Earth-House Sutras

Estuaries: Coming May 2011

2010-12-30T09:21:00.001-08:00

There is an estuary
where streams and wild rivers meet
and mingle with the salted tides.
It gathers all the water to it
like the afterlife of rain: inevitable!

I too must be an estuary of confluent tides—
this earth-body of antlered thoughts,
the decay of leaves: my branching mind.
Tumbling with stones and salmon toward the sea,
the rivers of the Earth move through me.

—Jason Kirkey

Resurgence

2010-07-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

I am thinking of water
     tea-gold, clear
     full of light—
     see stones, wet
     with algae
     like fur.

Suddenly!
     hear the fountain across the room
     left on, lying in bed,
     trickling away and
     river capturing
     these thoughts.

For a moment the mind
     was water,
     listening was being,
     sight meandered
     like a stream
     across inner tide flats.

The Dao—
even mountains
     hearing it
would flow!

Eating the World that Eats the Self

2010-06-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

A moment ago the sunlight draped itself
          golden over grass—
shoot, leaf, flower, and seed
—all lit with the fire of life.

Now it is gone.
The fields are silent with dusk.
Nothing is bereft:
The mint is still fragrant and refreshing;
hummingbirds flicker like fireflies,
          rose to rose;
The nectar of the sun now set
still sings in the light filled lungs of green.

The world consumes itself.
This metabolism sets the Earth on fire,
sits in the garden grazing leaves of mint—
one day the world will eat this body too.
It doesn’t worry me.
I already make a meal of myself
to broader and deeper things.
Eat this…
          poem
          these words, this song, this heart
          cracked open like ripened fruit.
Then, you too, collapse and feed the Earth.

All these words molding away;
all these bodies about to decay.
The sun rises and sets.
Now rise again
to quench the plants with light
and feed the poets
tossing fish to the hungry sea.

Estuary

2010-06-06T23:25:00.001-07:00

Come one year westward
under fog and shadows,
the Golden Gates spread
open on a lapis sea
like budding leaves—now
falling, crackling, dry with wisdom
and waiting to mold away.

The hills around are burning;
fire passing—not destroying
but creating, loving everything it burns.
Step through the waiting gates again
and open inward toward the shore.

The bay itself, an estuary
where streams and wild rivers meet
and mingle with the salted tides.
It gathers all the water to it
like the afterlife of rain—inevitable!

I too must be an estuary of confluent tides,
soaked by rain on Market Street—
caught in a torrent of emptying clouds
which hung above like a blanket of bogs
or a dripping chain of mountains.

Some things simply stand as they are:
the rain has nothing to say for itself
but “wet”
yet nourishes the thirsty earth.
And I am too full of mind
that wants to say itself
and say the world around me.

Covered, drenched, dripping
with rain
the world says me instead.

Pass the burning gates again, water
steaming in the flame graced heat
like incense in a temple.
Wildfire licks the soul and
tempers heart and mind—
pulls them taut like skin on a drum
so the fire and rain can play them.

A Study of Seasons, Abstracty

2010-06-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

Autumn has come again; the trees are shedding their memories of summer in red, or yellow leaves. They fall softly to the earth to be covered, one cold morning, by the hoarfrost of arrival … and then, Winter. Winter cannot be seen, covered as it is by the dark of our gestation, swelling like a belly, and soaked through by the falling flakes of sharp clarity. They play a game of contrast with Japanese brushstroke branches. Spring edges in slowly, but sure to one day lift its shining head of tender sprouts, up from its underworld of contention. Everything is born today in the arms of a cherry blossom on the breeze—the wind reminds us, even as the leaves stay, of impermanence. When Summer comes it is with a close sun, thunderstorms, and sweating brows. Aloof until the solstice of its own impending death, as night again wins over day.

Autumn has come again; the trees are shedding their memories of summer in red, or yellow leaves; and I, I am not just passing through, but too travel in the company of sun, and leaves, and falling snow.

The Dervish Dances

2010-04-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

“Walk out three days in the desert,”
says the dream to the delusion,
molting the psyche
and planting tender kisses on the cheeks of the heart.
Everyday I pray to fall apart,
a death-wish for life and obliteration
into the ecstasy of passion.
Spin dervish, spin! I want to die laughing.

Who is the Poet? Who is the Pen?

