The Sea Mouse

June 6, 2010

What lay this morning

On the wet sand

Was so ugly

I sighed with a kind of horror as I lifted it

Into my hand...

It had been flung out of the stormy sea

And dropped

Into the world’s outer weather, and clearly it was

Done for…

Before me

The sea still heaved, and heavens were dark,

The storm unfinished,

And whatever was still alive

Stirred in the awful cup of its power

Though it breathe like fire, though it love

The long of its own life…

It lay in my hand

All delicate and revolting.

With the tip of my finger

I stroked it,

Tenderly, little darling, little dancer,

Little pilgrim,

Gray pouch slowly

Filling with death.

Today I preached at my congregation about how beauty can be found in the midst of ugliness and tragedy, such as in the oil spill. How appropriate this poem. At first glance the blobs on the beach, the Mouse or the tar ball, has no meaning for us. Both speak of death – and hence bring messages of life. Life fills with meaning as our life fills slowly with death. Still, if I could choose, if I had the power of the gods, I would have the mouse live and the gulf clean. I long to be awake enough to know when I do have a choice, to bring life if not to mouse or gulf, then to relationships and other beings in my purview.

Where do you have the choice to give life?

Rumor of Moose in the Long Twilight of New Hampshire

Neighbors described the high, rough coated shoulders

the long neck

the glandular bell hanging

the shy face

the modest face of a scholar

weary of reading in the dim light

of the forest, how he carried

the flared rack

the knobs the branches

of dense horn

sign of power..

the light lingered

we sat on the shore

and talked in whispers

watched the herons

heard the owl

greeted the moon

stared at the far shore

stared at the far shore

empty in the moonlight.

In Buddhism there is the metaphor of the far shore. We strive to get there, to the land of no-self, of interconnection, of compassion. We daily row our boat there through the practice of emptiness - of seeing ourselves continuous with all that is. In Mary's poem then I wonder who or what is empty. Perhaps it is us the watcher at one with the signs of power grazing all around us, as we are gazing all around us.

How are you "not here" or "empty?"

Toad

I was walking by. He was sitting there...he didn't move.

I began to talk.

He looked neither up nor down, which didn't necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep. I felt his energy, stored under his tongue perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes....

I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head. I said, I wondered how it seemed to him, down there, intimate with the dust.

He might have been Buddha-didn't move, blink or frown, not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined anguish of language passed over him.

There is a saying. If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him. So there's the Toad, a source of wisdom, an open book of nature's scripture. What do we do? Kill the honest being of the toad by chatting with him/him - objectifying the amphibian as if s/he is only there to take in our species way of communicating? Mary got into the tire wheel to lie with the dead fox, and likewise Buddha says we are to live in the mud of the earth. Down there. With the toads and their spring eggs, fragile accumulations of DNA is bags of skin. Out of the death of our separateness, who knows, a lotus flower may erupt in silence. I hope. I hop.

How does language keep us from ourselves, from interconnection? Or does it?

I Found a Dead Fox

I found a dead fox

beside the gravel road,

curled inside the big

iron wheel

of an old tractor

that has been standing,

for years,

in the vines at the edge of the road.

I don't know

what happened to it-

when it came there

or why it lay down

for good, settling

its narrow chin

on the rusted rim

of the iron wheel

to look out

over the fields,

and that way died

But I know

this: its posture-

of looking,

to the last possible moment,

back into the world-

made me want

to sing something

joyous and tender

about foxes

But what happened is this-

when I began,

when I crawled in

through the honeysuckle

and lay down,

curling my long spine

inside the cold wheel,

and touched the dead fox,

and looked out

into the wide fields,

the fox

vanished.

There was only myself

and the world,

and it was I who was leaving.

And what could I sing

then?

Oh, beautiful world!

I just lay there

and looked at it.

And then it grew dark.

That day was done with...

My stomach flips when I imagine myself crawling like Mary beside a dead fox, for it is as if I too am dying and committing myself intentionally to oblivion. It's almost the same feeling I get with crossing a bridge - the water below calls to me, "Jump! Join life in death!" It is not so different than the stomach flutters of falling in love. I am but a drop and the ocean woos me.

What dead beings have you seen lately? How do you feel in your body when contemplating death?

The Gesture

June 2, 2010

On the dog's ear, a scrap of filmy stuff

turns out to be

a walking stick...not an inch long...

I could not imagine it could live

in the brisk world,, or where it would live, or how. But

I took it

outside and held it up to the red oak that rises

ninety feet into the air, and it lifted its forward-most

pair of arms

with what in anything worth thinking about would have seemed

a graceful and glad gesture: it caught

on to the bark, it hung on; it rested,; it began to climb.

When I look at fragile beings, a newly hatched chick emerging from an egg or a tadpole in a summer' pond, I marvel that they survive at all, let alone into maturity that brings their genes and experiences forward. I wonder now if it is any less miracle that I am here, that you are here, that our species has managed to hang on so long. My guess is that it won't always be so. There will come a time when we exist no more. Though small with no assurance of our contunuity, in fact with assurance that this moment and sunrise will pass from this world, I raise my hands to the east, and vow, let me continue forward to climb from my restricted heart, in gratitude.

Have you ever been up in a tree? What does the world look like from so far above? Small? Great? Infinite?

Owl in the Black Oaks

If a lynx, that plush fellow,

climbed down

tree and left behind

his face, his thick neck

and, most of all, the lamps of his eyes,

there you would have it

the owl,

the very owl

who haunts these trees...

Almost every day

I spy him out

among the knots and the burls

looking down

at his huge feet,

at the path curving through the trees,

at whatever is coming up the hill

toward him,

and, though I'm never ready-

though something unspeakably cold

always drops through my heart-

it is a moment

as lavish as it is fearful...

and sometimes the whole body

tilts forward, and the beak opens,

clean and wonderful

like a cup of gold.

I am looking for our summer owl. She is a Barred Owl that every summer hunts from our backyard clothes line. I miss her and fear that her eyes will not be surveying our grass for meals. Her absence haunts me. I long for her to fill the chalice of my soul, a bright light in the fading light of summer's eve. But perhaps if she doesn't come I will spy another vigil holder - the gopher tortoise's yellow eyes looking out from her cool burrow underneath the clothes line. Her eyes, the owl eyes, mine eyes. Oh yes, I have seen the glory.

Where do you tilt forward to take in the life around you?

August

Our neighbor, tall and blonde and vigorous, the m other of many children, is sick..;.

All summer the children, grown now and some of them with children, of their own, come to visit...

They all smile.

June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

So appropriate this piece on the eve of June, July, August and with the news today that the oil will continue to flow into the Gulf unto August. All summer. Everything seems wrong about this, and there is nowhere for the oil to go, safely, with health. If we cover our eyes to this tragedy, however, we would miss the laughter, the smile that is part of the oil, part of us, part of cancer, part of death. Some days though, what can we do but sit with our heads bowed, or held in the laps of others, silent with the ache of abundance in the midst of loss.

What is "wrong" before you this summer?