’d ever want –
“Go forth and multiply, do good;
make many good lives!”
This is my Lama’s dream …
just as I am my Lama’s dream.

Bonk me twice dear Geshela -
once to finally get it
and once to get going:
O mandala mine, make merry!
Sprinkle holy water everywhere!
May good seeds sprout and bloom everywhere!!

From the emptiness of the Crown:
equanimity toward all persons.
From “blame with no one to blame,”
to “bliss with praise for everyone.”

“Be careful when you pick your Lama
because you’ll become just like them.”
O this is something to pray for!
Prayer flags of all the world

Set this wish free on all the winds!
Carry this prayer on the inward wind
Carry this prayer on the outward wind
To cool all angry hearts

To move all idle hearts
To free all suffering hearts
From the invisible chains
Of self-inflicted pain.

First it’s circumambulate clockwise.
Then, when the Angel appears,
circumambulate counter clockwise.
First you’d better watch out or
the danger of desire will surely
cast you into the pits of hell.
Now you have a commitment
to go find your Diamond Partner:
“There is no sin in the entire
three realms of the universe
which comes close to that
of giving up desire.
And so now you must never
lose your love of desire.”

Go meditate to improve yourself:
this is how you help others.
“Do it with your right hand.”
“I shall perform all actions
with my left.”
How can this all make sense?

Open your wisdom Lover
until we two rising
melt into one descending
through the four; be kind,
open your door to this Paradise.

Then, surely, I will return
as you; you will return
as me and neither of us
will be opposite or know opposites,
and no one will be there
to obstruct our joyful efforts
to plant the seeds for everyone
onto the Joyful Path to Bliss.

“God, if you exist,” I yelled at the sky,
“do something to prove it!”
I was ready for anything; I was ready
to be struck down.
But nothing happened.
The sky stayed blue.
The grass stayed green. The great gray oak
and the stone wall stood in silence.
That was the day I gave up god.

O Great Deities, if you’re so enlightened
why are you so much trouble, so coy?
Why don’t you show yourself right now?

O, I’m not ready. O, you’re my projection.
O, you’re no being at all really; not
enlightened, not wrathful,
neither here nor there.

“When you see Buddha you’ll throw yourself
on the floor. It’s automatic!” says Geshela.
“First you turn yourself into small animals,
dogs and cats…” “No, really,” he exclaims.

Of course I believe none of it. Tell myself
who lives after I die to come shake my hand;
when I see Buddha have I gone mad?
Because I pass through the diamond door
to hold no existent thing, does this mean

no existent thing exists? No wall, no tree
no god, no me? I sit crosslegged, fill
water bowls, offer stinky tormas to the Deity:
I have to do something to fill the time!

This doubt, of course, is tantra’s ultimate sin:
all emanations of the Angel – you, me,
that rock; everything the union of bliss and void.

“Rub it, cut it, melt it,” commands Shakyamuni.
See if it’s pure, then you can believe it.
And in believing X, is Y denied?

Why fear you have something to lose?
“But if I present a questioning word
the one-thirty-four might strike me down!”

Strike me down, lift me up –
what difference does it make?
Save all beings or let them drown;

the choice is mine;
the choice is yours:
the world turns round and round.

Offer them flowers six times…
what am I, a florist?

No.

I am the source of flowers!
I am the source of flowers ungrown
and I offer them
to my emptiness –
to your emptiness
appearing there as you.

Shut all the shops on Sunday!
Then Monday, Tuesday, all the days:
we need more time
to celebrate!
Unplug my phone
and light five candles:
my Lama burns as five
dispelling the ghosts of ignorance.
Bring flowers to my altar.

Then bring one more.
Burn steadily Diamond Partner flame;
vanish through the nada into emptiness.
When you reappear
you will find me bowing here
before your altar.

We edge carefully
left foot forward
into the treachery of tantra.
“Don’t think this is easy”
my Master said. “Try
living three years in a yurt
all day every day with someone
at one hundred fifteen degrees.
Some days you’ll hate it.
And it’s the fastest way.”

All our lives
we’ve lived for this.
All that sitting –
was it just for
all that sitting?
That time is gone.

There’s so little time.
We seem so old.
Our memories failing
and our knees in pain –
now we must
rise up and sprint?
Have mercy.

Here’s mercy:
to offer you every paradise.
Here are the vows
to gift us enlightenment.
Here is the vortex of love
to save every living being.
What we give away
is what we receive.
So why would we want
any other way?

Roosters crow and pink slowly seeps
into the Bowie dawn sky.
I don't know if I woke up
because day is coming
or if day is coming
because I woke up.

Morning after morning
I sit at Shantideva House.
Sparrows and Finches scuffle about
the dusty driveway by my window -
they hop excitedly on their little stick legs.
When they spot a bug

they gobble it down.
Lobsang Chunzin says I made these bugs.
These pipping birds' next life
will be as bugs for sure.
Again and again I eat myself.
How can I stop this carnage?

Step onto the Blissful path to Bliss.
Slip into the Channel of Dance
and crack the Wisdom of the Light.
Dissolve Your body drop by drop.
Then return each dawn as many bugs.
Offer Yourself to the hungry stabbing beaks.

I give myself to You;
please take me.

I hold my hands before my heart,
I bow my head,
I kneel before Thee;
please take me.

All I thought I knew,
I give to You.
All armor around my heart
I drop for You.
Please forgive the fool I’ve been;
please take me.

Where You go
please take me there.
Into the ocean of Your heart
I offer my fragile craft.
I give my life to You –
please take me.

LADY OF DIAMOND

KEITH EMMONS

Go silently; like a train.
Hold your whistle.
Plow steadily through the night.
Racing across the rails
darkness cannot stop you;
mountains and plains cannot stop you;
anger and hatred cannot stop your
bursting into dawn
hair streaming with the wind of will.
No heartbeat can resist you.

Panting and hissing, at rest
in the center of the city
your full cargo of roses
spills onto sidewalks, fills cafes
with bouquets and amazed strangers
as you press into their hands
and hearts,

Her love.

This Dream will never die -
how can you kill a dream?
It can fly through steel
even blindfolded
in a cage captured
under a raging waterfall.

"Out, out!" says Nicole's

broom as she sweeps the Matrix.

"Yesterday's dust - get out!"

Be as busy as you like -
there's not much to do.
Open your heart.

Move over and make room
for your Angel
waiting to hold your hand.

At the stupa
I straightened the prayer flags;
I gave a few moments.

That's a day's work done!

Nameless One perched on a twig,

tent flaps still in the rising dawn,

I awaken to your song.

Thisday morning. Tea.

Sitting on a rock;

sun outside, sunshine in.

"I want some too, I

want some too!" says the fly on

the rim of my teacup.

Angel
be my spirit, my breath;
be ripples
on the wind of life
flowing within my heart.

When they criticize me
let me remember:
of course
it is not You
they are speaking to.

Let me remember
of course
they are like me:
Angels
at play.

And so may I love Them
deeply – from the heart –
and protect Them:
please, let’s not damage
Our still wet wings.

Thank you, Sweet One
for waking me into this dawn.

It's a game we play
saving all beings from death.

The day to give up my familiar self
is looking out the window already.

She said
we could let our lions
out of their cages
and it would be OK.

Mine's been pacing for years
turning its head impatiently
then meeting the bars again,
circling again.

I thought You could tame him
or make me forget.
Now I learn
You have one too!

I offer my naked chest:
do what you have to do.
Stand still! Reveal Yourself -
show who You are
Lady of Enlightenment
shut the door
on self and other now
You wrap me in Your wisdom
I diamond of the Angels
of Highest Bliss surrounding You
unnamed lady of ultimate wisdom
Keeper of the Diamond
dancing in your laser ruby light
touching all beings transformed
into shimmering emanations
of rainbow bliss.

No, move! Dance whirling
dervish of elaboration
now pure
by ignorant desire
untouched swirl
in ecstasy giving up
nothing denying
nothing exalting in
nothing all-named
playground of buddhas'
field of enlightenment
move onto me please
take me there please
for I am ready.

Love me caress me
take pity on me be
hard with me merciless
flood kindness
on me I work I pray
I study concentrate meditate
I bow to my Lama
to You please melt
capsule of love
on knee offered
to You to all;

I who am nothing
but Your sacred voice
promise to be space
without obstruction for You -
sweet mercy of Your blessing -
please fill me and re-emerge:
Your heart, Your love, Your breath.

The moon now
is not illusion -
is enlightened mind;
or mind of nirvana.

In Arizona the moon
remains the moon;
as in California;
Teotihuacan.

But the moon rides higher -
higher than the cleft
dives deeper into the valley
of your heart.

O how I wish
to ride that moon -
to plunge into that darkness
to fly into empty nighttime sky.

Wonder Woman
straddled the entire earth
as they explained
only She -
She was the only one
who could save every single one
of its countless suffering beings.

Did She have any choice?
Could She afford to doubt them
and cast every one She loved -
every one Her own mother! -
into bottomless burning hell?

But then,
glancing at Her appointment book
She realized
She had time
only on Thursday and today
was only Tuesday and
"O well," She thought,
I guess they'll just
have to wait.
And off She ran.

What touch, between Lovers,
is not holy?
This is what gives it breath.
O my spirit!
how it longs to go home –
to be held
in the cradle of Your heart.

To touch You
within Your heart
is to touch God
in His moment of creation.
From Your hand
my spirit moves

and all my works arise:
the body radiant,
the written word,
joy at small things,
and with great things too.
And without Your touch
all falls plain.

And perishes.

LERUNG

KEITH EMMONS

I can say things fancy
but let’s make a deal:
I’ll say them plain
then you can fancify them
any way you please.
Who has time these days
to adorn things anyway?
We stick bits of cheese
on globs of bread and ghee.
They say that’s enough
to satisfy gods and spirits:
why should you and I need more?

Day after day in retreat
I push myself counting mantras.
After two weeks I play a CD
called “Everyday Ecstasy.”
I sit by the fire
and listen to the rain.

Someone once thought
to explain The Great Mystery
and we’ve had trouble ever since.
Be who you are:
isn’t that miracle enough?
Why struggle so to change what is?

We bump and grind our daily lives
while dreaming of paradise.
They say … She takes you away
to a mind with no body
and only bliss. This
is why we sit

and mummer Triple Ohms
a hundred thousand. This
is why we sit scribbling notes
at the Masters’ feet:
this secret path – revealed.
She waits, They say.

Or appears one day
when you are ready.
O Angel of Love, I pray -
Your kiss of compassion.

Suddenly it seems so lonely
this enlightenment business.
Save all beings;
save all sentient beings –
it all sounds nice …
in an abstract sort of way.

But then two people,
even two lovers
have no idea
how to touch one another
how to meet one another
how to reassure one another.

I take refuge
in the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha;
having given up
on all the rest.
How sad to see my cushion
with resignation.

Angel said

She could not write

not knowing

From Her hand

bliss would be

anypoem

The journey seems

so infinite!

Then you pass the milestones

one by one.

It was only Wednesday.
The wind, the rain was gone.
White clouds blue sky. In Spring.
She spoke in a thousand voices:
fat-breasted robins, mourning doves,
green finches perched in the Buckeye tree.
Migrators. Like a tropical forest canopy
Her diamonds touched them all.
He knew Her love song
like the swaying wind chime, like white
red and blue prayer flags gently fluttering.
Just another Wednesday. In Spring.

She calls me.
A thousand miles I go to meet Her.
I leave my lover's bed to meet Her.
Have I ever heard Her voice?
In dreams, in dreams.

She is my own heart singing.
She is two Lovers weeping.
They yearn for one another -
and when She shows Herself They say
“No, not that … not that.”

My Lover is impossible, I'm sure of it.
No words no arms no form
can hold Her. My eyes
look inward: there She resides
my spirit, my baby, my love

the silence of my heart in song.

At the last
Sva ha!
She's off. But
I have nowhere to go.
Take me to love.
Take me to love.

The puja's gone.
The flame is done.
She left for town
and I have nowhere to go -
but to love,
take me to love.

This afternoon sun
dreams to revel
among stainless sheets
scented where She lay.
Take me to love.
Take me to love.

Indicate with a hand
and I'll lie down.
Marry me, and we flying
return to Paradise.
My Darling
let me take You to Love.

Please Sweet One
Dear One I pray
one day, Messenger,
then take me too -
take me to Love…
take me to Love.

This is the same hillside
where I've always stopped -
in a different time
in a different place.
It's the very same race
I've declined to run.

It's the same Pacific Ocean;
the same green hills,
the same sun, same seasons
again, rolling around again
this California Eden.

Would I could lure you
from your desks, your accountings -
your gasoline and plastic ways:
be not afraid of love.

Be unafraid of love and sun
and blue sky of afternoon.
You arose from nothing:
there's nothing You have to do.

Bank account near empty
no work lined up
late for an appointment
leaving town tomorrow -
all this is happening
to someone else.

I'm the One who
flies along a mountain ridge
propelled by internal flame.
My mind meanders
onto green paths through woods.
This sphere of Earth

is my eyeball; this moment
my eternity.
In the Valley
mankind swarms careening
and copulating into oblivion.
But She wanders off the road

and stops to drink the ocean.

On tsechu She appeared at the Rest Home
one hundred and three, blind, to tell us
Her great-grandparent's friends
poured together their rationed water
to wash Her baby skin cracked open
from sun and salt -
they had to sleep on deck.
Without this She would have died.

And She appeared as rose bushes,
the crab grass run wild,
butts and plastic blown into the bushes
the roses dead and we ran them over
with a gasoline lawn mower
thinking: before long each of us
will lie in intensive care
and strangers will level our prize roses
we carefully edged with white stones.

And She said: "Go into the market place
and watch the walking skeletons.
Listen to your Lamas:
practice with abandon."
And She appeared as all of Them reveling
and dancing throughout the night
then flying in one anothers' dreams
and flowing with one anothers' hearts
into the infinite emptiness of Our embrace.

Not-this-hunk-of-meat drinks tea
sits in the diamond posture on the floor.

Not-these-ears hears diesels
rumbling across steel rails
under Arizona sun.

No one saw these cotton clouds
blue sky jagged horizon
naked pistachio tree
dangling its black bundles.

Being You
how could He wish for You?
How could He wish to join -
this yearning
to dissolve this yearning
into You -

to vanish
into the infinite bliss
of no thing, as he imagines
His fusion with You?

That white cloud I saw

while traveling has reappeared:

spirit - take me to bliss!

A Month of Keith 2001

2010-02-04T20:16:00.001-08:00

5/20/01 – 6/30/01

A Month of Keith

Keith Emmons

Though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.

- Rumi

Is it possible I can serve others
and have fun too?
Of course.
If we don’t enjoy,
how can we possibly serve others?

“Here, I’ve been working hard
developing this misery
I’d like to share with you.”
Ha!

“I want you to write,” said Irene.
So she gave me this notebook.
“I want to see your poetry published,”
said wandering goodbuddy Shunyam.

I better get writing –
who am I
to deny friends and family?

Days full of wanting.
Let them go by without worrying
that they do. Stay where you are
inside such a pure, hollow note.

- Rumi

“Don’t worry about it,” I told my brother.
And he told me, “Get lost.”
“Just be happy!” I told my sister.
She threw me out of her apartment.

“Don’t worry, be happy,” said Meher Baba,
and that sounds good to me.
Who cares if my day goes left
or goes to the right? It’s still my day.

When something wonderful happens
it’s easy to be happy.
But if something terrible happens
do I make it better by being sad?

I think life is good: I got this life
for free! So I use each day
to go hunting goodies.
“Open for business: now accepting gifts.”

If you want what visible reality
can give, you’re an employee.

If you want the unseen world,
you’re not living your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,
but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting
what you really want is
love’s confusing joy.

- Rumi

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry
moving through, and be silent.

- Rumi

“Write every day!” exclaimed Shunyam.
But what if I’ve nothing to say?

Or worse: what if I write
and it comes out wrong?

And what if someone reading
thinks I’m a fool?

(I could have told you before,
only a fool could write these words.

I used to study hard and hard and now
so much I need to forget.)

If I’m lucky, I may, one day
become this fool.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.

- Rumi

When she lost her husband
she cried and cried
until she discovered
herself inside!

“Just because it’s Wednesday,”
is no reason to be glad;
what’s wrong with all the other days?

It’s important to be happy
for no reason at all.
If you’re happy “because of,”
what if it’s taken away?

In just the same way
it’s important we do nothing.
And we should do it now.

I don’t remember Ali asking, “Dad,
can I grow up?” Or Andrew,
“Is it OK to be more tall?”

We think we’re in charge here.
But we’re not.

The sun rises up and falls.
Teenagers push and shove on the village green.
The original composition Andrew played at school
will be soon forgotten.

I was there. I heard it.
And soon
they’ll forget
me too.

Whoever acts with respect will get respect.
Whoever brings sweetness
will be served almond cake.

- Rumi

I heard the Dalai Lama and decided:
I won’t worry
any more.

I’ve been around half a century
and it’s been good fun.
I must be smarter now. I have no doubt
the next fifty will be even better.

Now I think for the first time
I’m learning how to love:
all I need do is
get out of the way

let my love
show through.

I can’t explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,
and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty.

- Rumi

California summer morning 10:30
sweat collecting already
under my sleeveless tee.

Sometimes I swing a hammer
and sometimes I swing
my big cock and balls and all of this
has something to do with enlightenment.

