-
APART TOGETHER
It is this time each night that I think of you lying in bed, your head pressed deep into your pillow your chest rising and falling to an unheard beat. I reach out for you and grasp the blanket of the hotel bed and imagine it is your back as I trace my finger down…
-
BUDDHA’S BODY
If you see the golden body of the Buddha standing in the road will you stop for him? If you stop and ask him to teach you you will be rejected. If you stop and do not ask him to teach you you will be rejected. If you run him over and leave him…
-
AWAKENING
He could not hope to remember how he got there, he had wandered in search of nothing in particular, save dinner as his hunger grew, but in Shinjuku you needn’t read Japanese since the menus sat molded in plastic in the window of even the smallest restaurants. He began to look more intently when he…
-
SANCTUARY
The motion begins deep within you, bleeds quickly outward until it blankets the web between your fingers and toes, collects behind the ears as you hurtle on parallel steel threads connecting Tokyo and Osaka. You are down to the broad fields of golden-yellow beckoning the impending harvest, the rice swaying in the unfelt breeze. In…
-
ADAM’S RIB
Adam’s Rib was not, she said, a barbecue joint on Beale Street in downtown Memphis, nor a beloved Spencer Tracy movie in which sidelong glances with Kate Hepburn meant more than audiences realized. It most certainly was not proof of the claim that woman, born of man, was meant to be subservient for all time…
-
A MEDITATION
The true sound of the inkin bell can be heard in the instant before the striker and the bell meet. It is this purest of tones in which all of Buddha’s teachings are laid open for your inspection, if only you are willing to close your eyes and finally see.
-
ENDLESS FLIGHT
Painfully jammed into the middle seat of five three hours into the fourteen hour flight SFO to Tokyo Narita, it is easy to imagine myself a sheet of origami paper carefully and precisely folded into a crane wings bound in anticipation of taking to the air.
-
FINDING BUDDHA
Grasp what you love but hold it carefully, for it may slip away into the blackness of night. Grasp what you fear but hold it carefully, for it may slip away on the feet of your lover.
-
A FLUTE PLAYED BACKWARD : THREE CASES (100 – 98) FROM TETTEKI TŌSUI
ISAN’S TEN FOOT SQUARE 鐵笛倒吹 百 Ten thousand words what do they mean – with which will you compose a poem for the wall of your room. Leave the room, does the poem remain? Enter the room is this the same poem? Write them on the wind with a pointed leaf, that is a fine…
-
SHINJUKU
The sun rises slowly painfully, stiff from the cold night air, creeping upward, barely warming the streets. In Shinjuku Central Park the trees are still despite the cold breeze. The small group gathers for morning stretches and Tai Chi, smiling toward the fountain and the ten foot waterfall they call Niagara. The siren cuts through…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
an old writer and his words 