Category: Yoga
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From the contemplatives
From silence doors open — sometimes far off ringing, sometimes mute throbbing, sometimes rambling voices of ancestors, or strangers tapping at my window wondering, sometimes a tree in its final unleaving. Drawing my ear down, I pick up the thread, hold it just so before it trails away, and listen, listen.
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On poetry and knowing things
Today a child tossed a white stone into green water. As it sank, it turned pale green, then darker green until I could no longer pick it out from the green of the depths. At that instant, it disappeared forever. But you and I know better. We cannot deny its presence, its truthfulness. We mark…
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Roman ruins lying off a square in Arles
Muscles of stone hold fast one on top of another, watch time slip by in tiny packages, endless streams pouring forward, memory perfect. When did this corner round off? How did this carving waste away? You needn’t ask; it is known. Rough-hew blocks exhale their millennial sighs, add rhythm to time, note each breeze with…
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Versa
specks of rain tap on dark window; tree branch lit by streetlight swaying we rest on shoulders of night breeze, hemming, hawing through hours, wet air, open window ego pulls this way, that; shadows rock up, down walls; ever stirs our little pot of storm — shame, pride, joy, disappointment, shame, pride, joy, tap, breeze,…
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Karma
I sat here at this table many years ago. The door was on State then, not Chicago; three shops sold coffee here since. On Tuesday evenings, a homeless man muttered to himself at the window, staring into his coffee, while I ran through course notes at the next table, coughing on his stench, not knowing…
Poems from in between 