A Violin Concerto

After an absence
it is played,
the first few notes drawing
from me an ache
at once new and familiar,
silently playing all these years.

Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

Gratitude

A walk at dusk, Thanksgiving Day 

I am not insensible
to the light passing
through whitened slats at evensong
heavy-hearted as I am.

Hope

In the melding of mind
and light
endlessly rippling
in concert with the setting sun
hope renews itself.

Late October

Through the hedge
autumnal and green
I catch a glimpse
of my true self.

Mirroring

They shimmied in unison
the leaves of early fall
made ever more lucent
by a sympathetic gaze.

The Weed

Throughout summer
and in the ebbing song of the crickets
it persists
pressing itself against the window
vaulting over the evergreens
the gift of its blooms for the asking.

Thoughts

I sit with my thoughts,
permutations of the familiar,
contentedly inchoate.

Repetition

There is the kind that stultifies,
but also the kind that soothes
through the mindful tending to a ritual.

Daylily

On occasion you will see
that splash of orange,
a daylily, present all along,
different enough from the rest
to be the creation of a new way.

invoking the self-state
that you need
at a given moment

After the Rain

I can finally hear the songbirds'
distant warbling
and the trail of sound an airplane makes.

The dark skies of noon have lifted
and in its wake, rain
heavy on the dark green leaves
capturing the moment
when an eight-year-old joins the present.

Action

Continually we are poised
between the solace of words
and the uncertainty of action
sitting with our teacups
while marveling at the fluttering white butterflies.

Birdsong

In the lapse of downtown traffic
I hear a birdsong
cadence by cadence carrying a past
of cyclos whirling in dust and heat
merging then returning to the scratch of my pen.

Sir Senescence

In the savannah of mice
stretching across your flickering eyelids
a tail is a scepter
and your reign is complete.

In the seventeenth year of life
"Sir Senescence" becomes an endearment
bestowed upon a familiar form
and that gaze of emerald constancy
forever burnishing my heart.

The View

To reach the view that will change the present
I go through the suburban streets
having little to do with the shimmer
of lake and leaves
that has yet to fail me
now or then.

A Bee in Early Afternoon

Zigzagging through air
he is assured in each movement
whether it's his own
buoyancy in the light
or the certainty that the light will shift.

Recovering

Returning from sickness
through corridors that arbitrate "you go down that way"
not all having to do with the size of some lymph nodes
nor the redness of a throat
but more to do with the wonder I feel
at seeing a budding maple on a gray afternoon.

Soaked

To be soaked unstintingly
in dun
or iridescence
and to not know from one moment to the next
the hues that will come.

Emerging

There is a world of unwashed dishes
and a well-used breakfast nook
holding onto its sunlight over morning tea.

In parallel are the half-forgotten fragments
now tended by the undusted self.

Engulf

In an embrace where you and I
shift endlessly in a timeless blur
I can no longer feel the difference between receiving and giving.

Nurturer

In the first round of hearing,
like the words caregiver, provider,
it rolls off the tongue with the usual blandness.

But in truths that come from dreams,
self-states that seem alien to one another
can finally conjoin as one.

Ambiguities

They meet in a tangle
in skeins that on a rare occasion
I could trace to a provenance
hidden but never gone
giving rise in a bed of uncertainty
to a new way of seeing.

Drinking Li Shan on an overcast morning

Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire

The Unnamed

The words are there:

rage, shame, potency.

They circle in a nebula

attaching themselves to the vagaries of our days,

unwitting and unwritten,

waiting to be named.

New Pair of Glasses

Its frames have the color of Smokey the cat
resting intimately between eyes
that see anew the same teacup
mottled with a chipped rim
like the perceived and the perceiver
each in a light of their co-creation.

Lull

My thoughts meander in a repetitive way
and occasionally a shift in them
would tell me that the soil
lies not completely fallow.
Teeth of the plow rumpling a little
while I feel again that familiar ripple.

Returning

I return to the breath, to the steeped leaves, and all is as it should be.

Tea in Madison

matcha at macha tea lounge

Da Hong Pao oolong at Dobra Teahouse

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.  Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

this morning

a bowl of matcha
zazen with cats
a poem