The summer crickets click out the heat.
And it’s not even noon. So . . .
I’m only half-baked myself, sleepy
from last night’s sensual delights.

Perhaps when the sun’s at its zenith
I’ll be fully cooked:
complete and perfect enlightenment.
And then I’ll go out and

swing my hammer singing
and swing my big . . .
O …
you know the rest.

I wrote, “work diligently today”
in my vow book.

Drop the pen;
pick up the hammer again.

I wonder how many people
really understand my jokes.

O well, at least
I get a good laugh.

Considering my life
it’s a good thing
I can take a joke!

Writing about enlightenment –
and at the same time –
writing about sex –
isn’t this a sacrilege?

Working carpentry
thinking about the Enlightened State –
and at the same time –
thinking about my Dad:
how we raked Fall leaves together;
how we tore out a window
or replaced a door.
This is what Enlightenment’s
all about anyway, isn’t it?
Union with the One,
losing oneself completely
in Union with Father,
Son, and the Holy Mackerel.

It’s all very profound sitting here
alone at a construction site.
There’s a moral here and I think it is:

after a woman pushes a man
out of her womb
he spends the rest of his life
trying to get back in;
after a man pushes his son
into the world
the son spends the rest of his life
trying to get out!

Don’t worry.
Be happy.

- Meher Baba

The less said
the better.

- Major Blah Blah

I think this is something new.
I think I’ll call it, “poetry lite.”

I used to think poetry
had to be soo profound!
How about this new idea:
how about a poetry
people actually want to read?

Being profound doesn’t mean
so complex it’s impossible to understand.

I wake up on Saturday morning
and I’m still sleepy – just like
everyone else on the planet.
How profound is that?

I brew coffee and plod onto the porch.
I plop my butt on one deck chair
and rest my feet on another.
Deep. Very deep.

Preening before breakfast

Juice bends double and thoroughly

licks her asshole.

Actually, when offered a hotdog
the Sage did not say,
“Make me one with everything.”

Actually, his words were,
“Make me not two.”

I want to sit
but I want to join the children
in the living room too.
Today’s Memorial Day and it would be fun
to be with Irene but she’s working
the Boulder Creek Art and Wine Fair.

I needed to sleep in –
my hips and knees told me that!
But now I feel
the day’s half gone!
Why is there so much to do?
Is this great abundance?
or torture?

Just think of all the men killing each other
to protect my right to have
too many choices.
I’m a little ashamed
to complain like this.
Sorry.
I’ll try to behave now.

Writing another poem
suddenly feels so selfish!

I’ve not written many poems,
or, better said,

many poems I’ve not written
while serving others.

I did
drive a few nails
haul a few boards.
Now I sit on my client’s deck
pretending I need rest
from all that work!

It’s my karma, I suppose
to suffer all this beauty:
redwood trunks jetting up to blue sky,
a hummingbird buzzing to blossoms.

Yesterday I read Rumi and today
I’m afraid to put my pen to paper.
How was I so deluded
to think I was a poet?
Perhaps I’ll never write again.

“Nonsense!” cries Rumi. “Every tongue
sings its own song!
Let me hear yours,
and yours, and yours.”

“Stop talking to yourself,”
Don Juan admonished Carlos.
Carlos asked sincerely,
“Do you want me to stop taking notes?”
But Don Juan didn’t answer.

Luckily I have no guru.
I still think
I can do what I want.
But a Man of Power must be
impeccable.

So, I wrote in my vow book
to write in my poetry book
and now I’ve done it.
My hammer waits.
The boards are lonely.

And lunch is become Keith
and through some mystery
this page.

Rumi tells us of the Friend.
So that’s who’s inhabited
my poetry all these years!

These words have a heartbeat.
When I hear it
out they come.
When I don’t hear it
I am not alive.

Coffee cream and sugar
flow into my skinbag
this hot June morning.
Irene sits still as a Buddha
and the Friend sits with her.
Photos of Lama Yeshe wink at her.
He grins mischievously.
He’s met the Friend
face to face.
The Friend
rides in his pocket.

I cast my word net.
I try and try
to catch the Friend.
I pretend this hide and seek
makes me unique.
Actually it proves:
I’m just like you.

wind of a bee’s wing

You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.

- Rumi

wind of a bee’s wing.
dust of the anther
warmed by the sun.

we each remember
days as a boy;
a summer morning;
a young girl’s afternoon.

white blossoms trembling.
the hummingbird
chirps.

bed sheets abandoned in disarray;
the lovers nuzzled their nubs
and hairy places

the hummingbird plunges
into the blossoms the leaves
flutter in the wind
of a bee’s wing

the dusty yellow anther
warmed by the sun
tickles the bee’s belly.

the boy’s love swelling
to be the man visiting
his lover’s nectar.

they lay naked
sprawled in tangled sheets
their moistness tickled
by the breezes of a bee’s wing.

the boy the man
the girl the woman
the bird, the blossom
the bed, wrinkled and abandoned.

Every object, every being
is a jar full of delight.

- Rumi

Ecstatic poetry,
experiencing God
in a mote of dust – ha!
Read Rumi and believe his life
nothing but joy joy joy.

Where’s the poetry
he didn’t write Monday morning?
Before coffee.
Don’t fib to me.
Don’t tell me he always
leapt from bed excited to explore the day.

All that wine. And no headaches?
When did Rumi
pay the bills?
His clutch never blew out? His camel
never went lame?

The point of Buddhism,
says Geshe Michael Roach, is not
to tolerate crap with a smile.
It’s to live, he says, “in a crap-free life.”

I wake up on Monday
and my hips hurt. Some days
I could swim in coffee
and still be a grouch.

Let’s get real. Let’s hear
Poetry of the Depressed.
Crap Poetry. Lives
of the Dumb and Bummed-out!

Am I the only man
living ups and downs?
Let’s see Rumi’s vision
with camel spit in his eye.

To rewrite slightly:
every object, every being
is a jar full of delight.
and sometimes, it’ll piss you right off.

Rumi says:

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest
and let spirit fly in and out.

- Rumi

Can’t stop now . . .

still filling this notebook

with emptiness.

I think
I’m done making excuses.
I think
I’m done hiding.
I think
if you ask me what I think –
I’ll tell you.

Don’t tell me
I can’t drink wine
before noon.
I’ll do what I want
Ms. Conscience:
I do less harm than most.

I’ll complete my obligations
one by one.
And there’s no hurry.
What I must do
will still be there tomorrow;
if it’s not, clearly,
I didn’t have to do it.

Never put off until tomorrow
what you can eliminate altogether.
Do nothing.
And do it now.

Rumi says: Unfold your own myth.

Mission Statement

Imagine a world
in which you leap from bed
excited to explore the day.
Nature’s beauty surrounds you
and everyone you meet inspires you
with their generosity and love.

My goal
is to live in such a world.
And where I do not find it
to help create it.

I am here
you are there
between us is a mountain.
I sit sipping coffee on my deck.
You meditate in your gompa then sit
sipping coffee on your deck.
between us is a mountain.

Egg salad sandwiches, Capri Sun fruit juice,
I fill paper lunch bags and
drive Ali and Andrew to school.
Alpo and Cat Gourmet Delight, then
Thomas and Lily and Bo purr and wag
while you fast-walk to the dirt road gate.

What if a man proposed to you?
what if a man said
he would care for you unceasingly
and promised to be at your bedside
even the day you die
if between you is a mountain?

I swing a hammer and write poems.
You design business logos and greeting cards
and care for the comfort of lamas.
I am afraid we will wear away,
our dust scattered away by time,
before this mountain moves.

My children need me.
Your employees need you.
This poetry calls;
lamas need cushions and beds.
My coffee cools, is almost gone.
between us is a mountain.

What is love?
Gratitude.

What is hidden
in our chests?
Laughter.

What else?
Compassion.

- Rumi

I’ll hire a workman
but only if he’s a total flake.
Hooray when he doesn’t show up!
I get a little peace and quiet.

Yesterday my therapist and I decided
life sucks.
So that’s agreed. Now,
what can we do with our time?

There’s a teacher in California,
says Shunyam, who claims
you have it all now –
there’s nothing to fix.

But Shunyam, I protested,
if we’re enlightened already
what do we do with our time?
Celebrate! he exclaimed. Celebrate!

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

- Rumi

Five-thirty on Friday: other people are working.
I feel sorry for them.
I know, at this moment in California
tens of thousands of commuters
bake in rows upon rows of metal boxes
rolling on the remains of dinosaurs
and plants that died millions of years
before this chaotic rush to freedom
at five o-clock on Friday.

It’s true I have little money.
But is it sensible to make money
to live my life if I have to use my life
to make money?
If a man offered to imprison you
for a year, and feed you,
then let you go free
two weeks a year –
you’d laugh at such a preposterous joke.

I noticed in the market place
a man’s back bending by stacks
of cases of six packs of
bottles of soft drinks and beer.
Why did we ever turn away
from the clear creek’s water?
Man devolved to a machine,
organized into colonies, like ants;
like bees serving the corporate queen.

I left work early, unashamed of indolence.
Four miles down a dirt road I drove,
shoes off, shirt off, windows wide open.
At my lover’s hilltop house
the evening breeze whiffles the prayer flags
and clicks the hanging bamboo casually.
I will rest now, and soon
she will be home.

Up until ten minutes ago
I was as springy as a young sapling.
Now my knees ache just
hobbling from kitchen to living room.

Give me another glass of wine!
I don’t believe in time.
This pain is just emptiness
I tell myself. And don’t believe it.

O a bit wistful, I told Irene.
“Can’t see it changing,” she said.
“And I had made such progress
to free up my time from work.”

Some time
we’ll just have to say no –
no more work, I’m sorry.
Bring me another glass of wine!

Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief

disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.

- Rumi

My client’s not here. I can stop now
and check my 2:30 vow.
What’s more important –
to build a dog fence
or check your Bodhisattva vows?

Geshe Michael says having money
comes completely from your karma.
I don’t know. I must be a sinner.
It still seems to me work
has something to do with it.

After all
who’s going to pay me
just to keep my vows?
Hey! Cut that out. Quit pushing!
Line forms at the rear.

Don Juan told Carlos, men
have two centers of creation:
there’s reason,
and there’s the will.

Today my new workman
arrived at the jobsite, puked
and went home.
I think my will is winning.

My will, that is, to not work.
Maybe it’s my won’t.
I’m just a spoiled brat, I suppose
to think the world’s a pleasure place.

Free as the breezes
rustling in the tops of trees;
a butterfly lifted by air. Why
should a man’s life

be anything less?

Last week I drank too much wine.
The fact is: every day’s routine
drives me nuts!
Some people love their work –
I’m just not like that.
Some people love their money –
there’s nothing I want to buy.

I met a girl in love with life itself.
Personally, I have a goal
to “leap from bed excited to explore the day –“
but she’s the one who does it.
My kids used to criticize me
for waking up too happy.
Now I know how they feel.

I don’t know why I struggle so
just to be happy.
Aimlessly I just wander
from one drug to another: today it’s
coffee, or wine, or love –
where am I in all of this?
Sometimes my drug is intellection,

or solitude, or poetry, or Buddhist dharma.
In poetry, sometimes it’s all me.
In Dharma there is no me.
I look for the complexity in life
and I’m so excited … for a while.
Then I just see yesterday. today. tomorrow.
And wallow again in my sorrow.

Another day
Another pity party.

“Love?” said Lynne –
“It’s just chemicals.”

A great silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language.

- Rumi

I’ll go sit. Maybe something
will come of it.

I’ll go sit. Maybe nothing
will come of it.

I wonder what motivates men?
I sit on a redwood deck in the woods.
An owl says: “It’s whoo? It’s whoo? It’s whoo?”
I see the afternoon
bursting bright green in the underbrush
and I think I’m busy enough.

All day long I drive my big tin can.
Look at a rusty gutter.
Peer through a hole in a board.
A gentle hillside breeze
lightly touches pine boughs and leaves.
I don’t see a single thing to fix -

not a spider’s web, not a beetle’s wing.
It’s only the things man made
that fall apart and break.
“Why do we do this?” I called to Chris
while nailing up boards
to keep a dog from running free.
“Cause the women dig it,” he replied.

Men sweat and slay dragons and then
go home and get paid, get laid.
That’s a part of nature too, I guess.
But we forgot who made the dragons!
Now all “normal” men
run from the dragon too!

“Thus doth too much thought
make cowards of us all,” said Willie.

“Don’t waste time
thinking about how to do it,”
the Zen Master admonished.
“Just do it with all your might!”

The Tonal is very shy, is sensitive
says Don Juan. Only the Nagual is creative.

The will creates. The hara grows strong.
Lead guided by your hsing.
So I pass my body from drug to drug.

I had that beer, that wine, hard liquor.
Day after day I grew duller and dumb.

When you’re dumb enough
you’re just depressed.
Even in the light you’re blind.

After I’m done with coffee
I’ll drink just tea.

Maybe I’ll fast.
Drink only water.
Then only breathe.

Live beyond thought.

Rumi says:

We are lutes, no more, no less. If the sound box
is stuffed full of anything, no music.
If the brain and the belly are burning clean
with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire.

The fog clears, and a new energy makes you
run up the steps in front of you.
Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.
Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.

With morning birds twittering outside the open screen
and summer breezes scented pungently of pine,
barefoot memories scamper in my mind:
hot sunshine, grassy lawns, cool paths through
the swampy woodland behind my boyhood home.

Mom and Dad are gone. The house is sold.
“Not an original wall remains inside the house,
they’ve changed it all,” my friends say.
My boy bedroom – gone.

I helped build a school for Ali and Andrew.
I visited classrooms, swung a hammer and –
from an old stump – chain-sawed a playground throne.
The Headmaster and I were friends.

When the new Headmistress arrived
she glared scathingly and said:
“What are you doing here?”
In a week the throne - cut down.

When Irene was Vajrapani-ma
cooking for all and caring for children,
the men ran redwoods through the mill
the Gompa rose in the forest and
His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, came to teach.

Last night in Irene’s dream
old woman Irene hobbled toward the Gompa.
Nobody knew who she was!

So …
get used to it.
Don’t be sad. What’s the point?
You’ll fall apart yourself and
be forgotten before long.
The old walls won’t stay standing.
You’re the only one who knows your memories.
And they’ll go too.

Rumi says:
“Everything has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.”

Sunday morning.

It’d be nice to phone Mom.

She’s dead.

Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.

Love moves away.
The light changes.

I need more grace
than I thought.

- Rumi

Today’s poem, I think,
is best.

Tomorrow I read it and think:
what garbage!

Today’s poem, I think,
is best.

O dear,
meditated
studied Bodhisattva vows
wrote a poem
typed six poems
wrote two poems
printed a poem for Irene
printed a poem for Chris
O dear –
2:30 in the afternoon.
I better start
my day’s work!

Look at me –
I’m just like you:
just another someone with a job.
And inside too
you’re just like me –
a wizard
or an angel
struggling to be free.

Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation.

A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.

- Rumi

Coming to the end of things
“This is ending . . . “
not much more to say than that.

We climbing this mountain,
invite you to join.
Sometimes halfway up sometimes
half way down –
pass us if you can!
Surrounded by peaks
at least they’re visible.

Camping with relatives I see my hands
are my brother’s hands;
my brother’s: my father’s.
Each of us turns the same soil.
The water still flows in the creek endlessly
from peak to mountain lake to valley . . .
to the sea.

Even without invitation
we climb and romp together.
We scatter our lives along the trail
like so many bits of paper
scribbled all over with poems.

Scoop up a cup of clear water
as it passes.
Bring home
a breath of mountain air to share.
One gift deserves another.
Each gift is an act of bravery –
the beginning and the end itself.

from All Day Is Not Too Long 1997-2000

2010-02-04T20:15:00.000-08:00

ALL DAY IS NOT TOO LONG

KEITH EMMONS
Author’s Note:

(to appreciate it best, read it straight through, start to finish)

I

morning vow time

great!

I take a break.

November 30, 1999 –
just any old Wednesday.
Beginning all over again.

O if I only be blessed with Beginner’s Mind!

These clouds seem rushing, with somewhere to go.
This grass is taller than I am.

Note: See Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Crickets chirr on the

yellow hillside. I wonder what

makes good friends?

White clouds blue winter sky
on the hill by Vajrapani.
We’ve walked the gravel road
and now the shower’s lucky fingers
touch your naked body everywhere.

It is Christmas and I realize
there is nothing I can give you.

The greatest gift is your gift to me:
your acceptance of this poverty.

In the Gompa

Ah! There’s the one I dreamed of
her childish frame, her small white breasts.
As long as you follow desire
warn the words of Shakyamuni Buddha
posted on the wall
you will never be satisfied.

Note: Gompa – a Tibetan meditation hall

I can’t explain it –

three shots of whiskey and suddenly

my boredom’s gone.

Monday. Fog hangs

over my mountain rental.

I’m still alive.

I still believe the rose.

something happening again . . .
even if the same old debate.
why should he quarrel with himself?

“two paths are not one,” he said,
“not two, for both go nowhere.”
“O don’t go there,” she said.
and he feared his doubt

would hurt her certain thought,
her faith, that what she felt
was real, that what she felt –
her passion – was ample refuge

from reality, was reality itself.
O feel these bones and flesh
and know how soon their dust
and dust will mingle in the air

and on the floor. why
should we quarrel anymore?