2010-03-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

Anything can happen in the bare lines
stretched before us, waiting to be made
whole in the fluid motions of the pen, the
emptiness of the page like the emptiness of time
stretched forward toward the note of our death.
And we could fill that page with anything,
its quality measured by the attentive heart
so that we must tend to the falling of our steps
walking on toward the next page and the next,
listening and faithfully writing what we hear
even as the ear strains and the tongue falls short
until the book is written, gone from the imagined
to the real, beautiful even when it falters
because it is honest and the voice of the pen
our own— and even when we are gone
and others find that book, finding
through its lines some permission within to sing,
they will remark how true the voice to the page;
“But who is the poet whose voice is the pen?”

Heart-Mind Horizon

2010-03-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

Walk up the high cliffs at dusk
with the sun falling, a rain of light
to drench the fields in evening thoughts.
Down slopes tumbling green
the view widens into the sea
like a river gathering mist.
The long pacific coast gallops onward—
never tiring, never faltering,
never calling out for another way of life.

I will sit on the edge of the world,
eyes groping out like hands—
the sea cerulean,
hills light-draped
by grass in golden green,
the fog-fading horizon
pronounced now like poetry:
grace from the ochre sun.

If only we too could find the things
which makes our inner edge explicit,
then like the white moon, crescent
over cresting waves,
the night would be a sea of light
even when the sun has set
below heart-mind horizon.

Buddhing

2010-03-07T14:45:00.001-08:00

I live my life on a turning wheel
grinding me down toward elegance.
Beneath the wheel the stars shine euphoric
like the lanterns of pilgrims on a homeward sea.
All this turning, all this coming together
and falling apart from the center
and the long winters of loneliness
have come to another, greater circle.

This turning that seems like death,
this pulse budding toward completion—
it isn’t over yet. You were chosen
by no one in particular
to carry this blossoming heart in your chest.
Why are you blushing
and asking forgiveness?
I too was chosen but forgot to write the words.
We’ll improvise together.

Give yourself to the dawn
rising red with blood and blushing cheeks,
yours and mine,
still not writing it down, but shouting
our best poetry dissolving in the sky.

Three Years to Ithaca

2010-03-03T10:57:00.001-08:00

I have cast off the shores of unsure action.
There are no oars or sails where I am heading,
a horizon swallowing the coast
of all the space that I’ve been holding.
There indeed has been a dying!
This space of the waiting heart
is no space at all
but a hole filled with the ash of another life.
I have done my time—
three ritual years, enough to make of myself
a myth;
now, I am again fading into folklore,
another story
leading to an unknown shore.

What twenty-one islands of the heart
are waiting through the waves?
I am beholden to nothing but the wind,
carried on subliminal currents
or the backs of conspiring whales,
led by dolphins and seals,
the hawks and otters: Navigatio stars.

Now, I have no home
but the wide horizon,
a turning mandala in the sea.
This is no burden.

Why is this story
this nostos
this nekyia
this imramm
always recurring?
I too drank the elixir
of pomegranate wine—
sweet and bitter
at the same time.

Somewhere unconscious, Teiresias says,
“Wake, Odysseus!
The waves are crashing on another beach,
the clouds are pierced by the cries of gulls,
now is not the time to fall, again, to ruin!
Now is the time for further sailing.
Penelope is waiting—
she is not a girl,
but a sound
of boat scraping on the shingle shore.”

I have been intoxicated by this wine
now turned to the brine of sea,
not bitter, just sadly undrinkable.
I could write a thousand lines for this love.
I won’t. Not tonight
or tomorrow too full of future
and pink clouds, a slight chill
that brings the heart and mind alive.

The waves are lap, lap, lapping
on one hundred shores or more.
I will find them.
Perhaps singing as I pass,
meditating on the curve of a dolphin’s back.
I have forever to faithfully wait
for the waves to guide me home.

Of Broken Cups

2010-02-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

I drink tea like some men
might drink a god
everyday from an earth-toned cup
steaming wabi-sabi from Japanese lips.
Green tea for pleasure
and ruby-black Irish
at five in the morning;
such an ordinary, revelatory
religion

of simply what sustains the heart.

Now the cup is broken, cracking
its ceramic skull on the floor
as it tumbles from the desk—
my life has broken with it,
this, the last ritual act of separation.

