February 28, 2017
I’ve written a poem in response to a zen koan. The Moon Thief will be published in the forthcoming spring issue of Urthona. “‘The Moon Thief ’ came out of an encounter with the koan in the poem’s epigraph: the great Zen poet Ryokan, meditating in a mountain hermitage, offers his clothes to a thief but cannot […]
July 1, 2015
There’s a poem in The Tide Clock titled ‘The Edge’. Here’s an earlier version of it that perhaps works in its own right, before the poem took a different turn. This version is more overtly about zazen: zen meditation practice. Just Sitting Waves relinquish the carracks, make fractals, circles, then stillness. My shadow drifts on the water, part of the […]
March 11, 2015
The pond was deeper than expected, a giant footprint stamped into the earth. It was home to a fifty-pound ghost koi called Persephone. Music became silence, became music again. Moonlight shone on the tiles. Persephone broke the water with her tail. Now gaunt and middle-aged, I saw the moon glint on water like a ten pence coin, miles down, and […]
March 3, 2015
Reading Fire Season, Philip Connors’ account of his experiences watching for forest fires in the Gila mountain range, I was struck by the following passage: “My own insights are fragmentary, fleeting. I write something in my notebook and forget it an hour later. I do not so much seek anything as allow the world to come to […]
July 30, 2014
LUKE What’s in there? YODA Only what you take with you. It occurred to me that entering the haunted cave on planet Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back is like shikantaza meditation, which translates literally as ‘just sitting.’ They both seem to be situations in which you cannot avoid facing yourself. The challenge is to bring your […]
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