So I think I’ll go meditate then
“go about my business” pushing paper,
computer keys, phone recording replay buttons –

why did I wire my house? why
did I allow the outside world
to come cascading across my morning?
the neighbor’s rooster
is enough cacophony for me.

all life long, looking for peace –
have it now! soon this moment we call life
will be gone with the cocks crow at dawn
and we will never know:
peace has been with us all along.

OK Daphiney-cat

my poem’s all writ -

I’ll get your breakfast now.

Season’s first runny nose

and sore throat too. I go

to work anyway.

way behind at work –

I stop, sit down anyway

listen to the Grackle.

I’m so negligent:

so many birds singing and I

don’t know their names!

I’m a giant!

I kick and swing – terrorized

by this fly!

I’m a human.

A spider jogs this way and that

across concrete.

I work hard.

I neither laugh nor cry. My self

comes back to me.

Alone on the jobsite.

Maybe I can write. And no one

will think I’m loafing.

Loafing! O no,

not me. I’m consciously inspecting

the view.

Watering to hold down the dust.
I make a nice rainbow.

O great, a normal

electrical cord:

all tangled up.

Another ankle-buster –

the whole world

must be made of rocks!

10:20 AM:
My first curse.

Ah yes, to become enlightened,
That’s the point!

10:45, writing

in my Vow book. Geshe Michael

smiles from the cover.

planning my days

from vow to vow.

II

Spring. Tread among pink

paths of flower petals.

These old work boots.

Springtime I love you:

coats, boots, sweaters – women

removing all their clothing!

This ginseng doesn’t know it comes from China.
Why should the frightened kitty take my treat?
I sit on the deck and await Irene.

The laundry spins, and butterflies flitter among leaves.
All week long I’ve driven metal into wood.
Why shouldn’t the frightened kitty take my treat?

She approaches and meows, then runs away again.

work’s done. cherry petals

spread wide. I anticipate

your musky scent.

We made the bed.

Later, I watched Irene sitting cross-legged on the bedspread studying Master Pabonka Rinpoche’s Lam Rim masterpiece, Liberation Thrust into the Palm of Your Hand. To me, the Tibetan woodblock letters looked a little like miniature hoof prints on the pages.

red book in her hand her mind
dances, dances.

come home little pony prancing
in the meadows of the mind.

hoof prints lifting from the pages
her mind settles as she sits

softly as a rock

in her pasture without fences red book
in the palm of her hand.

I sit on the path warming my body
in the morning sun at Vajrapani.

Another day in the enlightened state.

The creek rustles through the ravine
while dusk descends; rising and falling
voices in the monastery chant
Twenty-one Homages to Tara.

Butterfly
my bed sheets hold you
until you wake
and fly away.

Butterfly I will try
to be the ground
that grows the flower
you long to visit.

Where you sit on the mountainside
I fear you will fly away
with lamas, with sheets of sutra,
and I will see too late only smoke
rising from the extinguished candles
at your altar.

Butterfly take pity on your followers
tangled in obligations
imprisoned in our insecurities and fear.
We too long to be free and we too
will one day
have wings.

I am here
you are there
between us is a mountain.
I sit sipping coffee on my deck.
You meditate in your gompa then sit
sipping coffee on your deck.
between us is a mountain.

Egg salad sandwiches, Capri Sun fruit juice,
I fill paper lunch bags and
drive Ali and Andrew to school.
Alpo and Cat Gourmet Delight, then
Thomas and Lily and Bo purr and wag
while you fast-walk to the dirt road gate.

What if a man proposed to you?
what if a man said
he would care for you unceasingly
and promised to be at your bedside
even the day you die
if between you is a mountain?

I swing a hammer and write poems.
You design business logos and greeting cards
and care for the comfort of lamas.
I am afraid we will wear away,
our dust scattered away by time,
before this mountain moves.

My children need me.
Your employees need you.
This poetry calls;
lamas need cushions and beds.
My coffee cools, is almost gone.
between us is a mountain.

Today I feel rich.

I’ll light

two candles!

Only this precious jewel
this candle’s flame
to be extinguished in a moment more;

only this pain of heart this
halt of breath – anticipation
of love;

inexpressible, this moment.
this touch of recognition of
me in you,

you in me, both unreachable;
we, burning and expiring
gazing at one another.

This is my only offering.
only this precious jewel.

I sat.

I did that.

Uh oh –

I almost hurried!

wind of a bee’s wing.
dust of the anther
warmed by the sun.

we each remember
days as a boy;
a summer morning;
a young girl’s afternoon.

white blossoms trembling.
the hummingbird
chirps.

bed sheets abandoned in disarray;
the lovers nuzzled their nubs
and hairy places

the hummingbird plunges
into the blossoms the leaves
flutter in the wind
of a bee’s wing

the dusty yellow anther
warmed by the sun
tickles the bee’s belly.

the boy’s love swelling
to be the man visiting
his lover’s nectar.

they lay naked
sprawled in tangled sheets
their moistness tickled
by the breezes of a bee’s wing.

the boy the man
the girl the woman
the bird, the blossom
the bed, wrinkled and abandoned.

a woman

who knows how to please a man.

When I found my
coffee cup at
your house I remembered your
coffee cup at
my house and I
thought
I better warn you – I
hope I’m
not
too late.
if I
spend time
with you and you
spend time with
me our things
might mix together
even become
familiar and you
and I might get mixed
together and even
become fond and begin to miss
that spot
on each other’s shelf or even
want
not to be separated
sometimes.

Her deep scent on my

fingers lingering, I study

Abidharma.

Irene’s in retreat

putting all her desires to bed.

I’ve no one to call.

Irene’s in retreat.

I wish I could put all her

desires to bed.

Abidharma – “Higher Knowledge,” one of the five great texts historically studied in Tibetan monasteries to receive one’s Geshe degree.
At Christmas time Irene gave me a little chapbook suitable for a poem a page.

EMPTY PAGES

Visualizing TARA

O – it’s Irene!

O, it’s TARA.

It’s almost 2000!

I resolve

to go slowly.

I guess I said yes:

Irene even

changed my haircut!

Holidays are over

at last!

Now

we can relax.

Stacking the dishes;

reciting the OM.

Hi chickens!

It’s almost next year –

any eggs for me?

Kids still asleep.

I’ll put on the music

REAL LOUD!

Hey, it worked!

Ali’s in the shower.

Egg in the pancakes;

I’m turning chickens

into children!

Ball and chain;

I put the kid’s beeper

into my pocket.
I

Life in America:

the kids go to their Mom’s

via McDonalds.

O yes! a day

of my own. Now

I can go sit.

So what if I don’t

get it all done.

Get what all done?

Om Tare

Tutare Ture

Soha!

I think about how hard it is

to ask rich people to give -

even to a good cause.

It’s not for the cause –

it’s for them too!

Look at the lemon tree

outside my door.

Without a bit of hesitation or complaint

it gives me lemons and lemons.

And its seeds go everywhere!

Back home.

Daphiney the Cat

waits for breakfast.

Sure

I want to be modern.

But I didn’t want Mom’s plate

to explode

in the microwave!

Yet to sit.

Now even Geshe Michael’s Book

delays my sitting down.

Ladling tea for praetas

I pray I always have

enough to give away.

I see

I’m being inefficient.

I do it anyway.

After all,

who wrote poetry

for speed?

I bow, touching

my chin. O my gosh!

I still didn’t shave!

Sure it slowed me down.

But I had to trim

that nose hair.

“Wake up!”

yells Patrul Rinpoche.

I know this

and I haven’t yet

opened his book.

Sure I love Irene.

And we are lovers.

But best of all, she’s

my Spiritual Friend.

I put my book away.

Nothing to rely on now

but myself.

All day is not too long

to sit in meditation.

I vow

to save all sentient beings.

I vow

to sunder the bonds of the deluding passions.

I vow

to live according to the Dharma.

I vow

to attain Buddhahood.

Nothing on these pages,

I go about my day.

III

I want to write a

profound thought about reality –

I feed the cats first.

Ah, good job Daphiney!

You’ve brought me a

dead bird.

I meditate.

Daphiney rips feathers off a

dead bird.

Brown Junko’s eye

is wide open. Daphiney

munches on its head.

Feathers abandoned

on my doormat. Daphiney ate everything

except the feet.

Sudden summer.

Hot scent of eucalyptus sap.

The grass is brown.

“Dad, come quickly -

It’s really important!” A spider

trapped in the wastebasket.

Back from vacation.

I didn’t need a truck repairman
until I got back in my truck.

Into my truck

enmired in the world

of no consequence.

At the lumber yard – ooops!

three poetry notebooks,

no work clipboard.

The work goes well.

I sit in my truck resting.

And feel guilty.

To be honest

I can’t charge my client

for writing haiku.

the electrician didn’t finish

his work. O boy – I get to go

have fun!

I’ll just sit here

by the road a minute

and keep these roses company.

Thank you, Poplars.

Your bright yellow leaves.

I switch off the radio.

Crickets chirr on the

golden hillside. Why would I think

I’m growing old?

Ali’s right: today’s air

is different. The breeze

flutters my pages.

A day’s work done!

Well, half a day really –

that’s enough for me!

IV

Go to work, I said,

blowing out altar candles.

But not all of them.

Begin in peace.
Continue in peacefulness.
There is no ending.

Songs among the mountains.
Begin in peace.

I better sit. Then go to work.
Continue in peacefulness.

Quick or you’ll never get done.
There is no ending.

Notebook; Vow book; calendar –
Begin in peace.

Refuge mind in Three Jewels.
Continue in peacefulness.

In peace until I die.
There is no ending.

Note: Three Jewels – The Buddha, his Teachings and those who are realized

Irene’s in a retreat on

Death and Dying. I can’t wait

to see her tonight.

We’re all going to die – let’s celebrate!
The saffron and maroon robed monk
tells us we’re going to die tells us
our time to live is running out tells us
we’ve very little time for our spiritual practice.
He studied with Tibetan masters, learned English,
and came all the way from Switzerland
just to tell us this.

The meditators sit around somberly.
They sit silently and sometimes sigh.
Meanwhile, the compassionate peahen
stalks the redwood chips searching intently
for some good bug to eat.
When she finds one, I guarantee it,
she’ll quickly put it out of its misery.
If it had any, that is. Perhaps
it was just a bug and didn’t dwell,
and didn’t sit sadly, its strength sapped away
with its illusory sense of loss of self.

Let’s celebrate!

This morning I want to grab you, I want to
embrace you and tell you how I love you.
But you are far away.
And so I feel the sweetness
of missing you.

I want to tell you simple things: what
fun it is, the kids gone, tidying up,
sitting with golden candles
and my altar’s smiling gurus, surrounded
by fog-wrapped redwoods, thinking of
you.

It’s good to be alone letting my mind
amble like the fog flowing
intimately around
and between the tufts of redwood
like the fingers of your hand
slipping between and feeling the fingers
of my hand.

I am so fortunate, I think, so fortunate to be
welcomed – like a wandering child,
like an embryo – into this
woman’s heart.

My only purpose in life
is to please you.
You leave me again and again;
sometimes for work,
sometimes to visit your family,
this time to seek unexcelled enlightenment
through Tantra teachings from Ribur Rinpoche.

I can’t go with you. My spiritual poverty
is complete: I don’t have the right vows.
So I muck about, listen to Geshe Michael tapes,
drive to construction jobs,
living my wanna-be life.

I wanna be with you.
I wanna rise with you
and sit with you for long
and a long time every morning.
With you I want to be
thanking the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
for their gift of giving me you.

And then all day I’ll serve them
by being kind to you.

Who says
I’m driven by desire?

I slip my hand
into my jeans this morning
and feel your fingers
encircling my cold balls.
memory plunges into your mound
and your warm palm
cups them gently
as they ride.

this autumn leaf falls
with no memory of itself.

there is no dust. sweep

as we might sweep, we cannot

take it away.

On that day when our sex life
expires like a subscription to Newsweek
and we suddenly realize
it was all just sex
that kept us together,
I’ll be drinking my tea
with powdered chai and you
will be reading Rumi because
your habits will have become mine
and my habits will have become yours
and we’ll say, “O well, then …
we might as well live together
the rest of our lives anyway.”

Deeply lost in love
how can I abnegate desire?
The smooth contours of your flesh,
my arm encircling,
les peches parfait, symmetric mounds
pleasure-tipped with ripe raspberries
for my tongue.
You stand naked, succulent
like a sun-engorged papaya
freshly cut open
expectant of my arousal.
In the thrusts of our passion
I copulate dakinis, gopis
my spirit lance penetrating
to your white light the release
of our ablution –
how can I abnegate desire?

Knowing no-self
And Buddha’s Precepts,
I go where I want.
I do what I want.

from First Rain 1993-1996

2010-02-04T20:14:00.000-08:00

FIRST RAIN

KEITH EMMONS

April in California! Mount Umunhum stands against a coral cloudless blue. The maples, naked all winter, hold out their leaf-hands again, palms up to the sky. The madrone litter pathways and creek beds with white fairy bell blossoms.
The sun floods into my mountainside living room. The carpet is warm on my bare feet. The sliding picture-window door is open wide.
O sensual solitude! The sensual solitude, the freedom and relaxation – the senses I dream to share with my as yet unfound other. O she dreams of these moments too. By the windowsill, gazing at the dappling sun play beneath the towering firs, her eyes resting on lavender blooms, on spade-leaves and purple-blue vinca blossoms, she listlessly draws her sensitive fingers through her hair. Her hair, light brown or blond, is long and light, or short and soft but she knows: it is not soft for her. For her it is just her hair. But she sees it now, not with her own eye, but with the eye of her lover, to whom her silken cascade is a marvelous wonder and who feels its sylvan coolness running between her fingers even to the palm.
She tosses back her head and goes about her day. As I do.

Would that I could write these reveries throughout the day. Would that I could wander by the creek side, could stand absorbing the filtered California sun sparkling on the jiggling clusters of clear bubbles on the water chortling within the wood. For whom does the freshet sport gaily along if I am not there to draw it in? And for whom do I push my pen along, for whom do I feel the delectable breezes along my legs, across my bare chest, if she is not here with me?

There is mystery – this we know. And yet, somehow, to make this mystery real, to bring it into the truth of being, we must acknowledge it, even without speaking, by being with it, together, and with one another.

This, I have written for you.

There were ants in the house
when we shipped off Dad.
In Massachusetts
in King Philip’s land
crickets chirred all summer day
all summer night
until the motionless moment where day
is ambivalent between breathless still
and imperceptible edging into morning.
Before dawn a bird I’d never heard before
sang alone then stopped silent
before the sun arose.

Ha! little black cricket
I saw you in the grass
when we pulled Granddad’s cider press
out of the barn.
I was a boy.
I played all over this grass.
I was never afraid of the big black ants
their leggy progress along a sill or floorboard.
But it was peculiar
to see them roaming singly,
on the kitchen cabinet,
up the leg of the dining room table.
One ant walked right up my arm.

We split and divided
the rugs, the plates
the pictures on the walls.
Dad hobbled from room to room.
Beds came apart, couches moved to the attic,
the Colonial floorboards showed again
after fifty years.
Dad placed his small selection in a box.

A worm ate half my mint leaf
pulled from the garden for my tea
before I hate the other half!
Brother
and sister in her black cape
had too many tête-à-têtes –
they didn’t realize I was awake
and watching from the upstairs window.
My sister signaled “time out!” with her hands.
My brother, leaning toward her emphatically,
sliced his hand across his neck.

And the bricks were loose on the front steps.
The wasps’ nests in the attic were empty.
The roof ridges of the shop house sagged.
The chicken coop wall was leaning and
some large burrowing animal was digging
through the chicken coop floor leaving piles of sand.
And the family stumbled effectively about
never mentioning their anger and their fear.

And the night before I left my family home
the merciless mosquitoes robbed my sleep
leaving blood spots soaked onto my tattered tee.

Open the door to your poet and let him live.
Who’s to say no? Who’s to say no?
The sun rises each day and I rise with it.

My father is dead almost forty-five days.
Every morning I meditate the phowa.
Open the door to your poet and let him live.

Through some strange blossoming I’m off again!
I’m sure there’s a phoenix somewhere in this dust.
The sun rises each day, and I rise with it.

My nose is running and my throat and knees are sore.
Today I will sit, or scribble, or sleep all day.
Who’s to say no? Who’s to say no?

Say yes to your poet, let him sing in green pastures.
Though what was, no longer is, and what is, is not –
if he sees beauty and says it in words
who’s to say no as the sun rises and I rise with it.

Note: Sit – meditate; phowa - a Tibetan Buddhist practice to benefit the dead.

Okay chickens –

it’s the Fourth of July, I’ll

let you out of your pen.

first rain –
if I could just learn to sit again.
or have the time! just to sit
without guilt, without anxiety –
so many obligations incomplete.
Why have I forgotten
I am complete now, where I sit
now?

“Who’s your partner?”
asks my friend Kathy. She means
who’s your guide, your spiritual friend . . .
your god.
Does rain have a partner?

My parakeets chirp and chatter on their perch.
They sidle left and right
and whack their beaks together.
Like them, I think,
just a two-legged companion
will make me happy.
What use have I for any
multi-headed, omnipresent being?

Don’t get me wrong!

Please, don’t misunderstand –
your god is fine with me.