What we try to hold will crumble,
trickle from the hands like water
squeezed in the palm for possession—
this poem is dying even as it’s written.
One day, I too, will be dust
and light
and faded dreams dissolved into the earth.

In life the cup was round and open,
like a door
allowing steam and heat and tea
to part the lips and praise
the mouth to singing.

I too wish to be a door before I go;
round and open,
a vessel for something greater—
before I fall and spill into the soil.

July Leaves

2010-02-20T19:31:00.001-08:00

If you would speak, then meditate;
if you would meditate then let that sitting
be the summation of your potential
following the breath to its center—
find there the waiting pearl of some
invisible and luminous strand
that doesn’t want your name,
or the fleeting victories
for which you have struggled;
no, it wants you to sing, like July leaves
trembling and riding the wind into wildness
or pan pipes passed through the breeze;
just a few simple notes to birth a song—
and we are no different, resonant chambers
through which the wind of our wild presence
might resound,
and break the silence of the old vows.
You too have been gifted with a voice
of words shaped around the air;
I am not speaking of that voice,
but the one you are afraid to use.
If you would meditate, then speak;
if you would speak then know that the sound
of your breathing passed through the pure
silence of the body, and all the music that follows
is the freedom that you were born for.
The air is already rushing in to fill you.
What is the beauty that you will sing?

Aisling

2010-02-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

The music was over.
          Just not in the way you would think;
It still carried on
          wind and wavesong
melody
          like a thunderstorm,
only with fiddles and
a little more gravitas.

The music was over
          when you saw her
and ate the golden apple.
          Lips and voicesong,
the melody
          was an art form—
but you've broke the only rule.

Dear friend, you now belong to Her. . .
          and the music was over
          like water
          poured into
          the sea.

Wake the Stars

2010-02-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

Back home is wasteland
but for the things which I love.
That is why I return
time and time again,
to taste that nectar, and
feel a familiar wind sweep
through my skin as my
legs become roots.
I come because it is a wasteland;
I come because I left to find a voice,
so anything but speaking is betrayal.

Name me a state of mind,
and this place too;
or name me the wind,
and you the leaves.

What is the sound of one place clapping?
The first sound ringing
through the eardrums of our
own percussive contribution to the song,
and it takes only one voice
to add a melody
but one thousand is one thousand more.

Somewhere under a blanket of sky
the stars are sleeping blind,
and if we sing together
then we can wake them,
and with a single sip
from the grail of that
light punctured darkness,
those stars
will become seeds in the sky,
planted by tongues,
imagined and made real,
grown into women and men
with shadows for mouths
and stars for their eyes.
And we will see them
there on the hills,
changing worlds with their words.
And here will be a wasteland
no more.

Beyond All Human Art

2010-01-31T21:52:00.001-08:00

There isn’t time for thoughts today;
not for a thousand rich philosophies
or the gilded silk of your religions—
those flames are doused in the opulent eyes
of the Beloved,
breaking like waves on the mind
and opening the sky to ecstasy.

The wings of birds now keep the rhythm
of the salt-sweet tide; the same tide
that beckons land to sea,
marries earth and moon
in belonging to the sun.
The same tide that’s rising
now in my chest
to swallow the world with passion.

Our bodies are shaped from clay and stars—
so don’t think, don’t feel, don’t even
try to catch this in your poems:
this love is
beyond all human art.

Migrations

2010-01-31T00:29:00.000-08:00

When I awoke this morning to the dawn,
thirsty from the long hours of darkness
through which I breathed, entangled
in the world that I had made for myself,
and saw the mirrored contours of my face,
etched hard with exhaustion, I spoke a
faithless prayer, admitting,
finally, the otherness of my life.

For too many days now, I have lived
speaking only with the night, trying to
sculpt from that enveloping darkness
some presence through which I might
catch some shadowed glimpse of the self
hidden away by so many layers of the world.

The dusty light now pierces
the morning curtains of my heart,
and for the first time since I
took up that flame edged sword
of my mind, I breathed in the fresh
stillness of the day, as if in that simple
act of air penetrating the body,
I could absorb all the innocent qualities
of that morning sun, and all the anticipation
of complete and utter surprise.

I did not turn my back on the darkness
through which I came swimming
in that great ocean of the night,
but after years of dreaming
and sitting with my back turned to
the fire of all that I was offered, I suddenly
learned how to let my eyes be free.
The dark corners of the world never
leave us, they simply enfold within us,
making room for a more visible place–
a place where we can claim the fires
branching in our hearts.

