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SEOUL NIGHTS
they wander up and down cluttered streets alleys under blazing signs OP.10 Nightclub Club Alaska Hesed Disco streets taped with posters Dancoh Discotheque young men flicking business cards cardboard confetti Venturi “Coffee and Whiskey” neon flashing Bulgari Nigh…
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DISCOVERY
In a small storefront, in an older neighborhood of the city, I found it. Sepia coated with a fine sheen of dust and neglect, it lay on the table amid a stack of others, as though a leaf of phyllo in a poorly made stack fresh from the oven. I knew it as I looked…
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JOSHU’S FOUR GATES 正法眼蔵 四十六
If you ask me who I am, I will have you close your eyes and walk behind you, or I may step to your left and take your right hand. If you are perplexed, I will ask you: do the four gates open into the city or out to the world beyond, and if I…
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SEOUL: A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Namdaeman is a ghetto of shops and stalls, where men squat cupping cigarettes and gesture, their hands grasping stacks of bills, rocking on their heels until they leap up to a patron, asking this price or that, assessing the will of the buyer by the thickness of his or her wallet. An old woman sits…
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FINDING A DIAMOND 沙石集 二
There are endless paths on which to walk, yet we find one and remain on it even when it becomes rocky and rutted. We do not see the road, nor those who cross it, watching only our feet. It is only when we step off of the cliff that our feet are free to walk…
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YAKUSAN’S LAKE 鐵笛倒吹 八十八
When you travel from home and are asked if the lake on the shore of which you live is now full, what can you say. Will you speak of the rains that soaked your fields and what of the herd of water buffalo come to graze since you have left. The eye sees only now,…
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CASTLE HARLECH
High on the battlements of Castle Harlech the winter wind cuts through me like scythes slashing the grasses in the meadows that roll out toward the distant, mute hills. The plaintive cry of bowmen whose bones are dust taken deep into the Welsh soil are whispers lost in the wing sweep of the circling starlings.…
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LLANYSTUMDWY
The small church is tucked alongside the narrow road, its moss encrusted stones bathed in the November sun. The headstones in the churchyard lean askew, sagging under the weight of time. The weeds sprout up answering to a silent call. We are here, they seem to say, to reclaim our own, and we shall do…
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TEN DIRECTIONS
It would help, she said, if you would stop thinking of yourself as Sisyphus and all of life as the rock. You might actually, one day, begin to enjoy what you do. It would help, he said, if I could be like a great blue heron, grow wings and take to a summer sky leaving…
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THREE HAIKU
Giant cranes are perched on thin spindly legs, necks bowed steel beams scratch the clouds. Needle-like church spires reach through the gathering mist clouds begin to bleed. Walls stand in the field one stone piled on another grass withers in shade.
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an old writer and his words 