But at times I feel
like the rain
falling without permission
and without regret.
It splashes on rooftops and decks,
splatters on maple leaves and lichen -
exploding on rocks where moss will grow.
Trickling into the soil it waits
to rise again as mist, as cloud.
as clouds in blue sky.
as the joy of the sight
of clouds in blue sky.

to gather together again
by the sheer will of purposeless nurturing
to again
tumble without restraint
through the tickling air.

first rain –

if I could just learn

to sit again.

My day begins guided by Ultimate Wisdom.
The day needs wisdom to begin? Ha!
Or am I the Ultimate?
I sit cross legged in my pajamas
reading about Dolma, the Liberator.
In the merit field of swirling milk
the Buddha’s radiant rays stream forth
implacably from his throne held up
by snarling tigers. This
is in the merit field of the mind.
In the merit field of the day
the forced air heater rumbles and hisses,
the phone rings and relatives rattle on
about shrinks and Family Court.
A light rain visits the deck and stops.
Junkos hop about snatching seeds
fallen from my daughter’s feeder,
the lilac seedlings press
green palms toward the sky.

Snow on the mountain.

Parakeet Cocktail struggled, scattering seeds,

rolled over and died.

This is the voice of no speaking.
It is Sunday – let the children sleep.

This is thunder of the mountains;
their massive shoulders – a slumbering bear
frocked with ridges of pine – lift the dawn.

O gift of time! Give me all day
that I may see the silhouetted pine appear
then disappear among indifferent mists.
If not all day, give me
these moments, at least.
Let me pretend the clouds belong
where the clouds belong,
the sun has risen above his proper hill

and I am vast in emptiness;
rich
without reason to be climbing
or descend.

sitting . . .

doing nothing –

with all my might.

sitting . . .

doing nothing –

with all my might.

sitting . . .

doing nothing –

with all my might.

O day of delicious indolence!
O exquisite pleasure of breath –
and to know I am breathing.
In the town of Los Gatos
the townsfolk hustle to and fro.

“It is from within the center of difficulty
one begins to see,” I read
standing akimbo, and browsing
among the library’s “new arrivals.”

Stretched on the bench
at the health food store
I fell asleep. As asleep as Whitman
striding across America.

I gather cocoa-colored leaves
and white magnolia petals;
my back is one of two trunks
each resting upon the other.

I’ve sat out this afternoon before
on a hundred village greens across America.
Face-kissing sun, I know you know me;
the dirt sings in pink clover blossoms
popped-up above a carpet of green.

When I traveled as a lad
searching for America,
I found it in sunny afternoons
and blossoms of clover.
America is in my heart
and my heart was here
before my heart was born
and was here
before America was America.

Los Gatos nestles her cozy fur
against the coastal mountain foothills.
The air is sweet, is fragrant
with the breath of grass exuded,
with the warmth of my chest
of a thousand afternoons
in the towns of our imagination
I have visited
across America.

at the Cirque du Soleil one of the silly sad clowns
lurched again and again reaching out
trying to grab the delicate butterfly of joy.
he didn’t see the fine black wire
connecting the butterfly to his own head.
as he lunged, she fluttered temptingly ahead
always elusive, always leading by just a tiny bit
our clown-selve’s reach.

perhaps the butterfly cannot be captured
but I think we can know it, somehow,
in some way related to the wire
springing from our head and
giving her flight.

As I drive into the market lot
for a cup of coffee I think:
I’m just being lazy, I’m just delaying.
I should go straight to the site
and begin today’s construction work.
But then I realize: there is no should.
Yes, I need to pay my bills.
Yes, if I indulge philosophy all day long –
if I expect to be given all
just because I’m happy – I’m deluded.
Yet just because others rush – so should I?
Because others judge happiness as worthless,
as empty and not the source of life –
should I deny what I know is right?
So I’ll stroll to the store -
not rush across the parking lot.
The purple sweet pea is blooming
all along the guard rail fence.
I, for one, have seen it.

In my blue van, sun on my page
I sit distracted. The Forest of Niscene Marks
covers the hills with green stillness; the Pacific Ocean
and a coral blue sky merge at the valley’s opening.

I sweat in faded denim pants;
Skillsaw, tool belt, sledge hammer and electric line –
these lie neglected for a moment which I wish
would expand to be a lifetime.
End desire? My whole life is desire.
Desire to loaf. Desire to sit in the emotion
of idle inspiration. Breathe in; breathe out.
The mountain air cools my nostrils.
When I see the young wife, in her white sedan
wearing hip-hugging tiger-striped tights,
my arousal stirs endless thought.

Valley to the sweet sliding ocean of bliss
grant me my sincere desire: head first
I’ll plunge into your emptiness and disappear.

Distant songbird
I hear your melody.

Do your children hear you sing?

We sing in the vastness to our destinations.

Meeting, from time to time, by chance
sharing the depth, the emotion
the nectar of our voyage
to embrace
then fly hurriedly away,
carrying wonder and recollection of our dance
then fading into clouds
distant specks
fleeing toward the horizon.

Invisible partner
progressing under the same sun and stars as I
I see the sun that shines on your back
brightening and lightening your way.

I see the sun
that sees you singing there
loosed above the land, yet like me
not in the heavens either, aware however
the mystery is in us and around us
supporting us in our miraculous flight.

With your husband gone
you left too wearing chic sunglasses
and hip-hugging tiger-striped tights.

Later
you drove home,
your white sedan,

your thoughts smooth, soothed and confused
distracted on that sweet moist guilt
between your legs.

Under the eves a wood tit
with his red cap on
hops from foot to foot then
flies into the cottage!
Ooo . . . warm cottage
O . . . how cozy
how cozy on the roof beam he sits
so pleased, so pleased with himself
bright black eyes he flew right in
to be home right pleased. We too
found Cottage Six in the misty woods
and opened the door.

Oh let us open our own doors too!
Perhaps a little winged thing
is hovering about –
I think it is –
I think it flutters about
in the dark
in the mist
among the redwoods
seeking a warm protected home
and there to roost.

He tucks his red cap
beneath his wing to dream
until the morning.

if she wears perfume
I promise to be the poem she writes
that wells within my body now
as she offers word
upon her upturned palms
after word in her open palms
offering them
leaves plucked
one my one from the tree
or like one button from her blouse
at a time one sleeve falling
another
her dress
offered
settling as a flower petal she
drapes her arms around me
and I swoon into her perfume
in the lost scent of our longing
into her thick breath
her nipples blossoming upward as I plunge
into the perfume of her thighs’ ravine
in flood, spuming with mixture of juices spilled,
pelted and washing sweet waves
of warmth across her spine . . .

and she exhaling
like the land plowed
with seed
and touched with rain
when she wears perfume
and I
am her poem.

This fly and I sit in the Sunday morning.

I . . . settle into the plastic lawn chair,
my back aching from raking the deck
and quarreling every day with my boss;
the fly on the railing stands motionless
on six legs, facing into the breeze.

After these days of winter rain
the redwood railing is dark and wet
and touched with green. I imagine
his feet feel the cool moistness
of his life without traffic and timecards.

Vast images of sunlight and cloud travel
across his hemispherical eyes.

The mountain birds and my parakeets
pelt out their morning songs;
I reread my own erotic poem, a stirring
swells warmly against my inner thigh.
O imagined darling! where are you now?
When will you be here to join the dance?

Coffee steam lifts from a white cup;
the parakeets chirp and chatter.
Her cup of tea, no doubt, is steaming too.
Or her lithe body stretches in the Sun Salute.
Both of us, I feel, may gaze into this valley
now washed sweetly by the sun

caressing its mountain thighs; she reclines
spread widely open to the sky.
The birds flitter and chirp playfully
among the tips of evergreens
secluding the humid and deep ravine.
I take my life here . . .

here my head rests, is restored
and becomes whole, with you,
with you as valley and bosom and mountain,
as grace of fertile life in your belly I nuzzle
your birdsong your stretch of sinew,
our steam evaporating sweetly into day.

With whom do I share my morning poem?
And where is she
enwrapped in her own poem
this morning? The ruby-throated hummingbird
visits the fuchsia. Sharply
it plunges into the humid nectar
before buzzing away.

Some cricket’s legs make music together
like the legs of naked lovers
tumbling among blades of iris.
The white butterfly flits among ferns
and floats above raspberry blossoms.

I feel their moist fragrance lifting her wings
like the lilting of lovers
in the reverie of their deep interior touch.
And I imagine she, at this moment
musing within her own poem
with whom, one day
I will share my own.

This day suits me perfectly
fogged in
sitting on my misty porch
in the mist
smoking my first cigarette
thinking of my stuffed-up nose
acquired into the early morning hours
with you.

I imagine
we’re just now waking
in some girl’s school dormitory room
our heads still spinning
from the touch
of such forbidden pleasure.

“Don’t tell me what time it is,” you say
so I don’t, rising from our bed,
turning to tuck around you
your puffy white comforter.

O heart
why do you hurt me
with your love?
O you ache
imagining your freedom
to flower like a rose
if She were here, now
Her silent presence flowing over you –
as beyond my window I see
cool wisps of fog
curling around evergreens in silhouette
against the grey emptiness.

The mountains are completely gone!
The fog’s gentle breath
has obliterated them in spirals
and eddies of air
light as the imagination
yet as irresistible and overwhelming
as love itself.

O heart
you call into the fog
knowing,
if She chooses not to hear,
you will stumble on
even companionless.

The rose will flower in some other garden
even without you there.
And the sun
burning invisibly behind these clouds
will, by its own will, one day
press through.

Obsessing about you
penetrating you with my anger
penetrating you with my love.

I must love this pain must love
your distraction your fear
your ambivalence. you are the doe
fleetingly disappearing
into your intellectual ravine.

my mind pursues you
through bristles through thorns
into darkness pursuing
your white-peaked tail
onto the glade.

is all this just for sex?
am I just animal – no heart, no mind –
to rut alone
with my imagination?
the wood says nothing.

you bound, glancing back at me.
and my madness moans
to be wicked with you

in bed.

Hanshan 6/30/96

So the wheel turns and it appears
the cock crows! for the last time
on my shingled cottage in the woods.
“Wake up” calls the sign by my door.
The bronze Buddha sits on his stump
watching my cardboard boxes come and go.
For an entire year I watched him carefully
and he never moved. O my companions!
sharing in the pageant of one man’s life,
the blessing of your being is with me
and I return it to you always to blossom,
as I leave nothing behind, take nothing away.

moving again!

the cactus tongue-leaves

point every which way.

I have no place to sit

while I write poetry.

I write anyway.

Death, my friend! If not for you
why would I live? I love
the cleaning-up of things.
I sweep beach sand from the living room
linoleum floor at our suite
in the Bonnie Blink Hotel.
Into the wash go sheets and socks –
Leap! you possessions – back, I say,
back into your cardboard boxes.
The U Haul slumbers in its lot,
dreaming of sucking you into its maw,
then to pop you out at Redwood Estates.
Andrew’s and Alexandra’s wild entropy dance,
in their absence, settles down. Shirts
return to drawers, PJ’s fold their arms,
and rest in the darkness.

This is not somber. This dying
is the growing of life, is movement
settling from a planet’s spin.
It is the future, arrived with anticipation
at our door. Eagerly
she waits for us to let her in.

I know, in just this way, I
rushing to the beyond one day
will tidy up my own little whorl of dust.
I will set each dislocation, and each creation,
just so. I’ll gift each friend and love
in my final giveaway.
When the door opens
the wind will rush in
scattering my sand everywhere.

While shuffling papers

on my desk the clouds

completely took the sky!

though I bustle away to the bookstore
for coffee before I commit again
to my afternoon’s here and there,
let there remain here, let here
be the scent of the ocean in my hair.

Sitting peacefully
as clouds move grandly
across the mountain range in my horizon,
the white butterfly comes back to me.

So rejoice!

Between now
and Eternity

I am!

Put it this way –

I am happy to accept heaven
in my day to day living.

So, solitary moon!
slipping silently from behind the blue mountain
into the bluer sky

eyeball of the night
there are no words about you
but I think you see

my loneliness. even my blue eyes
have one another
but I have no one, as you

have no one, moon
waxing with love
and waning in your single sorrow.

I see you moon!
tell me you see me
too.

It’s quite ordinary, I suppose, what I feel –
a quickening of the heart,
suddenly the air is refreshingly cool
caressing my nostrils as deeply
I breathe.

It’s as simple, I suppose,
as the life of a cup of cappuccino
pumping in my chest or the breath-held
anticipation of the spirit
held gently

in a beautiful woman’s body
a woman I touch caressingly
with my voice
as I dare offer to share
a moment’s cup of coffee together.

I doubt myself each move I make.
This is why I need you.
Hold me, while we dance.

This present notebook marks the past
as if my writing’s made it last.
I doubt myself each move I make.

I’ve loved – these archives prove it!
And now I want another chance.
Hold me, while we dance.

The night is gone and dawn
Has blasted through – for who?
This is why I need you.

Hold me, while we dance!
Alone, I spin about but doubt myself.
Your touch can pull me through.
This is why I need you.

Hanshan CXXII

Give me a quiet thought, please, before the day begins.
A cup of Cambric tea, a sunlit view of Douglas Fir,
Rush of air from the flooring vents the only sound.
Thursday I have a date with someone new!
“Natural, elegant, slender, graceful, youthful –
Very attractive,” her friends describe her.
I bought a book: How Loving Couples Fight.
O please great powers of my karmic past -
ripen for me now! Give me love!
Give me love again: a love that’s worth a fight.
I promise our differences will be the tropic wind
To nudge our naked craft throughout the quiet night.

Hanshan

Coffee. Then alcohol. Then coffee again.
This is how my days begin and end.
Will they end in agitation? Coffied-up
careening over Summit Road to a construction job?
Or in dullness, eaten by a pus-dripping dream dog
lurking in my restless horizontal stupor?
Dad is dead. Mom died years ago.
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death
I still have no money. “Keep your book of vows!”
says my Geshe Michael Roach. “Surprising, amazing,
unbelievable things will begin to happen.”
And I believe him, and I rise each morning
to turn another page.

Note: Geshe – translated as “Spiritual Friend:” a graduate of the twenty-year Tibetan Buddhist tradition of spiritual studies.

this page I turn for she –
she waits for me
she waits for me.

she knows I sing my separate song –
it won’t be long
it won’t be long.

the sun comes up on Easter
the chicks chirp in their box
I’m ready now to greet her
I seek her like a fox.

her humming brings the morning up
I rise to sup
I rise to sup

to supplicate, in love be lost
don’t care the cost
don’t care the cost.

we’ll ride through noon
I’ll set with her
in evening’s dew
we’ll mix our fur.

Take off your clothing and sit with me.
There are no clocks.
If we sit here or we sit there –
it makes no difference:
I seek you where you are.

The sun bristles silently.
Mars and Mercury – all the planets
circle in their silence about the center
in which you sit. Below us Earth
dangles from our motionless dance.

We have the answer:
there are no questions.
My heart beats. Your heart is beating.
I see you seeing me.
Let the distance we imagine between us
dissolve.

Now let us touch.

Burgundy Honda
hies her
hither & yon.

Blue van
holds the man.

OM AH HUM
Yellow nectar flowing from our minds
to purify thought
Red light connects our throats
to purify our speech
Blue rays bring heart and hara
together.

When she parks by the Town Hall green
by the blondness of her hair
she will be seen.

Together in their separate ways
they’ve sought the light
now hoping they can disappear
into the night.

Take off your clothes
before you sit with me;
I am afraid of your hidden self.
Give away your armor
as I have tried
to set mine down.
This is our love
and our solace for one another.
We touch
where no words travel.
I have been hiding here forever
awaiting your arrival.

If
I think of you enough
I know we will be lovers.

only one
petal fell

this one

the heart

is open

the wind

does not fall

I feel beauty
and the joy of life
rising up around me – hey hey!

I feel beauty
and the joy of life
rising around me!

Draw me into your paradise
O spirits of the possible –
Let me be a light
to open the eyes of all.

I feel the beauty
of the day and the light
all around me.

I feel the beauty of today!
and the light
all around me – hey hey!

Lay down your weapons.
Let all the engines stall.
Now sit in the light of the rising sun
with one you love.

My body is strong for you

Come, take my body
while it is strong.

My desire is strong for you

Come, take my desire
while it is strong.

The sun, the planets and the stars
relentlessly swing within their silence;
soon we will be dust.

My heart is strong for you

Come, take my heart
while it is strong.

My mind is strong
only for you.

Come, take my mind
while it is strong.
Soon we will be dust.

Ho! muse!
at life’s intersections –
speak to me!

summertime O love!
warm the earth embraces me.

Someone needs to listen to the doves
cooing in the evening, the Fletcher woodpecker
tacking on a tree –
I’ll take the job!

Buddha’s birthday.

Just another day –

water the plants.

Drove to the top of the hill and got there

just as the view arrived.

I saw the sun rise this morning.
I saw the blue mist that half obscured the mountain.
I rose from my slumber and saw this day
as its own whole thing as its own struggle
from dawn through working day to night
to reach its own completion
to be itself without regard for yesterday or tomorrow.