For too long I have sat
with the world laid out at my feet,
probing the endless space of my interior,
searching for the word that breathed me alive,
sure that in its syllables and speaking
I would find the center of my question,
the quiet beat of an unspoken heart.

When you are exhausted,
you must fall to the ground,
let the movement of surrender
be the forfeit of the journey,
your passage to the promise land–
and you will not be too lost
to see the folly of the road
stretched out from your back;
the world was waiting only
for this falling toward the dust.
There is only one horizon
where we cannot arrive; it stretches on,
receding into the distance,
concealing itself beyond all other arrivals.

And I know the exhaustion in my feet
is no sign of the miles I’ve traveled,
but an assurance that some part of me
has secretly died, something which I refuse
over and over again. And I know
my refusal and its need to look away,
to build around me the walls of the
garden of delight, the walls of my
comfortable and familiar suffering.

But I know the blade of this conversation
is not sharpened on the smooth contours
of life, but edged by the turning grit
of my experience, however difficult and
however alone and full of grief and loss.

I have asked the same impossible questions
hoping to find an answer I could live with,
and only finding silence at the center,
a silence that threatens to make us everything
that we are worthy of, writing our names
in the wind, barely conceived, but faithful
enough to carry a migration of wings
pounding on air, moving worlds with
invisible ability. Gracious, the morning
is full of light and vitality, beckons
with its slow and hopeful rhythm
the ease of all exhaustion, an invitation
to participate in this great migration—
to cease asking the questions,
and simply let the questions live.

Empty Tetsubin

2010-01-25T12:55:00.000-08:00

Womb black belly,
heated spring water,
spout    sends    swirls of steam
upward and lazy—
               smell of steeping leaves.

The space around it
can’t help but turn
to silence
              and fill itself
with nothing.
The teapot fills the tiny cups—
but the tea fills something
greater.

Uncharred

2010-01-24T21:17:00.001-08:00

Poetry begins in the earth, emerges
in the clear dark water from the mountains,
so I, wanting to know the sunlight on my back
and feel the cool slap of water on my feet,
will take these strong spring currents and
weigh them against the steady words of the heart.

There is a moment that follows the writing
of every good line of poetry, the kind
with roots deep in the breath –
breath, that perfect invisible image of poetry,
dialogue is breathing, a conversation between
winds of air briefly adopted by lungs,
changed and reflected back to the world,
maybe to disappear but sometimes
to join in the currents of some storm
which blows in, changing everything.

Line after line the poem is forged through listening;
so take these words and weigh them against
the strong spring currents and maybe
catch a glimpse of them as they pass,
floating atop the buoyant power residing in the voice.

This is not the time for poems of happy love –
this is the time for poems to set the heart on fire
and in those flames reveal the uncharred remains
of what could not be burnt.

What it Means to be Seen

2010-01-23T01:25:00.000-08:00

In the warmth of late winter’s sun,
the kind of day that heralds spring,
go out the door, down past parking lots
to the fence that edges out the wild –
and humbling through to get on your knees
offer yourself, and find the shore
of your own entrance to the world,
and there sit with the melting ice,
clinging with memory to water’s shore.

I know that I have been away too long
from the rough texture of the world, and
so like the salmon must come home
and with the painter’s hand
deftly unveil the colors hidden in
the canvas of my body,
feeding this new creation with
every past failure or triumphant
moment spent quietly or arrogantly
admiring the well made work of this life.

Behind the clouds the sun shines
yellow-grey, illuminating the water’s
faithful ripples, teasing dim shadows
on all the surface of the world,
which dulls and brightens all at once,
turning stones and ravens
to a silhouette of mind.

And we could carry on like this
forever, practicing with the water,
finally abandoning whatever prisons
we chose to conceal our voice in,
slowly uncovering the freedom
which we were made for,
enraptured and set aflame
by the solitary choice left
by our saying yes;
no longer in need of looking down
at the tension of a surface
that we do not need to know
will hold us.

And our faith,
not in what can’t be known
but in what must be approached
is all this body needs
to be carried on the
surface of the water.

