Practicing English with Geshe-la

Mouths round
to make crown.
Throats and lips thin
to say bliss.
We talk about
meanings,
the differences
between bliss
and blessing,
religious versus
spiritual gifts,
how kind becomes
benevolent.
We consider
the subtle
shift in
dependence
when saying
grant me
instead of show.
The feeling of O.
O sweet prefix
of recognize,
praying
to comprehend
again and again
what is true—
how this sound
is chewed!—
our own true nature
beyond words
where one is both
a pronoun
and a universe.

2012
with thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen

Tavern Tattoos: A Communion

Sitting here in my old drawings,
every one carefully clothed,
I watch braver, bare arms
fold across chests,
raise boisterous hellos over heads,
stretch wide and slow to find
an old lover’s full-sleeve embrace.
His three of swords in her poppy field.
Her ravens clawing his cross.
He buys her a beer.
Their pulses retrace
the sharp, blue story
of love fading,
lost in new needled filigree.
Skin pictures never stop breaching
their own boundaries,
whispering like prisoners,
raised like braille for the unblind,
like prayers no gods but eyes
and hands can hear.
So many gods! Even still,
such prayers often go
unanswered.

November 2012

Puja Tilaka

I ask this conflagration
to reduce me.
How long must I burn
with flowers?
Wind dashes my hands
across parking lots
and streets; hips settle
on lawns and rooftops
a fine grey ash,
and still I wish
to smear my mouth
upon your brow.

2012

Night Walk with Strings

Cause what is simple in the moonlight by the morning never is.
~Conor Oberst, “Lua”

A bare cornfield in Illinois takes your footprints.
Walking toward the unlit woods, seeds
fall in with the family of names you drop. Only a radio
tower’s three red lights witness your strange fruit.
Say one name three times and be surprised
when the train woos. Don’t ask why.

Just walk stinging to the edge of the field. Run
for heat. It takes what seems a long time. Think eyes.
The grassy edge drops low. The woods are only a string
of trees along a road. A sprawling tree creaks.
Straddle a white fallen log. Call ahhhh.
Call and call until the moon shines sharp wind.

No mountains, you don’t know which direction
you face. Relative to what. The direction is want.
For long moments, there are no names.
Tall waving weeds are not people walking
or weeds. You are not a person but a wind,
low sky, cold and creak. No one knows.

When you are done with nothing, a fox
doesn’t run by. Visit the soft moon through
the talking tree. Think of sitting in tall grass,
of what this might do to you. Don’t sit.
Climb back up to the field and walk with the wind
behind. Moving toward light goes faster.

Think better of doing magic for what you want.
Don’t plant the clean orange panties you found
tangled in the fray of your clean orange scarf
when you first stepped out the door, tired of walls
and warmth. Nothing will grow from them
in this field under the moon. One never knows

which you is casting the spell. Better to let
the huge field walk across you. Fallow. Love’s pale
stalks and cobs plowed under. Crunch with cold.
Bite with wind. Spread rich space over earth. Wait.
Gloveless, pull out a pocket-sized notebook and write
careless rows in the light of a nearby neighborhood.

Nearer and nearer your mother’s home, notice
your scarf soaked with breath. Touch your water.
Sing your song of want. Dance drunk with cold,
clumsy with clods. Sink into crusted, soft furrows.
Find the old wagon wheel leaning on the oak
where you first left the manicured yards.

Trespass, breach the stand of grabby trees
where Shadow’s name is engraved on a river
rock. Pay respect to every dog you’ve ever lost.
Hold on to your hat. Walk the paved road back
to the house with burning thighs, a fist of panties
in your pocket, smelling of Christmas night.

2012

Urge and Urge and Urge,Always the Procreant Urge of the World

Countless khandros navigate my seaward
hands. I reach for you. They dance

in me like carbonation, fermentation,
a holy coronation of vision. I see!

I am not sorry for my fleshy eyes,
their quantum mechanical missteps.

Blind to union, they are more than generous,
offering up the object of your wet face.

They know enough to close with pleasure,
savoring our swaying tête-à-tête.

True, there is no duad in this world.
Merge is the song stirred matter sings,

sang Walt, who taught me: gather
his water in your hands and wait for salt.

Come morning, I wore my palms
upon my face, a mask to breathe and taste,

peered darkly into luminous depths.
There is no floor in you, my dear.

No use begging for harbor or land;
no fearing my own swollen surf, or yours.

Return, return. Our liquid bliss unfurls on granite
oaths and buoyed words, a winter hurricane.

I whisper, even earth is no real anchor.
Look! When towns and trees uproot,

sky inhabits roofless rooms, rearranges
what is wooden into moorless doors.

Blown open, we fly through.

2012
with thanks to Whitman for the title

Migration of the Snows and Blues

The silage field empty
of nothing but a honking island
of a thousand snow geese,
I stop for what could be mine.

Overhead hundreds circle,
settle undetectably, safe,
swiftly emptying the sky
of white and grey skeins.

I wait for everyone to land,
walk beauty-hungry and wingless
toward them. Two or three sense
my strange approach and drift.

I step slowly, broad shouldered
with great love and homeless desire
over corn-rich clods to see the island lift.
Today, after you, this is my only power.

Cradling the flock’s racing hearts,
a sparkling surge of countless, prudent v’s
sings one high pitch of blue solidarity
slanted for miles and miles away from me.

2012

On the Upbeat

The water of the sound of and in you
spreads light in salted rivulets

from highlit crown to flashing
clavicle and liquid notch

through—gasp—
your heart’s black springs

past dampened cotton collar lip
where goblet eyes and palms

can only guess the gleam
of gravity’s clandestine lines.

This joy can never fully know.
But O! we clutch and sing,

evaporate and brim
our thinning clothes.

2012

Photosynthesis

However scintillant,
One grows tired
Of suffering.

Trees grow tired
Of the fuss of leaves.

Even in the dead of winter,
We cling to final rattles.

Stark, just drop
What no longer
Gathers light.

Light already gathers us.

2012

Picking Up Sons in a Parking Lot

Misunderstanding
the concept “kennel,”
a boy cries quietly
into tissue for three hours
in a car when he believes
his parents are planning
to sell his dog
before holiday travel.
He won’t tell his mother
who pleads gently
to know the reason for his tears.
She makes guesses.
He shakes his head.
She wonders if he is protecting her
from her own imperfection.
She is sure it is her fault.
The divorce wound,
the one he will hide
the way she has hidden hers
for thirty-five years.
Perhaps he doesn’t tell her
he cries for the dog
because he has already
learned that sometimes,
no matter how he feels,
events, decisions and love
are out of his realm of control
and it is no use discussing them.

2012

Doghouse Bass Blues

Still thrumming spine,
a lone bass string
dark humming one
who plucked and left
a stolen peck
on smiling teeth,

from scroll would span
that fretless neck,
past high bridged
wooden abdomen,
and within hollow
sound holes, ring.

2012