If I can live through this day only!
If I cannot despair of the future or the past
but can dance, coast, play or ride
on this day’s sweet mystery
then I know this day will be today
and will lose no luster to any other;

and I know this self will be itself
beyond time, beyond comparison,
and will proceed knowing the purpose of not-knowing
and will proceed into another now
with another sunrise and another mountain
standing there this time radiant
and in full view.

from The Joyful Oblivion 1979-1983

2010-02-04T20:13:00.000-08:00

THE JOYFUL OBLIVION

KEITH EMMONS

it’s conceivable when we step over the cliff
it’s not a cliff at all
but a thin veil of ignorance
hiding from us a new paradise.

as the fool strides by the precipice
all death has the taste of freedom.

but who’s about to jump?
the wind of fear cuts to the heart.
so men stay married and keep their jobs.
and the fool sulks by the cliff, dejected.

Do you write anymore? Yes
but I haven’t been O
I’ve been living in this box.
this box on boxes floating
on the water as
sweet silvery she – the water –
she flows each day away
away she flows away.

Little have I had dreams,
my dear, for I am a man
bound by invisible thongs
only the water can make them light
lower them into the water’s dream:
they loosen and set me free.

Let the moon be a friend to me
for I am a self-bound man
for I know as the water I flow
as reflection as a dream
on the water I go so I cling
to my box on the boxes on the bay
as you know I’ll completely vanish

one day.

Note: written on Pandora’s Box while building The Pullman

Sit on a rock my friend
even though the ocean
will take it away.

in the Epiphanal Pisgah the poet waits
while the women chatter away the morning
and four cormorants ride a log
that drifts toward the open bay.
cold wind hugging the water
lifts the black feathers around their necks.

in the Epiphanal Pisgah the poet waits
while the women chatter away the morning
and four cormorants ride a log
that drifts toward the open bay.
cold wind hugging the water
lifts the black feathers around their necks.

there was a time I was deeply thankful
just for the food to eat:
a bowl of grain in the morning.
now my wife bitches
the wine glasses don’t match.

what a fool I am to take on a woman
and for her sake to take
this earth so beautiful and simple
and cover it with tinsel and golden gewgaws
to try to make her happy.

the earth is itself! nothing
can add to it or take away.
the beauty and joy you want
is yours already – polish the clarity
and the crystal of your heart:

it doesn’t match –
it surpasses all.

poetrywork
construction
money
wife
boat
loans
relatives & friends:
an image of self.

so, the life goes on.

dreamers
in the other rooms float
into their realms.
dreamers we all Ah!
dreamers we all
spinning into emptiness.

and when the dance is over –
we begin to dance again.

if there were this thing called “love”
in the sky we would find
mountains
and the sun
would rise up from the frozen earth
to kiss our face.

little would we know of
“what went wrong?”
the past
could only bring flowers
into spring.

(this is a game of logic
about this thing
called love.)

like the soul
the physicians could not find it.
nor could it be lost

this love
the earth rising up to scratch its back
the mountains in the sky
and the sun
rising up to kiss our face

looking back –

tracks of a man

climbing in the snow

lowland in the heat –

afternoon mud; highland covered

with clean white snow.

I am a blind man with
first imparted sight.
I am a fool
to think I see anything.

I can stay awake forever
and fall over in the morning.
so, I am not worried
wherever I am found.

the ice on the river is thin
and we swirl as planets
as through unknown waters.

geese fly south.

I go to the Pullman.

another day’s work.

it was a spider –

a bit of matter

got up and ran!

I shall sit in the sun
at my own doorstep –
there is nothing anyone
can take from me.

give me this long fortune
broad as my imagination.
give me the joys of freedom
I’ve never lost nor forgotten.

O! I labor hard. O
I work I work and work
I labor through the darkness of the day
by the glimmering illumination of my dreams.

I pretend the future is already mine.
O, look at this man digging in the mud
his eyes his mind full of stars.
he is a blind and senseless fool

grinning into the face of his fortune
illimitable as his imagination.
he knows not the impossible,
his palm wraps the earth –

bright ball of dirt –
and lifts it like a lantern beside his eye.
he listens to the sweet soft song
singing within the glistening sphere

and hums along with phrases of his freedom
that cannot be taken away nor forgotten.
and the future is a friend
whose heart is the joy

his joy already knows.

So it is conceivable
on this day in San Francisco
the earth may move
in my direction.

O quake in my shoes!
I give away money
that’s not even mine!
Tell me banker,

do you see fortune
in my eye?
Will the land and sea
give up their gold

to a man
who dearly seeks it?
Roll away wave,
shiver your spine

sweet earth
and give me your plenty
so again
I can give it away.

Morning
tumbling of gold
you strike your golden knife across the water
blinding me into bright wakefulness.

Hot sun
as earth spreads wide her valleys
to receive you; cool breeze
rippling up the gold-flecked water,
moist, whispering up around
my naked just-morn flesh –

O my dreams !
heating my heart, hot sun,
breathing into my soul;
slipping your cool breeze fingers
up my trembling nape, the hair
on end! the casements of my heart

bright, blinding, as the brilliant gold
of my dreams bursts forth
surging around you, and into you day,
my love rushing out like a trusting child.

ah dance ah joy
ah light ah love –
you are all mine
for I
am a child of god
playing naked
in the luscious greens of spring.

light shower, sprinkle upon the poppies
tickle my skin
I lie
open to you
for I
am a tumbling of golden light
trembling under the touch
of your timorous fingers.

sweet hands, be not afraid –
I am rapturous
as you surround me
for I
am a flower in bloom for you
and as you draw me up
into you once more I am born again.

burning in the boredom of Sunday afternoon
for you
whom I know whom I know so well
I shall not have for so long
so long.

Ah we
craven victims of a mind
swirling through the black caverns of emotion
we taken by the earth, our seed
shared, we
whipped into the joyful oblivion

torturing me now. O love, with you
I always dance in a lonely sway and swirl
tapping no floor in the limitless empty
sky around me black and I so humming to myself
I think of you and list to the tones
of a silent song.

Victim of the heart O
I love you broken, heart.
O I must love you, weeping heart,
as my head falls forward my chest
collapses into an aching I must so love
for I
fly in the impossible air, I
push aside the mountain,
and hold the sun in my palm for love.

For I know the joy of dawn and the birth
of love
and I know the flowing and piercing warmth
of love as she wakens
with a fluttering of flower petals
within my skin.

And to me
the mountain is as my brother
with its light breath whispering
as I effortlessly ascend, ascend
the weight of my body away falling away
as the sunset resplendent rays the mountain peak
and I
my heart full and open
I vanish into the whole
and unbelievably crumbling air.

In the long day dawn is all day –
good morning, good coffee, and love.
Ah!
speed across the city in a great tin can
great motorized cannonball –
I fire down your hills
into the world of competition,
into the world of determination.

Then in the day the sun flies away
to the sky! O sweet dream!
best I am
when I am nowhere
full of nothing by your side the sun
swimming its tender fingers upon my skin.

Though the wind of life is around us,
even so, we do not believe it.
And day turns into time
and we go our ways.
And we are like gods –

O yes you know I yearn
for the risk of love
and the love of risk;
willing doe who courts the arrow
I will slay you when I can.

my mind
is immensely
crazed
my dear

I desire
to have you
now
I fear

O Lulu
dizzylegs
let’s
fuck.

My pen wants me.
My pen calls to me with the inexpressible yearning
of a city in heat waiting to mate
the shimmering bosom of a summer’s day.

The pen strikes a snake’s tongue at the page . . .
Yes of course I’m in love bitter diamond –
go roll your fancy facets through the streets
where gamblers chuck you against the walls like dice.

beautiful lass behind the counter
in the shirt shop
one look at your eyes
and I know
you could fall in love with me yes
I know.

O I am so handsome yes
I am delicious O
beautiful maid
such sweet soft skin
such trust you show and you
could fall in love with me.

But I will not let you.
I will not fool you
then break your heart.
Go forward your own way –
perhaps you will have luck:
perhaps you will find a world

where love is not pain.

I thought I would have a lot
to give away.

Lonely man
what do you have to give?

I will give away
my loneliness.
To the clouds and the sky
I will give it away.
And to the beautiful infinity
of solitude.

good god
what torment
is the joy we behold!

love –
we cannot live
without it. though even so
love has no mercy and love
may kill us.

the river flows
as it will go
into the sea of love.

so,
we are water,
and try as we might,
even our tears are water
and we cannot help but let them fall.

O beautiful day!
O beautiful day of my heart’s regeneration!

O yes,
I shall court madness another time;
shall court her as she carries me –
in her scintillate arms,
her dazzling dance between the planets.
She is the god between us
and yes
we know there is more love and yes,
we know there is more joy more light
and yes, we know
even the deaf air of space
and the screaming silence of the earth
cannot hold us quiet
nor the blazing sun
obscure the beauty we so plainly see.

For we are the eye itself
through which the universe is born.
And we are fertile.
And we are rich.
And our wealth goes forward – strong! –
with its heart of love.

Every evening
I need you lover.
When the liquid sun
draws her skirts toward the horizon
I need you lover.

Turn up the music!
The darkness
begins to eat me – I wish
to forget about nighttime alone
I will go mad –
I need you lover!

Nothing but your fragile arms
are strong enough to hold me.
Into night’s deep cistern we descend
but we are not frightened.
Lover I need you so
or there will be no morning.

Like a man –
like any man –
I hold close my dreams
and though believing in no dreams,
only the imagined
carries me forward from day to day.

O wind
cutting across the lake
thrust me on, on
across the ice.

Perhaps I shiver.
But I do not believe in cold.
Noonday glints from chips
spraying from the runners of my iceboat.
O!
how I fly!

Believer in miracles I
sail as the sun’s eye –
the light’s chill sears my cheeks.
Man alone . . .
the white lake all around . . .
I cannot but smile.

Love –
this thing is love.
Or this is wine
and love
is only wine?

O am I a fool
drinking off my mind
my mind
flying off?

What is to become of me?
Will I meet this love –
dancing with her in flame
with the moth of illusion?

Or will I pretend
I do not know this love.
No.
I am afraid
I shall be consumed:
love I desire so much
I cannot be near thee.

delicious man
you have no woman.

you walk the sidewalk in a strange city.

walk like a man
with a place to go.

no one will know
you have no woman,

no where to go.

I am no narcissist!
but I am in love.
a body with a man
like this
can never be alone.

it bends space
in all directions.

and draws you
woman of love
and touches you
where your light shimmers
within all emptiness.

I am not vain –
I am proud
of what I am.

hand of light
in a graceful body
you are not ignored.

you are a torch
searing in the soundless dark
between distant stars.

and your heart is the joy
of one who calls you.

she is a dance
in her own constellation.

and together
the universe is filled with song.

O great and glorious solitude -
take me sweet solitude,
back to myself
for I am lost

in the futile effort
to appease my hungry heart.
O fool –

why did I marry?
spider tangling my dreams
with your sticky thread.

why did I labor?
I fed you dollars
and you spun your web.

mindempty:
man in a vacuum.

a beautiful woman
wants to give him her body.
but his mind is asleep.

he’s been beaten
by another woman; his heart
recedes.

cavern of nothought:
in the darkness he craves
her silken flesh.

but he is afraid.
his confusion weeps. O he weeps
yet he has no tears.

his eyes are open
and he has no tears.

live in the lust for life!
for it is God’s one gift
that is wholly yours.
wear your daily joy
like a jewel.

let the mind be revered
and let its heavenly powers
radiate throughout the universe.
let the sun blaze away
and let the rain pour down

and let the miracle of every day
stir the deepest happiness
of your soul.

I believe in the everlasting palm
sprouting through the scorching sand
to raise its thankful hands
over the blue and whispering sea.

The sand makes you squint
viewing the island. The sea
bathes the body of your mind,
bathes the maiden body

of your mind and plays its fingers
along the folds and around the nipples
of her flesh. It is she
who rises from the yellow sand.

She is your eye’s salve
and she is the song
uplifted in the hands of the palm,
the sky kissing her fingers

as it flutters by. Ha! the sky –
and where is it going?
It goes back – back into the earth.
And I am the water and the soil

and her buds, supple and green,
press moist kisses
with the might of mountains
toward the sky.

business
money matters
love –

Monday morning
my mind revolves
its tetrahedral head

its eye
obscuring itself
to see a different world.

no wine
no women; no dedication
to madness

but devotion
to the dearth
of daily life.

head like a mantis head.
eyes with the glint
of geodesic domes.

and the mind
swirls about itself
and it knows

only the fool rules
and the fool is
love.

this morning stuck (somewhere
in the middle
at the beginning of the beginning),
the alarm sounds its jangling
crab clock ring

and though sleepily
I rise
and though son of this earth
I rise before earth’s sun,

sing I shall.
and singing
I shall wake the children
and their slumbering Mom.

the clocks eye me warily
and skitter away sideways
as I stride to my horizon –
as irresistible as dawn.

the abyss approaches.

like the tentative tendril
nudging bits of soil aside then
bursting from earth

I will run, I will leap
into the canyon,
into the blue impassive sky

I will leap

from The Course of this Chaos 1978-1980

2010-02-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

THE COURSE OF THIS CHAOS

KEITH EMMONS

ten thousand blank pages!
O – that I might never venture onto them.
the ocean, unrippled as the horizon;
moon . . . and occasional clouds unmoving.

my own splash has me terrified –
would I had lived in a bottle!
cork hold me tight –
my mind speaks blankly, my island

is a circle of sand my eye
is a palm of three fronds.
I am the only monkey bungling about.
the back of my hands have fur.

I scruffle about in the sand all day;
a bottle that’s empty has nothing for me.
I have no message, no scrap
I can scribble it on . . .

violin among the trees –
I’m by the lake Winnisquam.

a chipmunk “chips!” and I
hope to play a music of my own

among the trees of Winnisquam.

I wait for the motorboat to pass

before slipping into the water

naked.

I know the
cabins are everywhere the subdivisions
the lots the chatter of children calling
and the hum of the distant motorboat.

a screen door slaps! as we pass

yet even so
on Winnisquam
rounding a green peninsula
in our aluminum canoe
I soon expect to see
“Indians . . . moose.”

this is supposed to be fun.
perhaps I’m just getting hungry.
my stomach growls.

riding all day in a car
this is supposed to be fun.
Jane crinkles a brown paper bag.

I must remember I am floating
here to there both nowhere –
I cannot be early, I cannot be late.

Note: “Indians . . . moose:” Henry David Thoreau’s last words, uttered on his deathbed.

a few days in the country;
now back to TV. on the tube
a chase scene I’m
drinking whiskey.

take care of your teeth, says Joe

after eating a sandwich and

dropping his in a jar.

in my valise
it is there I imagine
the occult world of the ordinary.
blackbirds cackle in the marsh.

after a thousand miles
I have not moved; crickets
agree: a jet
never left the ground.

so what if it’s only
my imagination –
bring out to me your reality
and I will eat it.

Mayacita coming toward us –
two bouncing eyes;
Maya going away –
a bouncing asshole.

what’s to see? what’s

to see? the fly

tastes the head of a nail.

home in the old town.

driving down the road I

ran over a blackbird.

after two ears of

corn I’m stuffed. my father eats

five. seven!

outside sitting zazen
seeking the greatest depths
of no-thought.

while I am sitting
the sun appears!
and I linger,

knowing
when I step inside
all worlds appear.

if a man takes a vast loneliness
hovering in a circle of air
outlined by the bushy trees around the harbor;
if he flies three-thousand miles
and finds he has no home;

if he sees his wife and brother
clinging to a veil of the imagination,
or climbs a tall bell tower
to ring an iron tongue
before the deaf of a sleeping city;

if he sees fathers at war with sons
and husbands and wives
biting one another’s eyes –
what difference will it make to the water
flowing gently toward the sand?

there is no shield
from the radiation of our hate.
and when we are gone
the breeze will blow on no one
to cool him from the blistering rays.

I am calling from the silence
of a door closed behind.
here is my cave
overlooking the little harbor
by the sea.

I am witness
to the inexpressible possibility.
I hold secrets
no one would believe.

behind me
I close the door
and the soul of my irrepressible joy
ignores all boundaries and leaps unrestricted
as a gift to all.

traveling in the East
I lose all meaning my home
is not here my parents
talk from room to room like clocks

I turn them off or their chimes
keep me awake all night.

visiting in the East
I sit in a foreign land populated
by a strange race who
close all doors turn on the refrigerator
and crawl inside.

sneaking to the venetian blinds
I surreptitiously let in light.

and in the loneliness
of constant company I
coming alive in the East
hie into the anonymous city,
hide in a dark cafe.

I imagine you hear me . . .
it keeps me alive.

a person is alive

and a tree is too a leaf

floats down through the fountain.

I sit in the sun
and there is no future
and there is no past
and I have no purpose
nor need of one.

why should I create great works?
I am a fly! ta ta!
I know the flower –
I see the fountain –
I sit in the sun!

we no longer have any home.
we go anywhere
and do what we like.
perhaps people stare – what do we care?

America is one land – I am in it.
I am of it.
where I go, it follows me.
we create each other.

an American
I roll loose from town to town;
word-seeker –
I am a prospector of appearances.

when I find myself
sitting on a stool in a country cafe,
I write it down: home floating
somewhere among these pages.

here stands
the evidence

though
perhaps
it sits

this day
could go on and on
for all he cared.
he knew the mountains
would wait his crossing;
and whether they were the granite arms
embracing sunrise
or the senseless walls to cut the day from night –
the promise of their mystery,
the promise of their open secret
would beckon to him always until
no longer again
could the sun ever rise
without finding him
flying through the mountain’s sky
his brilliance blinding
through the night.

