I Found A Poem In The Forest

in

Tucked under a rock in which there is some kind of fossil. I never studied fossils. My friend thinks I have. He talks in terms he thinks I know. But I don't understand the past. I just walk through the forest. I came here as a child. With my mother. To the darkness between things large and old. We walked this path. I'm sure though I don't remember. It has changed though it feels familiar. Then there’s the poem. Under the rock. And the fossil. It's a poem about the past. Walking in a forest with her lover. It says, your hand in mine, I taste the sap of your kiss and count the rings of love. Awful poetry. The writer walks away into the darkness. My mother walks through me. Goes another way, her eyes closed. I continue on past trees, through shade, against the breeze. Holding the rock and the poem, fossils of dead things preserved. I imagine the creature in that ancient sea, its image being left in the rock. I see the woman lay down her pen, sleep, and become paper. I see my mother still moving through the forest making a sound I no longer recognize. And again I understand that I don’t know the past and keep holding onto the wrong things for the future. 

Reading Zen

in

When one is reading Zen, I am told, one should only read Zen. Nothing else. Yet I am writing this poem. Thinking of tea being poured in ceremony. Becoming a bird flying over the South China Sea. And since I have no knowledge of that sea, it becomes Lake Ontario and I fly east-northeast toward the St. Lawrence River. Gaining speed, I come to islands that multiply and then fade to open water again. I fly out over the Atlantic. Dive in. Become a fish or maybe a whale. Even then I wonder why I can’t be a shark. The Buddha says, be only what you are, but I am dreaming of the great white shark such that it now bears down on me. In the deep, I become again the middle aged man I imagine myself. The shark clamps down on my waist, cleaves me in two. The pain is beyond all measure. It is also nothing. I hit the shark across its snout with a book of Zen and I breathe, hoping to somehow come back together. I do all these things. The shark, my Buddha, says, do only one. 

Nothing Happened

in

This was years ago and never happened. Dad is driving. We are on a long trip. Mom rides beside him. She’s talking. Their cigarettes are in full bloom. My older brother has disappeared into something he brought to keep busy. I’ve brought nothing, just foolishness. Mom points at a tree growing out of high rock face, the uneven diagonal layers of rock scorched with vertical blasting lines. The tree is broken. It’s roots slipping out from only a hint of soil. The trunk hangs by a strip of bark. I see the tree as if it were in the car with me. Mom makes a metaphor I fail to understand. My brother ignores her. Dad nods, keeps driving. But I hang onto it and driving my own family today, I saw it again. Same tree. I swear. And Mom’s metaphor came again. But there is nothing to be learned from such things. Keep driving. Live your damn life. Stop waiting to understand the metaphor. None of this ever happened.