Reading Zen

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

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. 
 

New And Selected

Having finished a book of George Bilgere’s poems and having no more of him to read, I picked up Billy Collins’s New and Selected Poetry wishing publishers wouldn’t keep reselling the old just to put out a dozen new. I finished The Trouble with Poetry Section and went to replace my bookmark. A piece of folded paper on which my youngest daughter had written in marker: dear dad. I am really sorry For what I said I was just angry and I am really really really really really really really sorry. She drew a sad girl in her bed looking straight at me. The note is signed with Love, the O a sad face. It’s a poem I’ve read before. I may ask her to write another volume and place it in here. New and selected poetry from one of my favorite authors.

Doppler

Maybe I’m still in bed. Inside a dull dream. A man sits before a page. Holds a pen. Has an idea that death is a physical thing. A child growing inside him, dull and lazy. The death inside his wife is something metastasizing, a word he fails to understand, barely knows how to spell. In his father death was a sudden short of the circuitry. An electrical explosion. He tries not to imagine the deaths inside his children, but a maggot wriggles. If this is a dream, I want to wake but it won’t let me sleep. I close my eyes but cannot lie still. There is a chill. And a smell of something burning. Outside, strange flying things buzz and call. Lights flash. A siren blares, it’s tone deepening as it moves away. I recall the name for it: the Doppler effect. A sure way to know if something is coming for me or moving away. I listen hard. The man with the pen is unsure which way things are moving. Death doesn’t make even the slightest sound. Not anything either of us can hear anyway.