I am on the road to nowhere.
faster and faster I fly.

my course crosses your boundaries:
in some land we will meet again.

and limits will have no definition.
beyond us there is no horizon.

without motion speed is infinite –
and we are not even nowhere.

I shall wait forever
until there are no graves
and the virtue of my being
is it’s own reward.

I shall wait forever
for all I want to realize
already is mine
and cannot avoid my taking.

my faith is in forever
when all wrong will fall away
and all shimmering light
will blind those who cannot see.

and the way of things
will turn again as I come
and as I go
to no more wait

forever.

turn the knob

light goes up on the

bronze buddha

I shall not go back.
so wonderful are
the memories yet
the future is more
than a thousand caskets
of forgetfulness.
I shall not go back.

great men
burn bridges
before they get to them
and I shall not go back I
am my own road I
am the only man who
sees my destination.

holding the past like water
in my hand I reach
for yours and
memory flows from my fingers
into this moment and I resolve:
I shall not go back.

a bird

has a single “cheeo!”

the moon is here.

bye
bye
daytime

christmas lights

begin
to
appear.

Hanshan CLXXVIII

American Indians, Gays, Buddhas back to back;
Swiss Army Knife, Modern Japanese Haiku,
Grey’s Anatomy: Christmas 1977 and now
evening has come just the same. Keith sits
sipping tea, Jane takes a shower, the radio
sings the intensity of some anonymous poet.
tell me: what is all this excitement about?
last night we were at a Tiburon Christmas
service and the people were singing as a dirge.
well, at least they were singing. but only
once a year? do they think Christmas comes
and goes? where could it possibly go to?

be gentle

and go forward.

can nothing stop the charging bull?

or is this snow
falling?

to remember the goal

is to arrive

I lay down my sword.
perhaps I will write more.

I will lay down my sword
and let my head
fall back against the wall –
if I travel too fast
how shall I ever arrive?

there is a story
of a man, panicked,
running through the fog,
running through the fog so fast
he never saw
there was no fog at all.

he had panicked because
he had left his sword behind.
I shall give mine away.
or bury it.

my road is here
wherefore is my rush
to go elsewhere?
I ride concrete
the freeway is a river
in my ear.

the universe envelops me
as it’s single nub.
wherefore is my rush
to go elsewhere?
I go
as the river goes.

there is no beginning.
no time to end.

Jane calls

for my company. let us remember

we are gods.

it rains.

I sit in a houseboat

and listen to music.

this is some kind of

special day – the rain

falls on the water.

ah! a card is fallen.

who is it heralds

the end of Christmas?

I will go forward
and step by step
I will climb the impossible mountain.

I will stride past doubters
yet welcome them readily
at my final abode.

I will not slay my foes.
I will ignore them.
And they shall make me strong.

And when my present act is done
and I sit to rest and view the world
from my impossible vantage,

there will be no this, no that;
the door will swing back wide
and all shall be accepted equally.

I know now
those who are to the left of me
I will pass
as I go further left;
and those to the right of me
I will pass
going further right.
some will condemn
and shake their fists.

yet here and there as stars
first twinkling through the canopy of day
I will recognize others rising with me.

as they explained The Sphinx,
when one chose to enter the chambers
all choice was relinquished.
the only alternative after that:
death.

so who would walk into such darkness!
the golden pharaoh
shined from the pits of murder
like a sun.
but this was long ago.

now nobody cares
about these things.
and still
we have no choice.

It is important to survive –
let the mind go where it will.

There are those
who would keep us where we were.

There are those
who know not where we are.

Who cares?
Be honest to the mind.

Be master and slave;
the course of this chaos

will show itself
soon enough.

after a few words
I again create the world.
steam
rising from the tea
smells sweet; wind
dimples the water,
runs up against my houseboat
swaying.

to begin with
there is no world.
the mind plays tricks
plays tricks.

first

I build

mountains

of the imagination.

then I climb them.

he was a madman:
in a feat of ecstasy
his arms swirled
into a Pullman Car
appearing before your eyes.

he knew his energy –
relentless as a locomotive, gentle
as the down of dandelion –
could not be stopped.
he met those
who believed it impossible
and swept them aside.

only dreamers
could ride this train.

I am captive
in my own house.
perhaps it has always been so.

now savory nature of alone –
I smoke for thee.

lead me into the house
that has no doors.

I am alive
always
I shall be so.

I have thirteen tons on my mind
I cannot relax if I told you
the nuts and bolts of my problems
you’d laugh of course.

and were I to explain
ordinary miracles -
you’d hardly believe.

the volunteer
is relieved of duty.
the road taken joyfully
reveals it’s own way.
traveling without yourself
you easily arrive.

the monk knows

no labor.

no rest from labor.

Hanshan CLXXXIX

why should I force myself to do so much?
even relaxing I feel I must accomplish something
and type up poems. in the world
the rain falls on the water and disappears:
it seems I should watch it while I can.
looking in books, looking in books! I could
spend my whole life looking in books and
what would I ever know first hand?
give me a hammer! I would drive in my life
a few nails such as would make a man work
if he were to remove them, if he
were to remove all memory of me.

bring me the mind.
it is all I eat.
all of a morning
I taste it’s savory tang.

swirl of an eddy
swung round an empty eye;
dog after my own tailbone
round and round I go.

woe that I find it!
I’d perish!
I taste the void;
breathe the empty air.

I cannot breathe bricks –
woe if I know
one thing –

bring me the mind
it is all I eat.
all of a savory morn
I taste its tang.

from The Developer's Song 1977-1980

2010-02-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

THE DEVELOPER’S SONG

KEITH EMMONS

List of Dreams

Kapleau

Moondrifter

Marinship Marina

Sausalito

California

94965

Mr Big Bucks

motorboat on the water;

airplane in the sky;

I am seized

by strange passions

and fear

any minute

I may blind

myself.

the mind
runs rampant

the dog whining the car motor
moaning moaning moaning
to start the car

I peer through the porthole

the dog
is on a chain

he drags it he drags it
across the objecting boards.

another day
another bout with mortality.

immortality
is out of the question.

it would offend my friends.

give me the vision
to be of value to all mankind;
from the confusion of blindness
let me bring the clarity of sight.

may I be strong enough
to contain the greatest truths;
may I be enough generous
to give them away.

let me bring peace
where there is discord
and may I not know the doing
of my own actions;

let me walk the correct path always,
let conflict between my generosity
and my greed subside.
give me the strength to see what is

and to say it
without fear.

traffic roar.
gull squawk.
can you hear my song
from another land?

the plane
scratches overhead
yet can’t even fly the route
from ear to ear.

tea steam.
pen squeak.
it is monday morning.
the slumbering beast wakes up

over the bridge
his groggy eyes;
into the city’s belly
to be eaten,

spit up on friday.

a man can sit forever in his single room.
where is the door that takes him out?

when the window flies open he leaps
into a field of golden grass;
locusts, grasshoppers chirr.

their music is an opiate. he sleeps,
his cheek freckled with stars.

this man will sleep forever
even if his eyes are open;

he sees walls no one has ever made.
when he wakes he knows it was only a dream

and the walls
rise up around him screaming.

sitting reading
no event to record
this evening

this night
on the Fortune Cookie.
nothing.

I imagine at low tide
the mud; I imagine
the neighbors talking, or their TV.

only one thing is real tonight.
not the swish! of Jane turning a page;
not the thump! thump! thump!

of a home-spun barge-borne band
playing its lugubrious sway
by the boards of the decrepit pier.

the dogs don’t stir; the cat
howling in heat howls not.
tonight, nothing. only one

moon
obliterating all; moon
sowing its murky clouds its

scintillate halo its
moon
motionless round

tongueless voice
open round
and no sound.
what dreams to me
no way to tell you
what dreams to me are passing
Moondrifter passing away
forever.

I can’t even imagine
the way I believed
the beauty of each day.
Moondrifter, motionless, still,
then turning with the rising dawn,
swinging to face the breeze
flowing from the open bay.

a few waves lapping against the hull.
bump of the dinghy, smell of creosote
from a tangle of line.
morning meant the infinite sky
was mine with each breath;
the sun and the sea
befriended my small endeavor
to stay alive.

everything was right for me.
the earth was mine
and loving each other as we did
each day
was its own reason to be.

and if it rained –
what of it?
tomorrow
is only a day away
and it would be clear
by afternoon the sea-lion rising,
his sleek brow, curious whiskers,
his back
humping up again
then disappearing.

I remember when a fistful of hardware
scavenged from the bay-sweep refuse pile
was all I needed to make me glad.
rowing against wind in the afternoon
kicking around the rusting cables
the rotten pilings the stench of barnacles
dried open in the pitiless sun
I needed no roads, no motors.

yet then, on a quiet dawn,
after the bittern had done
his night-long watch,
after the great blue heron
grew restless and
squawked off into day
on his broad wings –

even on a morning
muffling the calls of gulls
in fog even then
the shore world began
a motor here beginning to whirr,
a whining truck cutting across the hills
on the freeway there until soon
all the land was astir
with its urgent business
and even I had to row away
beguiled by the dollar’s call.

(perhaps I’m just growing older
perhaps I thought as a child and
lived as a child
and clung to my childish things.
O I shall be free
forever on the sea I shall float
light as a duck
over whitecap and wave.)

O how I’ve changed.
I’ve said goodbye
to a lot that was all I knew.
Moon, I loved you.
and you were a home to me.
from you
I knew myself
and I spliced your lines and
patched that leaky roof and
built that cabin from found boards
found spikes, that hatch,
and I scrubbed your barnacled bottom
and kept you afloat and you
rode those winter waves for me.

and perhaps it doesn’t matter
I don’t live on you anymore
I won’t live on you anymore
I pass you on
to another hand following the eye
of another man’s dream;
I’ve gone to the shore –
into the midst of men –
and the sky
is no longer full and the mornings
are no longer quiet and the neighbors
yelling and banging pans the traffic
echoing outside my window.

(the egrets continue their way
without me; the cormorants
go north and go south
in their clouds of black wings.)

I
have a lot of life to live
and I will live it
with or without this small paradise
I call this “Moondrifter” I call this
“waterfront.”
I imagine these things.

and the creatures of the sea
have faded from my eye
and the winds of my dreams
have turned into the gears
of the approaching engines
as I have heard them marching
armies of motors
from the world of men,
armies of pulleys and gears
gnashing their metal teeth the sound
rumbling up around me with the rising dawn,

as I have heard their relentless approach
I have escaped
to be among them.

(yet as they close their jaws
around me
I will be away,
slipping between their teeth
to another world
they’ve not yet found.)

may
a great peace

swallow you into its cavern

where you
are the only voice
and you
say nothing.

I’d like something profound
lying in my rowboat
in the afternoon
but the sun’s too warm
for thoughts.

what time
do you think it is? asks Jane
and I think
I don’t think
it’s any time at all the tide

high
a coot
hoots
a motorboat buzzes
Poppet’s TV
plays melodies from the 30’s
and the eyes of the neighbor’s cat
open
and close sleepily.

on a day like today
developers
don’t exist
and the thrust of dollars
is completely imaginary
in an empty mind.

what day
do you think it is?
I know
but I don’t intend
to give it away.

rather
I shall take it
into myself
my head’s shadow
on the floorboards
the dry sponge the plastic bottle
of outboard motor oil
the yellow bucket
the blue dinghy
the great tongue of ocean water
swept into the bay
lifting me
and rocking me idly.

Hanshan CL

halfway between here and there –
what’s the hurry going to the nowhere
I’ll be when I’m gone? in the hearth
is a fire tonight; the leaves of
this particular artichoke are very green.
so a man passes through the time
that stands in books. even the books
will go the way of even the stones.

little music.
wife in her nightie.

I went to a party –
no, two!

a little spat we had
little music I’m

a little sleepy
wife’s in her nightie

and we’re
a little sleepy

not mad
anymore the sun

falls late
in summer wife’s

in her nightie
little song.

Boats
floating on the water

frail as dreams as

lily pads, rocking
their lips lifted in the wind.

white blossoms

Monet
nearly blind
swirling his paints in masses

of houseboats
living in happy communities.

the babe grebe
pops to the surface
quick looks
goes beneath again
boats
floating above,
their dark shadows
between fisheyes
and the sky.

goldfish
swirling in a bowl

food
falling from the sky
in their little world
frail as dreams
or morning

before the blasting light of noon.

a white heron

flaps down with a raucus squawk.

coots and gulls make way.

picture of Don Arques

DON ARQUES I

Well it’s gone now.
after a while it gets away;
the world’s no place anymore
for an old man.

everything looks bitter.
young people –
they’re all crazy these days.
when I was young –

but that’s too long ago,
no point in remembering even.
so what you want to
come listen to me for?

sure I’m a millionaire –
got millions of problems.
you young kids go out –
have a good time while you can

nothing I can do now –
you’re on your own. I’ve got
to straighten things out;
everything’s mixed-up got to

save what I’ve got time’s
running out.

ARQUES II

You know
what’s going to pass now:
another year or two and
he’ll be dead, you’ll see.

he thought
we made no difference
“a bunch of bums” he called us.
but we kept him alive.

strange about the water –
a dead thing that’s alive –
sets our minds awash, notions
swelling and slacking with the tides.

the oceans are dreams
of the sleeping earth beneath.
time rolls over in its bed.
sooner or later, all of us

settle to the floor,
gently into the mud.
hold onto your hairs, old man
you let us go;

won’t live with yourself long
now.

now that’s too close

to live: I smell cigarette smoke

from Poppet’s boat.

one line at a time I woke up
when Poppet screamed I
leapt out of bed stood
naked on the deck
told him to shut up.

there’s no poetry this morning
that’s for sure Jane
talking on the fifth phone call
Poppet’s kid’s screeching and I’ve
been thinking of dollars.

been thinking of dollars
not dreaming didn’t dream right
all night and now
I’m full of pancakes and Jane’s
just left for San Jose.

I look north and she
looks south I don’t know
why it happens that way she
works south in San Jose and I
want to buy a house up north.

and forget it about vacation
no Hawaii no Peru we’re through
could be with our young days’
freedoms – old people now got to
work. be serious. work.

meanwhile our lives flow by.
we’ll spin around and they’ll
be gone and on our last day I’ll
be chasing some dollars and Jane’ll
be driving south to work.

“how’s that?” “worse!” “how’s

that?” “better!” the neighbors adjusting

the antenna “perfect!”

Monday morning

and all of a sudden

the clock exists.

good morning beast!
the world wakes up.
a mallard preens on the floating piling.
the voice of the land is a taut vibration at dawn.

high rumbling, low rumbling, hissing of tires –
a stranger rows past my stern
with a splashing of oars.
this is my day of transformation

when the weekend dissolves and the mind
adopts a new man to port it from place to place
without dreams, without dreams.
flick! the switch is thrown: mind on, mind off.

just driving my yellow

truck – death to another

white butterfly

no way
to make a picture frame today –

my head’s full of air.

no saws, no metal teeth
eating the wood, risking fingers;

my head’s full of air.

I should be ambitious –
my future demands me – now!

yet my head’s all full of air today
and might even
blow away.

which way?
which way?

on Wednesday we suddenly realize
it has been Thursday all along.
the right path
may be the wrong way; every day
requires an escape artist.

this is because this
is the 20th Century! and men
are no different
than at any other time.
the high tides are very high;

the low tides are so low
the bay grins with her muddy gums
into the summer’s sun.
the hot mud bakes
and into it fall my friends.

and into it falls my foe.

one of bruces photos
showing pennants

dizzy fingers
let your home fires burn – tomorrow
is not soon enough –
poetry passes from hand to hand along the pier,
a man is accused of stealing
and we are being thieved.

do I hear your drum? the moon
is in a black sky the stars
stand naked stop!
I am a man, a man –
and you cannot move me.
I am my own flame

and I burn and I burn
in the ferries in the water
in the moon is my eye burning
on the water
the water shall rise –
and cover all.

and all alike shall see themselves;
the known shall be known.
it is true that some will burn; death
is a guest among our homes.
and he takes orders.
and he never fails.

the day’s over brother
and I’m glad.
a small man combats many.
he does not understand the war.

but he drafted himself!

walking to a

political meeting; mimosa – leave me

alone . . . your sweet smell

if insults were rewarded –
we would all be kings!

my shit slips into the bay;
you carry yours in your pocket.

if hatred and lies were love –
pink hearts would sprout up everywhere!

blackbirds would sing in the morning!
high tide is in –

the putrid waters of our greed
rise around our scummy hulls

and we drink deeply

the son-of-bitch dream-eaters
rule in these parts;
the Mayor is a whore.
from her cunt
grind a thousand tractors
cutting through fields
crushing our children
fed into the treads.

sing high and fine praise
to the great dollar bill!

there are no dreams but of dollars.
your home is good food
for the Mayor’s tractor teeth.
she will digest us well
and shit out condominiums.

so we know all men are perfect.
and all men are liars.

government is created to eat the people
because they are liars.

because the people are perfect
they hide from the government.

the people are pitifully dumb.
they should eat the government!

because to admit the need for governance
is to be imperfect

and to be a liar.

to fight to save it is to lose it.
cattails and blackbirds wail.

a hippie became a cop
and now he fingers his friends;
those who have money will have it from

those who do not.
if I sink your boat will you
be good enough to sink mine too?

cattails and blackbirds wail –
they know nothing of dollars
as bulldozers eat their marsh.

blackbirds fly off
to pay rent elsewhere. cattails
lay their heads down.

picture of issaquah or van damne
ferryboat

have you seen my mushroom?
I’ve been working hard.
it means nothing to work hard;
it means nothing to work at all.

all day I have been doing nothing –
have you seen my mushroom growing?
it pushes through leaves –
it bursts from my wallet.

