Sunday afternoon.
I give myself a pedi-
cure and take a walk.
Low tide. Sun on the
mudflats. The horizon bright
with the sound of geese.
As Zhuangzi says, this
is also a that. Nothing
compares with the Il-
lumination of
the Obvious. Haiku and
Zen go together.
We historians
cite Basho’s frog poem to
argue about it.
A year later he
described himself: long hair, pale
face, in the May rain.
Follow nature and
your every thought will be
the moon. It’s child’s play.
“In the finite world, one must be reconciled to the perplexity of the interplay of the particular and the universal.” Catherine Pickstock, Aspects of Truth, 110.
The mockingbird, high
on the wire overhead as
I pulled weeds for pay
in summer vaca-
tion. The ivy shone around
me. The bird repea-
ted, “Squeeze the sweat from
your eyes. In time like me you
will sing others’s songs.”
How little I do
in the process of making
something to look at.
Only look, they say.
The cove is empty. No it’s
not. I see a duck.
It paddles between
waves of light, above and be-
low. It makes more waves.
From my window, sounds
of rain falling on the roofs
below. I wake slow-
ly, having slept like
a child— that sweet nothingness.
As it happens, rain
in May is a good
second. So I just lie here,
counting syllables.
A painter fendu,
these outbreaks of chrome yellow
forsythia stun
me to childhood slopes
near the Pacific. Rolling
fields of mustard. Far
out in the grey-blue
migrating whales one by one
stately as they pass.
Everywhere I walk
apple blossoms blow; apple
blossoms line the path.
The cove appears, gray
and flecked with foam. An egret,
not about to leave,
stands in two-inch waves
and waits. No difference: sub-
stance and emptiness.
Young, I studied my
self in Yeats’s many selves.
None survived my youth.
A day at a time
seems best, and walking around,
slowing to see things
as they appear. Care
for the otherness of things
is my salvation.
Just one of those days—
not enough water at low
tide to float the ducks.
The horizon draws
the eye beyond desire to
the edge of elsewhere.
The distance erupts
with the tremulous outcries
of geese taking off.
Polishing a ku
about my decentered life
made me wobble on
my way to the geese.
I prayed the Dao and settled
down. The wise faces
of the geese, inscru-
tible, greeted me, a drop
of red in my black.
Solitary bird
moving with balletic poise
across the mudflat
you’re an illusion
of mine, I own you, empty
jesture. Prolonged watch-
fullness shrives me as
gathering wings, legs, neck, head,
my dream collapses.
