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.
On this cold clear day,
the color of the Bay speaks
for itself. No words,
just a shattering
blue. There’s no conversation.
Stronger than the sky,
it scatters dark light
away, leaving solitary
swans to the good life.
If I keep naming
the waterfowl as I walk,
they are the constant
ones. Peaceful ducks, swans
always feeding the beauty
that is their burden.
Now that it’s Fall and
brilliant leaves choke the gutters,
trees talk to the sky
candidly, freely.
It’s just me and the birds now.
People turn inward.
The cormorant’s wings,
spread in the Fall sunshine, fill
with wind. It’s awkward.
Before you died we
talked about the afterlife.
Grief didn’t come up.
The cormorant tries
again and again to spread
its wings in the sun.
The great visible
body of the feeding swan:
the head deep under
and indifferent
to what others think about
its nobility.
Poets recognize
that one must root around in
mud for good verses.
”There are, notoriously, no criteria in the arts or sciences for achieving or executing integrated wholes.” Jan Zwicky, The Experience of Meaning, 72.
Summer dusk. A brief
flash of lightning in the trees.
We had stopped talking
as your health declined.
Only yesterday I got
the news you had died.
Who can I talk to
now? I’ll miss your sudden daft
wit in bed and out.
You’re in a class by
yourself, your shapeless shape now
a dear dreamed-of-whole.
More Summer than Fall.
But who can trust the old names.
Public Works restores
drainage pipes; old roads
are retopped for ice and snow.
Who knows the future?
Does even Nature?
A burly kayaker heads
out to the ocean.
Afternoon hazy
with crying gulls restlessly
hovering over
the cove. Shouldn’t you
be going somewhere? I wait,
a precipitate
of time. You cry and
fly about in the lazy
last hours of summer.
Nobody’s out here
today. There’s a cold wind the
sun makes colder. The
gaunt pine bristles with
light. Still I sit under it
and watch the dark blue
waves roll in, deeply
folded with glassy black sides.
I miss my father.
”Only the finite can be augmented. The giving augments the being of the finite, in the sense of making it more than nothing, making it to be, with an otherness that is its own.” Desmond, G&B 313.
Debts on my mind, I
have never been free of debts.
Some can be repaid.
Capitalism will
kill consciousness if you let
it. I take a walk.
In the cove, under
the plantation garden, an
egret steals color
from the dying day.
Ducks take one more turn. Others
flow as from Nothing.
I walk fast in the
Fall, my breath just ahead of
me. The Bay is flat,
slate gray. Once late the
available light picks out
in the tawny grass
a monstrous Mute Swan,
unearthly as a full moon
in the early dusk.