I clip it
and carry it to the bank.
one day this working will make me old
and even the foxfire of my savings

will provide no light
for a man gone blind.
I have been working hard;
what for? what for?

O my god!

our blackberry patch –

nothing but houses!

a merganser? a coot?

one thing’s for sure:

one less minnow!

the world
shrinks vastly as you know.
you will excuse me
if you happen to be my food.

I have my dreams, you know.
so great my dreams your sacrifice
is nothing, your life
is nothing.

my god
forgives me my food.
He made me eat! and I
can make new gods.

be careful then –
crowd me not and look not
too tasty:
my death is merciless.

gulls squawk. the mother

in the next door houseboat

slaps her child.

the man in short pants
sits at the end of his pier.
he does not know
his friend his ally
his helper –
or his treacherous foe.

he listens to everyone.
everyone makes
some sense.
yet when the tide is high
for some, the water
simply comes and goes for others.

and to some
death
swims nakedly.

if we knew which road
is the right road, why
all of us would travel together:
the wheels of our vehicles
would sing together
with the laughter of our children.

how can these by my friends?
not one agrees with any other -
as if the solitary world
were many worlds.
I would travel all roads . . .
and keep my own.

for though some say
their way exceeds all others,
I have known the deepest
and unmistakable touch of love.
and friends and words
and even the road is forgotten

all paths pure
and undeniable.

walking along the pier – ha!
as if the wind would take its time.
these gusts may topple me –
I’m no measure of time.

the bamboo rustles;
I sit in a corner where dogs
have been pissing for years.
to be completely comfortable

is to be uncomfortable here.
don’t come onto your pier -
the mad men
eat it.

you’ll be feeling new breezes
as your boat floating here
to there as a lotus blossom
accommodating toads.

listen
to the direction of the wind.
as speaketh the wind
I go.

I would even be

a fly – if I could spend my day

sunning on a leaf.

I’m in a hurry to speak!
nothing to say, nothing to say.

I rowed my boat past Varda’s boat.
Ho! Alan! where are you off to now?

white egrets know nothing of money:
they like the mud

and dream their swampy heaven
of silvery minnows idling in the air.

if we were all philosophers
what developer could touch us?

we are architects of the mind.
we would invite you off the freeway

but what would you understand?
our paints are imaginary,

our easel everywhere.

Note: Jean Varda – “larger than life” oil painter; Alan Watts – legendary Zen philosopher, writer, teacher. Waterfront residents, each living in one half of The Vallejo ferryboat.

picture of Kapleau

so you see?
the world is.
try to tell me different.

the wind blows
as the wind will blow.
I see your pennant flying.

some will ascend
while others die – it is all
in the order of things.

as if things had any order.
as if any world, as if there were ever
any wind.

“good,” she says.
“not so hot,” I say but then
who am I to say: I am not
the mother of her child.

she’s my neighbor. she watches
TV and listens to CB radio.
she’s angry and hits her child.
her husband is a cop.

the child cannot speak yet.
she screams at it: “shut up!”
in the morning an aware being
inside the child wakes up

in despair at the end of sleep.
day begins again. “shut up!”
rails the mother
and the being cries.

why shall I not go mad?
you say you are civilization
yet all of your gods are thieves.

my heart is plundered yet
I am a voice far lost
in blackbirds and weeds.

the last muck of the earth
has been bought for a dollar
and now they will beat us.

more noise abut one man’s plight –
the tongue beating the dumb air.
perhaps I am a moth looking for flame.

will I know when I find it?
perhaps I like to be blind.
this anguish – I must love it.

in the morning I think the day;
at noon, afternoon.
I see my ass up ahead of me.

I follow myself an erratic course;
I am full circle with my hollow voice.
perhaps I am flame with no one watching.

the old woman
squints as she thinks
as she talks as she
strains into words
her thoughts. so painfully
into words she brings them she
feels it is very important
very important what she feels.
she is an old woman.
how could it matter? soon
she will be dead.

tattoo – he’s been rolling

his cigarettes for years.

they’re still a mess.

he’ll have to go:

people who carry knives

don’t pay much rent.

well with this boot

in the grass I wonder

what he walks in?

death is our servant –
we send him out
or keep him home.

if we send him out
against our neighbor –
even if we lock our doors

he enters uninvited.

what can I say?
what can I say?
what should I say can I bear
what I know I am saying even
when not using words?

our mortal combat is slow
and I’m not sure we’re going to make it
what can I say play
soulfully my friend
I know the speaking of your eye

no costume can hide it
what can I say your theatrics
are a veil for your soul saying
what should I say I’m not sure
we’re going to make it yet

I can sing we’re going to
float all our fears all our cares
onto the water where wings
of flame flair into the night
and all reason for saying, not saying

falls away.

The Waterfront experienced a dramatic moment when Chris Robert’s massive multi-story sculpture-houseboat, Madonna and Child, built around a salvaged pile driver, burst into flame.

to you I’d talk but I’ve fallen
into a book again.
the book was a simple marsh.

by it I sat as the grass stood up
and the trees passed the breezes
from leaf to leaf to carry that evening
into the mind withheld
from the noisy concourse of men.

the mud
spoke with the mind of genius
in tongues
that know no words or sound . . .

save the sound of that invisible being
who brushed his hand across the grasses’ heads
so they nodded together in choirs

I’ll sit here
until I write something.
It might be worth the weight
rising from my soul
onto these pages.

Someone laughs hysterically atop a houseboat
among the pink heart flags
with fist suns flying all around them.
Why should I complain –

things
go
the way they go.
Nobody asked me to live here.
Now if they did
I wouldn’t take it without wages.
I take my wages from the sea.

As my own home’s shadow
falls across my paper world
I see it’s a dream and rush forward.
Full speed ahead.

a man gets drunk
then a man drinks coffee
then sits and plans
a fantastical house
to expand the mind
of all humanity.
it is to be his home.

while living there
he expects visitors.
they will enter
full of wonder at
illumined glass iridescent in the roof,
curved beams, a railroad train rocking
on the water, all of a mountain
in the window.

yet he shall remain calm
for this man knows the possible
and the impossible
are just a matter of thought
and to believe
we do not all have wings
is at heart
foolish.

new boat
dumping our stuff in boxes
Jane clattering in the kitchen
reorganizing the things of life
in this new excitement
in this bit of sadness
as the old ways of our being
fall away.

ah Fortune Cookie
you were good to us
though the Houseboat Yard
tried to make us miserable
and the work crew on the pier
didn’t care
if we had a ramp to our house
if our float was sinking
if they shattered the shingles
on the neighbor’s boat.
ah Fortune Cooke
you were good to us
even with Poppet and Susan
screaming at their kid and
their TV cartoon minds
at top volume on Saturday morn.

new boat
lifting all our stuff from boxes
Waldo Point Harbor
no longer exists we
move forward with the things of life
and the husk of existence
and the tired problems of the past
fall away.

asking for that joyful gladness
that precedes all good
knowing that in the way of good
the way of peacefulness resides.

asking for the joyfulness
of a glad heart knowing
it is at peace and peacefulness
with all it encounters

asking for that divine guidance
wiser than all things to
bring into this soul a knowledge
of the only way that lives.

asking for humility, for patience,
and for faith in the divine’s own power
to further itself by entering ourselves,
by leaving ourselves to enter all.

from Sausalito Interlude 1977-1979

2010-02-04T20:09:00.000-08:00

Poems Of Between

SAUSALITO INTERLUDE

BY
KEITH EMMONS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Moondrifter and The Fortune Cookie are World War II wooden Landing Craft boats converted to houseboats with the addition of little cabins – walls, doors, windows, rustic potbellies, two-burner cook tops and so on.
At the time of these poems, Keith and Jane had moved from The Moondrifter, anchored-out in the open water of Richardson Bay in view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate, to The Fortune Cookie, moored ashore on a houseboat pier edging the nearby town of Sausalito.

Moondrifter, Waterfront Hanshan, Bittern on the Post, What Falls Away is Always, The End of the Veil – each of these works were written during a decade living on the Sausalito Richardson Bay Waterfront
.
The poems of this compilation are perhaps best understood in the context of their arising approximately 1977 to 1979, between the collection What Falls Away is Always and the narrative series, The End of the Veil.

The Author would like to thank Marinscope Magazine for publishing several of the Hanshan poems and for City Miner Magazine for publishing “this is the 20th Century.”

The tides go in and out and there is little we can do about it. So the life of a man goes on. Each day he makes what he makes of each day. Poems written on water with a stick. As the water passes by it carries them away.

here a new conception

of things

giving their own lectures of

myself

as the amphitheater

into which they speak.

on a morning with the tide way out
all my neighbors asleep the sun still straining
to top the meditation tower on a nearby houseboat,
a heron
stalks the shallows
a cat pads soundlessly some cock
crows as the traffic swells around him and I
draw dawn into myself like an immense morning moon
fading before the irresistible tide of day.

and at the end of day
to be able to look around you saying,
this is fantastic
the orange sun
at it’s dusty finish,
this same wreck of boats ruined and new
sprawled about and all this mud;
a grey cat
approaching
across the pier’s grey boards,
climbing onto my lap
batting the end of my wiggling pen.
and the line the sun makes straight
across the mountain shadow,
lingering
a moment
then sweeping upward into night.

Hanshan CXXXIV

in the evening while Jane showers
I sit by the bookshelf and lean into a mind
in which I begin to realize where I am.
the sound of the water running and splashing.
the Proteus blooming, the cyclamen, the fern
browning in the window-nook. the oven hisses,
it’s door open, the heat rising into our boat-haven.
the water is off with a jolt; a few cars honking;
a jet passing overhead. when Jane walks
toward the bow, the Fortune Cookie swings to port
and the marbles in the Chinese Checkers tin roll.
roll roll roll thud thud! then roll back the other way.

somebody threw in

a raspberry sprig. coots eat

the leaves off one by one.

the first fly buzzes

through the French door –

I chase him out!

I sit long into the afternoon
saying nothing;
I am witness to the world
while others work.
the tide
rises and falls as always;
I hear the daytime’s constant traffic
rumbling on the hillside freeway.
the foghorn hoots.

the water
creeps silently across the mud,
silently and unnoticed
it slicks around the hulls
and lifts them up! –
concrete barges
and tons of waterlogged wood
with folks inside
borne up, rocking gently back
and forth.

in that little houseboat
a couple lives pontoons
yellow wall they
string their own clothesline lop-eared dog
sleeping on the bow.
little one-room squoosh-bed
squeeze-sink tiny dresser Alice
wears white and leaves for work Mike
might work in a mine scruffy hair
dungarees might pass out leaflets
on a concrete corner in the city.

the difference
between night and day
when you are working is
the night
flies, but the day
is long
one hammer blow taking
weeks or even years;
while at night –
that time your own –
the stars begin to reel
careening like lights
in a collision of automobiles -
spinning into morning
when the hammer
smashes the clock
to smithereens.

cantaloupe sweet

you stink

ripening on the window sill

on Friday the sun rises as it rises
on Monday and the rest. and the day
looks neither brighter nor dull.

the ocean follows the moon
and the Fortune Cookie floating
now settles into the mud.

O return good moon! or I
shall vanish with a methanous gurgle,
coots circling curiously above.

the coots don’t know it’s Friday.
the foghorn speaks its “HUUMM!”
and doesn’t say a thing.

the work week ends and I’ve
not done a thing
and yet I know

without my feeble efforts
to live what is called living
the sun wouldn’t rise at all.

good morning beast!
the world wakes up.
a mallard preens on the floating piling.
the voice of land is a taut vibration at dawn,

high rumbling, low rumbling, hissing of tires –
a stranger rows past my stern
with a splashing of oars.
this is my day of transformation

when the weekend dissolves and the mind
adopts a new man to port it from place
to place without dreams, without dreams.
flick! the switch is thrown: mind on, mind off.

there’s a girl in my house

in her panties on the phone

rifling the refrigerator

Hanshan LXXIV

so, Monday – back in the boiler room again;
weekend’s over and now it’s just waiting about,
working about, waiting for next weekend.
such impatience have I! there’s not enough
to keep me happy; to keep me believing
I’m moving, moving in a forward direction.
the boiler clanks its old bone pipes;
the girls in the office sort the mail.
this is an age of revolution! the Aquarian Age!
let’s get moving, get things rolling, there’s no time
to lose! OM SHANTI! say the OM, repeat
my mantra, do something that feels vital – now!

Hanshan LXXV

well, here I am back in the boiler room
again. the boiler pump is broken
so every few hours – between dreams of freedom
and schemes to run the get-rich-quick machine –
I return here to drain the blasted pipes.
well, it’s only so long until five-o-clock
and wiring the new Industrial Building light
will keep me busy for a while. working there
I can see the blue bay water this morning
rolling with wind-pressed whitecaps. O Moondrifter
are you lonely for me? or do you have such fun
bucking in the waves you don’t care if I’m there
or not. well, however. the boiler’s drained . . . I go.

I am

far far

away

some

meadow

some

bird-throat

singing

for no reason.

going out to Moondrifter.

guess I’ll buy a newspaper

to light the fire.

I jump down

from the gunnels I must have 2000

pounds of keys!

tied from her bow

Moondrifter swings this way Moondrifter

swings that way.

NOTHING TO SAY

home from work

next week off

seems there must be

something

to say must be

something to say.

though I go only five

let my mind travel

five thousand miles

it is not my day

to write new poems –

it is my day

to recite old ones.

water from the barrel.

one cup for me

one for the maguey

Hanshan XXXXI

All day long I rock one way, then the other
sloshing in Moondrifter on Richardson Bay.
The wind-whipped waves slap against the hull;
the sun frolics on the wall while I sway.
This morning, like every morning, the window spider
built a perfect new web – his own private rays
of homemade sun. Day after day the wind tears his work
and he strings it again without ever a moment to laze.

I

watching the mountain at dusk.
sound of a motorboat; sun
setting behind the barge.
seeing water like scales on a dragon’s back.

II

I write words
because words are the eternal mystery.
they contain nothing, mountains and clouds.
when you read
you are the words yourself.

a match.

in the darkness

a lantern

is lighted

Hanshan LXII

no need to light all the lamps – just
the little one behind my shoulder.
it casts light and shady blotches on my page.
I hear motors tonight – a passing airplane,
a constant rumbling of distant commuters,
the drone of a small motorboat slowly
progressing from here to there on the bay.
I see the first star! high
above the Hayoka Barge, above a forest
of sailboat masts. it’s alone now
but not for long and all evening
I’ve waited for the moon to rise.

waiting for the moon

a seal
his slick black head

the pennant behind me
whispering

I like
doing things the hard way like
waking with shivers
stomping my feet on the noisy floorboards.
I like the hatchet
I use for splitting firewood,
like the sound of splitting,
like the splinters, the bit of match
and the silent yellow flame
creeping along the edge
of a crumpled poem
riddled with typographical errors.

the tin stove crackles and
pops rusty scales swelling and stretching
with the searing heat. and now
the sun walks the window
across the floor and now
with my belly of oolong tea
I believe it may be morning
and certainly warm –
I like it – or hot!
and I like it now
peeling off my long-sleeved shirt.

you know
it is
unusual,

he rowing back bent
she sitting behind –
the water
blue of coral.

hills, great sky,
in between the spars
white hulls
the sun of the morning
polishing gold on bows
pointing into the dawn as now
a soft whorl of smoke
from a neighboring home
passes across my view.

unusual
the two
floating across the water
to begin their shoreside day.

I’m sleepy Mom, don’t want to
read any poems
any more.
all those words.

I’m no big deal. no genius
keeps me awake at night.
I’m in my yellow PJ’s Mom –
Jane made them and

she can read
if she wants.
I’m going to crawl up beside her
and snooze.

it’s a struggle to say anything
and it’s a struggle to say nothing.
where do we stand? the island
sinks wherever we move.

at 10:00 PM I begin to end work –
ah, cup of tea, swallow me!
steaming fog lifts off at dawn while night
drops its snowflakes of black

until black blankets all and a light
keeps its yellow sentry on the pier.
such effort to lift up my day,
such effort to set it down

though it falls of itself, I know,
and all I need is to let it go.
the island floats off as a cloud,
in my teacup: rain!

five coots paddle

amid splashes the rain falls

straight down.

I cannot sleep.
I sleep and cannot rest.
I rest and cannot sleep.

a dark cloud
inhabits a circle of bone.
it has no light
it has no darkness.
it came from nowhere.
I made it myself.

I would lie on my back
on the grass one week
two weeks watching
the clouds float overhead;
the day
turning to night, the night
turning to day.

and

then the wind says

do

few among us there are
who will sit
on a torn Volkswagen seat
in a circle of dust wind blowing
the poplar whispering in a thousand leaves,
few among us to join
the circle of stones the council fire
is tin cans and wire and
old burnt bottles cracked by the heat.
but I am such a one.

automobile seats in the dirt
their vinyl baking, the tinfoil, pop tops.
the stones about the ashes
cemented into a ring,
cracked glass, old stump your skin
is nothing but cinders now.

a latch clicks. a white-haired man
walks to the land from the hull
of a sinking ferryboat:
City of San Raphael, white-haired Piro
smoking his pipe the dust
rises and settles in the summer wind – few
there are
yet I am such a one.