And there to be glimpsed,
standing with all my weight
held by the currents below;
seen praying with silence
to the place the water edges
seamlessly to shore, where the
trees know the intimacy of moss,
and dry leaves marry the ice
into some new presence.
Seen held by the vibrancy
of belonging, and nothing
in the vision out of place;
not the waves or welcome grass,
or the birds glimpsed by ears,
nor the solitary poet,
pen in hand, scribing the world
exactly as it sees him.

Religion

2010-01-21T22:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes
religion
is nothing more
than silence,
the steady reflection
of your face
in the stillness
of your tea,
and watching the
falling
snow
beyond the shining
candlelight
on your altar
of remembrance.

Haiku

2010-01-21T02:36:00.001-08:00

blades of grass
snow falls
into my cup of tea

* * *

golden tea drop
lively as dew
sits in lotus posture

* * *

The rough mountain
gazes upward
still silent in awe

* * *

swift river washed
in dusk
miles for making love

Conversations with Maple

2010-01-18T17:58:00.000-08:00

After all day working at my desk
with the sun behind the clouds,
gathering green tea—pearls of jasmine,
with cornflower blue specks
boiling in the water,
thinking to sit for a while with a book
and seek the fire of the mind.

Out the kitchen window I catch
a maple branch covered in May
growing seeds edged with red and
new leaves still learning their hue
in a brief autumn-come-early canvas of color.
Incredulous, it inquires of my intentions
for quiet,

“What are you reading for? What are you reading for?
Let the world come in your eyes!”

Now I sit in the brown light of sunset just before a storm
with space enough in my tea for the rain.
The lawnmower is broken. The grass is knee-high,
and bends in the wind like a river.

“Just once, let what is in your care grow wild
enough to see the world through its own eyes."

Now my tea is mostly rain,
my best shoes turned to glossy brown,
and flecked with grass and flowers.
It is evening now—I can feel it in the trees
like time is just a mood to shift
with the light from brown to gray.

"Just once, do nothing for a day
but study the life of a leaf.”

Even in the city, there is quiet in the earth
and fire that the rain can not put out.
The sky seems huge above the house
as I enter, returning to the mind,
but trailing purple petals at my feet.

Twenty-One Ways to Birth a Heart

2010-01-17T19:07:00.000-08:00

Today is a day for giving up;
tomorrow, for whatever comes after dying.
No need for clichés about
love and courage and soul
and the faith we have
in the nature of stars.
No, today is a day for human
no-nature,
yellow and orange and red—
the feel of fallen leaves on naked skin.

Somewhere in the branches of rain
there is a feathered song

signifying nothing but Wren;

so too, you,
in your nudity.
Stripped down of meaning
like milkweed on the wind,
impregnating the air
with your presence.

There are at least twenty-one ways
to sing whatever name
you will have on your lips tomorrow;
nine of them sound identical to silence,
and the rest
well, there’s no need, yet, to go into that…

What is Written

2010-01-17T19:03:00.000-08:00

What is written in the line of the falling leaf
that cannot be written with paper and ink?
After so many lines of poetry
the self cracks open to spill blood like nectar—
one line is all it takes the leaf
before the heart kneels swooning in ferns
and feeds the tree its essence.

Hearts like apples, plump and ripe
hang beating in the foliage of branches.
A second line written in autumn red
falls into the aroma of leaf mold—
one line is all it takes that heart
to fall re-imagined as a human.

Earth-House Sutra in Winter

2010-01-17T18:37:00.000-08:00

I.
I am ready
to live with the wrens
and the cedars,
to slough off
my mind
on the mountain.

II.
There is nothing but stillness here.
Stillness and wind.
They flirt like squirrels
among the branches.

III.
This mind is full
of drifted snow.
I will settle immobile
on a sun-glazed stone
and wait for spring
and rain to melt it.

IV.
Until then: watching, listening—
a visit by a rain of pine needles.

V.
Almost still enough
to feel the mountain breathing;
quiet enough
to hear the passing clouds

and my own body stirring to life.

VI.
Crocuses and snowdrops
watered
by melting thoughts;
the rest trickles down
to join the great watershed.

VII.
An apple tree blossoms:
the mind is set on fire
with love.

VIII.
I touched a fallen bough.
It too bloomed barest pink.
The mountain set ablaze
with longing.

IX.
When snow falls now
it lands for a drop of time
then melts and flows into
the lonely river.

X.
All this year
the mind watched,
from where I set it,
in the branches of
the fragrant trees.

I will pick it up again
this summer.