poetry notebook

for To Shi Lynn

A monochrome blue-gray print of a fish scale roof,

The sky seems to disappear as it grows

But the expected wind only comes

As an aging smoker, in stumbles and gasps.

  

I can’t explain to anyone why I’m so sad.

Anything I point to as cause is not.

Anyone I blame is blameless.

There’s a circuit loose, or some kind of

Jam, if it turns out that the mind is

Just a machine after all.

  

I watched her from a distance.

Her walk was not inviting,

But fluid, economical, and majestic.

Complex circumstances having nothing

To do with me until the sequence ended,

When she read me and knew me,

Brought her into my house as a renter.

  

From the first I was happy

To just be in a room with her

To see her and know she was there

Though my interminable babble belied me.

No desire, no disrespect, no grasping.

  

Over time we grew closer.

Desire arose as a herd of elephants.

Grasping came as darkness and wind

Behind them. Handlers were absent.

I jumped on one’s back and grabbed its

Ears and it knelt to me. But the next one

Tried to throw me, so I jumped up and down on its head.

As I moved forward through the herd

They got stronger and harder to tame.

To reign in the old bull, I did a backflip

Off his tusks and faced him,

Put on an eyepatch and stared him down

With my look that can melt rock.

He still won’t kneel, but he’s stable.

  

Is this conflict the cause of my sadness or

Distraction from it so that the distance

From distraction back to sadness in the fall

Feels like a universe?

  

Because she loves me deeply,

Kalliope bestows both good and bad

To develop my insight and empathy.

She took more than half of my sight and

Just as a boring cutter takes good steel

With the rust and the scratches

To make an engine hum

She cut away parts of my brain

But endowed me with the power of song.

  

Long before my father erupted with pleasure

Between my mother’s welcoming legs

In an experience all animals worship as peak,

(Aphrodite so grips them in her girdle)

Kalliope practiced her craft on my eldest brother,

Greatest of poets. He taught her

To be more gentle and generous, so my eye,

Unlike his, can see the beauty

Whose source is the imagination

But which at times appears in the guise

Of a mortal woman with long dark hair.

  

I like to walk.

• I like to walk in town.
• I like various walking styles:

• I like to do Thai Forest, Theravada style walking meditation.
• I like to walk fast.

I don’t like to be seen to be meditating.

• I prefer to meditate in secret or with a group of other meditators,
• I don’t like to perform traditional walking meditation in public,
• I invented my own walking meditation for meditating in public.

I’m not teaching this.

• This practice has no sanction or tradition.
• I’m not suggesting that you do it.
• It’s just something that I like to do.
• I call it meditating because that’s how I experience it.

I wear my normal casual clothes, with whatever shoes that are best for the walking experience I want at that time.

Since I prefer not to stop,

• I choose long routes that are clearly marked for pedestrians.
• For my taste, this is usually best in town.

Digression:
I used to walk around Manhattan and do this, in the evening, after most of the workers had left town for the night.
I’d nearly forgotten how much I loved this adaptation of walking meditation.

In Willits, I like to walk on Main Street, which is Highway 101.

And I like to walk elsewhere.

I choose a destination that I think is far enough away to make me tired if I walk there and back at a rapid pace. The pace will be described separately.

• While I walk, I sing the 7-Line Prayer of Padmasambhava
• in Tibetan
• to the tune Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche sang it in,
• very quietly, so nobody can hear me,
• one syllable per step.

I also visualize Padmasambhava in the sky above the mountains.

The pace, the breath, the tune

• are intimately bound together
• as are the visualization
• and the other sense impressions.

I walk

• at a pace as fast as I can walk without seeming to hurry
• or seem to be walking for exercise;
• and govern my composure.

• If I strain
• I don’t reveal it.
• Yet I walk with definite purpose
• with focus,
• not looking around,
• gaze forty feet ahead,
• a smile and greeting for anyone met,
• but no change in pace.

• I keep the pace even and brisk,
• relax the arms and chest,
• keep mind on the prayer
• and the visualization
• and the steps

as a mandala.

The rhythm of the walk with the song of the prayer are a drum beat of awareness.

When I arrive home, I sit and let my mind go free.

If it wanders,

I bring it back.

I awoke into a world full of color and trees,
Seemingly real, tactile, sensual, formal.

  

Triangulation of sound and sight on objects
Gave evidence against dreams.

  

Dreams dumped me there, no less real for being
Thought of as not a dream, though the dream

  

Violates itself in memory and real is regular.
Awakened from dreams in succession,

  

Imagination and Quanta entangle.
This pattern arises to displace that pattern,

  

Now another, alike enough for the senses
To tween them in a seamless cloth

  

Of self-apparent continuous existence.
You were there. I saw you.

  

And then I didn’t see you anymore.

  

  

Prometheus: I established blind hope in them.

Prometheus Bound (Attributed to Aeschylus)

  

When he cut ties

Thought

One might say “stay.”

  

If one noticed

None said.

  

At first, pain.

Just convenient,

As suspected.

  

Hope

Lingered,

  

Smoke smell

Long after fire.

  

He, for those

Won’t miss him?

Tears

  

Pass.

Potential

Returns.

  

  

  

  

Factories fascinated him. He read management magazines.

He lived in a manufactured world, everything

He touched was mass produced. In a factory.

  

After the eye was gone, it was time to get a job.

“You can’t do this job with one eye.” said the guy

Who did the hiring. “Give me three days.

If you don’t want me then, I’ll leave and admit it.

I can do the job.”

  

He had no idea what the job was.

Electronic substrate silk-sceen printing

For digital clocks and watch faces.

Must have been 1975. Digital clocks

And watches just hitting the market.

  

Slate black chips, electronic circuit

Lines in silver or gold paint on one side

Rows of eights in brighter ink on the other.

“3,000 chips a night.”

  

Night shift. Squeegee the screen.

Place chip on platen. Step on pedal.

Take chip from platen, carefully –

Don’t smear it. Use a spatula. Put the chip

On the conveyor belt between you

And woman on identical machine

Bakes for a few feet and drops three inches

15 feet away where inspectors

Seek broken lines

Through fluorescent ring around

The magnifying center glass.

  

Everyone had to produce. Everyone had

To inspect. Rotation. He couldn’t see

Fast enough. Then he noticed.

It’s a pattern. To look for imperfections

Is the long way home. Look instead for

Perfect patterns. Remove imperfect patterns.

Inspecting sped up. Errors ebbed.

  

But it was the machines. The sound patterns.

The rhythm. He sped the tempo,

To keep from getting bored

  

And to blot out the radio less

Like music than like someone

Shouting out the time.

  

The machine fused with him.

He often awoke believing he’d fallen

Asleep at work at the Machine

He could play like a drum kit.

Tempo expansion. Syncopation.

  

By the time his output hit 12,000 he wanted

To scream. He went to the office.

“I quit.” They said, “We’ll double your pay.”

He said, “Too late, I can’t take it.”

  

Of course, he just turned around and got a job

In a different factory. Jet airplane filters.

But that is a different story entirely.

  

And he hadn’t yet learned that there are ways

That are neither numbness nor insanity

To engage with seemingly infinite repetition.