“One Way” the carved hand

points. ferryboat San Raphael

sinking into the mud

Seagram bottle -

some old drunkard

slept the night

what will you do
when you leave work?
what will you do, they ask,
what will you do?

O, you know
Jane is working late tonight
and I
am sitting in my truck
watching the clouds pass
before the mountain.

all purple the clouds, the sun
slowly fading away.

walk on the road?

no.

cut through the field;
walk on the railroad tracks.

leaf on my hand.

I thought a butterfly

has landed!

lifted an MG

hubcap. millions of pill bugs hid

from the nighttime rain!

a boy rides by

with a gust! dandelion fluffs

fly!

first
I build
mountains
of the imagination.

then I climb them.

UPON THE MOUNTAIN

hmm said nothing
profound
on the way up
perhaps I’ll say nothing
profound
on the way down
(but I did
sit naked
in the sun).

this sun!

where was this sun when

I was inside?

there is nothing happening beneath
these trees I sit
and watch.

banana slug so

fast my mind goes noticing

you go so slow.

sitting naked

at the summit an orange-eyed

fly tastes my toe.

red berries on bushes

in bunches – could these be

blueberries?

little
to be said now;

thoughts in mantra
mantra

in the peck-pecking of a woodpecker
high in a tree.

I lean my ear against the bark
and listen.

I lay down my sword.
perhaps I will write more.

I will lay down my sword
and let my head
fall back against the wall;
if I travel too fast
how shall I ever arrive?

there is a story
of a man, panicked,
running through the fog,
running through his life so fast
he could never see
there was no fog at all.

he had panicked because
he had left his sword behind.
I shall give mine away.
or bury it.

the way
is to forget your goal

and in this way
arriving there

wind flipped the pages

of my clipboard I thought

ah! a white bird!

a man

drunken with the appearance

of ink on paper

ten thousand blank pages!
O – that I might never venture onto them.
the ocean, unrippled as the horizon;
moon . . . and occasional clouds unmoving.

my own splash has me terrified –
would I had lived in a bottle!
cork hold me tight –
my mind speaks blankly, my island

is a circle of sand, my eye
is a palm of three fronds.
I am the only monkey bungling about.
the back of my hands have fur.

I scruffle about in the sand all day;
a bottle that’s empty has nothing for me.
I have no message . . . no scrap
I can scribble it on.

I’d like something profound
lying in my rowboat
in the afternoon
but the sun’s too warm
for thoughts.

what time
do you think it is? asks Jane
and I think
I don’t think
it’s any time at all the tide

high
a coot
hoots
a motorboat buzzes
Poppet’s TV
plays melodies from the 30’s
and the eyes of the neighbor’s cat
open
and close sleepily.

on a day like today
developers
don’t exist
and the thrust of dollars
is completely imaginary
in an empty mind.

what day
do you think it is?
I know
but I don’t intend
to give it away.

rather
I shall take it
into myself
my head’s shadow
on the floorboards
the dry sponge the plastic bottle
of outboard motor oil
the yellow bucket
the blue dinghy
the great tongue of ocean water
swept into the bay
lifting me
and rocking me idly.

Hanshan CLXIV

one day the Waterfront’s plight – destruction at the hand
of money-hunting developers – seems more important
than any other issue in my life. but then on another
I work as a carpenter and think myself of buying
and selling real estate. then investing and securing
Jane’s and my financial future seems most important.
all the separate worlds operating side by side each
its own importance, all others irrelevant.
so what does matter? Jane comes home from work
carrying an orange package. “I’ve brought you a
present!” she says. and it becomes clear to me
“What’s the present!” is more important than anything!

Boats
floating on the water

frail as dreams as

lily pads, rocking
their lips lifted in the wind.

white blossoms

Monet
nearly blind
swirling his paints in masses

of houseboats
living in happy communities.

the babe grebe
pops to the surface
quick looks
goes beneath again
boats
floating above,
their dark shadows
between fisheyes
and the sky.

goldfish
swirling in a bowl

food
falling from the sky
in their little world
frail as dreams
or morning

before the blasting light of noon.

come to the time
you’ll either stick
or go off with it
for yourself –
there’s the straight of it;
at the pinch
you’ll show your colors.

it’s a simple choice:
you’re for us
or you’re for yourself.
simple.
faith
or no faith.
simple as that.

and yet they say
as you think of others
so the world appears to you, so
if the world is
whatever we think then
what is
the world left
really
to be?

I’m
for myself I’m
for us all –
is there a difference?
the living and the dead
watch,
and there is no hiding.

Hanshan CVII

so, tomorrow, no – the day after tomorrow - Jane & I
leave for Canada, going North, going forth
to see what we can see. Alice sweeps up
inside her tiny two-float houseboat; dogs sleep
every which way about the pier.
our camper is ready, we’re ready to go, ready
even if only for so short a time to take off
letting the world float effortlessly by as we
coast along. Valerie sprays the succulents outside
The Benecia; Eric and Cindy’s boat is locked: they’ve
moved to land! and so shall we, now going
for a little infectious land-sense into our blood.

Hanshan CIX

O so it’s morning in Victoria the maples
turning orange loosing their leaves about my yellow truck
as we drive along the air clear with Fall the inlet
clearly blue now that we have left the US of A.
Canada: civilization at last! the Museum guards
stand erect; beyond the window a red flag flaps among
brilliant green trees before the copper domes of
the Parliament building. something is upright and
self-respecting here unlike Port Angelus across the bay:
every other corner sustains a bar, ruffians entering
and leaving after dark. Regal Mount Olympus should be
moved over here – I’ll jot a note to the Queen directly!

VANCOUVER

I am cleaning my glasses
carefully
squintingly
a man enters the lounge
to sit beside me and I think
he is going to smoke cigars people
who smoke cigars spy me
and come from across the room
to sit beside me to smoke cigars
people who smoke cigars are like that.

the Museum’s green-garbed guard
enters on his polished shoes
and lights up a cigarette.
he stands in the corner
gazing at the view
blue water, boats.
the dumpy blond though
dressed to hint a bit
risqué,
gazes at the view
the hills the green trees.

suddenly the guard
hears something none of us hear.
he snuffs his cigarette and
strides urgently out.

- For the Native Americans of northwest America for whom
the Potlatch is a celebration of plenty. Written at the Van-
couver Museum of Man dedicated to their heritage.

things look good, actually
people of the Potlatch;
what we resist we become and
guilt so heavily runs
in your race’s annihilation the white man
has hauled your carven hulks from the rainy forests
to enthrone them here in this museum though
anthropologists will certainly call it
a twentieth century church.

the wall-to-wall carpeting. huge glass slabs
unbelievably ascending the ceiling
breathtakingly high.
tourists or
students stroll looking up or stop
to think inwardly their
hands in their pockets realizing
somehow they are small against this are
dwarfed in this pavilion and
out of place among
these exalted hand-hewn trees.

the tree endures though it is covered with teeth a
wide-jawed lintel is bitten eyes glare a bird
sitting squatting on a man’s head the head
bodiless three ravens mutely see the directions
thirty feet in air.
a mother with great brown lips and a
ten-inch chunk
fallen from her nose
proffers her wood-womb child.
the jaws of this red beak
could swallow us five at a time; bear
you crouch for a hundred years
your yellow eyes look hungry.

and people of the Potlatch blow on their hands
in the rusted Chevrolet rumbling
into town for café coffee
the cold morning the screen door
banging old dreams gone
gone from the dirt roads the
dirt paths gone the bellowing and growling
mute tongues of your fathers
gone from the mist in the field the settling rain
silver on the boughs of pine gone
into a hall of glass and light and
white-skinned children
learning at the feet
of your own ancestors.

this is the 20th Century!
and trucks in the underpass roar deafeningly.
trains pass and people
think the automobile is wonderful
the red the blue the bright automobile
swooshing and whooshing and whizzing about but
these are all dinosaurs to me I drive one too but I
don’t take it seriously.

dinosaurs.
and very uncivilized for
civilization is marked by cleanliness by
the old Zen adage: don’t
eat and shit in the same place and
long long shimmering masses of cars creep or crawl or
don’t move at all along the Long Island Turnpike
considered to be
the longest parking lot in the world.

uncivilized.
for each auto sits muttering there
shitting in the face
of the car behind the grill grinning
with its chrome teeth with its Cheshire smile
slowly disappearing or rather
rapidly vanishing since
the dinosaurs did over a couple of million years
and made all this muck
the autos run on.

the muck
the oil the gasoline it’s all as we know
left-over dinosaurs, their bones their leathery bodies,
their big fern food and their shit all
festering and bubbling up
and stinking of methane gas and now
pumped into tanks and squirted on gears
wearing thin and burning up and
only thirty years of it left they say
and we all suspect civilizations may wage war
squabbling over the sticky last drops.

O it’s so silly and so fantastic how I
hop in slam the door press the pedal
lean back and shazzam! flown –
on an Arabian carpet –
miles and miles the world spins under
and I am in a new world
noting my omnipotence forgetting
my uncivilization my smog my
global politics forgetting
dinosaurs disappeared and I

am simply riding on their remains I
swish ten times as fast
my fantastic fabricant rubber feet
spinning hotly my flesh-polyp in its
speeding metal cage vanishing even
a hundred times faster into the horizon I
mad to the last patch-laying end I
and my metal cage both, no doubt,
to be burped one day from the La Brea tar pits

amidst a crown of amazed children.

Hanshan CLXVI

once upon a time there lived in a boat that was actually
a house a man who couldn’t make up his mind:
to float any direction like the reflections of the clouds
upon the water or to freeze up into the cold
yellow stone worshipped by the people on land.
so, sometimes he sat and scribbled nonsense in a notebook
like a maniac without any mind at all. and sometimes
he trudged down the brown pier, picked up
hammers and saws and went whacking about
raising such a clatter that people paid him –
if for nothing else, to encourage him to finish quickly
and go home – where he could rest in peace once more.

bye
bye
daytime

Christmas lights

begin
to
appear

Hanshan CXXXIX

I wanted to collect for my Mom some poems
titled: Poems to Read When “Down in the Dumps.”
It’s been snowing all winter and she’s cooped-up
in the house and lonely. Jane’s been thinking
of her Mom and Dad and brothers and sisters and how
she so much misses them all. What’s to be done?
This is the Twentieth Century; the world is smaller
yet we are all farther from one another than ever.
I couldn’t find any poems to send her – I don’t know why.
When I call she says: “I’m sixty-five, I have perhaps
only ten more years to live and how many times
will I see you?” Fall leaves fall faster now.

O it’s Christmas again

in America. the child next door

got a BB gun.

my neighbor Poppit

comes out of the house swearing!

and stares at a pipe.

the neighbors are quarreling again
“fuck shit!
I can’t do four things at once!”
“Yeah, and your things
are so much more important!”

well
I’ve blown a hole in the wall
and I’m no fox jes
gettin’ a little view
that’s all.
the flies hover over my electric tools;
the water outside
warps the visions of houseboats.

O! just wait I say
and in God’s own time
the neighbors
will finally shut up, the flies
will hover over the electric tools
and the water outside will
warp the visions of houseboats.

the mother
long hair red dress
scolds her child;

he adores her she
is his only planet.

O she scolds!
harsh tone spank hand;

he adores her she
is his universe he
sometimes cries sometimes
he laughs just the same.

Hanshan CLXXXV

well this place is absurd the pier’s half
chopped down half built up and it’s been that way
for a month. the developer arrested sixty-nine of
our community so he could dump dirt in a creek
to make a parking lot, and now bulldozers
dig it up again to put in a pipe they forgot
in the rush to arrest the resisters. heavy
machinery and diesel noise and exhaust everywhere
the developer has turned our packed-dirt parking lot
into a bumpy mud pit when it rains and when it’s dry
our cars get filthy and covered with dust.
and for all this the developer has raised our rent.

now is the dark time
did I hear a girl scream?
barking of all the dogs.

wind in the attic
pulling the clothes off the line.

now is the light time
are you blinded by cars?
I heard a shot! one
clean shot.

dare you open the door?
are you afraid of the light?
does darkness protect you?

wind in the attic
the eye stands naked.

Hanshan LXXXIII

O I have too many obligations too many things to do
too many chores the press of reality has always been
too much for me. I know where to begin
I have to begin right here right now but I
don’t want to do anything – is that so wrong?
let the world go it’s way, I don’t care about it.
let the sun shine let the rain fall
it doesn’t matter to me in my little artificial world.
I have so many pretty dreams I’d like to cry.
maybe you’d like to know one – I dream . . .
I dream of strangers encouraging and helping strangers.
I dream of poets’ words lifting joy in all hearts.

more noise about one man’s plight –
the tongue beating the dumb air.
perhaps I am a moth looking for flame.

will I know when I find it?
perhaps I like being blind.
this anguish – I must love it.

in the morning I think the day;
at noon, afternoon.
I see my ass up ahead of me.

I follow myself an erratic course;
I am full circle with my hollow voice.
perhaps I am flame with no one watching.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

perhaps I yelled
and yelled and yelled

but the wind
hid all sound.

building the door

didn’t work – I stand around

looking at houseboats.

as the sun

slips behind the houses –

breeze enters the leaves.

“how’s that?” “worse” “how’s

that?” “better” the neighbors adjusting

the antenna “perfect!”

if I do not move forever
perhaps I can be invisible forever.

how could I not move?

turn the knob

light goes up on the

bronze buddha

a merganser? a coot?

one thing’s for sure:

one less minnow!

have you seen my mushroom?
I’ve been working hard.
it means nothing to work hard;
it means nothing to work at all.

all day I’ve been doing nothing –
have you seen my mushroom growing?
it pushes through leaves –
it bursts from my wallet.

I clip it
and carry it to the bank.
one day this working will make me old
and even the foxfire of my savings

will provide no light
for a man gone blind.
I have been working hard:
what for? what for?

O my god!

our blackberry patch –

nothing but houses!

the man in short pants
sits at the end of his pier.
he does not know
his friend his ally
his helper –
or his treacherous foe.

he listens to everyone.
everyone makes
some sense.
yet when the tide is high
for some, the water
simply comes simply goes
for others.

and to some
death
swims nakedly.

a man gets drunk
then a man drinks coffee
then sits and plans
a fantastical house
to expand the mind
of all humanity.
it is to be his home.

while living there
he expects visitors.
they will enter
full of wonder at
illumined glass iridescent in the roof,
curved beams, a railroad train rocking
on the water, all of a mountain
in the window.

and he shall remain calm
for this man knows the possible
and the impossible
are just a matter of thought
and to believe
we do not all have wings
is at heart
foolish.

Jane calls me

for my company. Let us remember

we are gods.

Victim of the heart O
I love you broken, heart.
O, so I must love you weeping heart
as my head falls forward my chest
collapses into an aching I must so love
for I
will fly in the impossible air, I
push aside the mountain
and hold the sun in my palm for love.

for I know the joy of the dawn and the birth
of love;
and I know the flowing and piercing warmth
of love as she awakens
with a fluttering of flower petals
within my skin.

and to me
the mountain is as my brother,
with its light breath whispering
as I effortlessly ascend, ascend
the weight of my body away falling away
as the sunset resplendent rays the mountain peak
and I
my heart full and open –
vanish into the whole
and unbelievably crumbling air.

girl talk

takes the three of them

I turn again to the fire.

as time goes on
and they continue to talk and
the ocean keeps crashing
quietly in the distance, and the wind
rustles through the naked branches of sage,

I realize the ocean
is endless the land
an inconsequent patch as the talk
bubbling from the mouths with minds
living on humanity’s rumors
is endless

and the peace we seek
crumbles into sand
as the rolling waves of sound
tumble and grind at the edge of silence.
on the yellow beaches a single man
wanders and wanders on forever.

Hanshan CLIV

halfway between here and there –
what’s this hurry going to the nowhere
I’ll be when I’m gone. in the hearth
is a fire tonight; the leaves of
this particular artichoke are very green.
so a man passes through the time
that stands in books. even the books
will go the way of even the stones.

if he would have his choice
he would burn them all.
was it that they lied?
or was it their denial
of human life in goodliness?

they would cause strife
within his household.
would they were subtle
and openly evil in their intent.
so he could respect them.

but their despicable stupidity
crushed his greatest toleration.
he saw in their disregard
for human life
the stuff of wars.

but what did it matter?
he was a poet
and the flame of his imagination
his blood let food
as he would slowly flicker away.

because I carry in my mind
museums of memory, seasons of remembered weather, or
seeing a bee on a dandelion flower just so
once long ago, the yellow persistent but
not just any yellow but this, just so, as I
and only I have seen, just there
by the round grey stone, by the lake,

and seeing it and the island from the hill,
or beside me now after many years the air
crisp again with Fall and underfoot
the fallen leaves; because I know it
and I also am one who knows my own wind
will one day fail swirling in an invisible eddy
carried off within a greater wind;

because I know both the conquering of time and
its indefatigable course making of all, embers,
I know naught matters beyond a bee’s wing buzzing,
that buzzing beating the air, the fire
flaming faster up,
a bundle of bones jiggering with glee
headlong plummeting into the flame.