-
CLIFFSIDE AGAIN: HEKIGANROKU CASE 5
HSUEH FENG’S GRAIN OF RICE It is not the seeing but the looking that will drive you to the edge. It is easy to see, you hardly need eyes for that task, but to look is beyond seeing. Do you think this a mere grain of rice? Look closely, do you see the entire world?…
-
CHINDI
They come down from the hills long after the sun retreats beyond Tres Piedras. In the moonless sky they creep around the pinyon, nestle the sage that blankets the mesa, stare at the scattered homes that dot the half-frozen soil. They are orange flames compressed inside orbs paired, they approach here one set, there another.…
-
LOVER
There is a moment just after the lights are turned off, when the ticking of the clock on the nightstand is amplified, reverberating off the skylights, when the heat of your body is a blanket from which I never wish to emerge.
-
DARLING’S MANTRAS
You are two and you laugh for everything is funny or can be, if you just tilt your head a certain way or wag a finger at it. The cat watches from behind the sofa with a knowing gaze. For you food is as much a toy as words are food and you cannot imagine…
-
GOING OVER THE BLUE CLIFF: HEKIGANROKU CASE 4
TE SHAN CARRIES HIS BUNDLE Walking in the room you cast your eyes about, looking for something, although you cannot say what it is that you look for, and you cannot believe you will not find it, for you think you will know what it is only when you see it. The person who sees…
-
MEETING BUDDHA ON THE ROAD
In my dreams last night, I thought I came across the Buddha while off wandering somewhere I could not recognize. I thought long and hard about following Linji’s prescription and killing this Buddha, but while lost in my contemplation the Buddha took up his keisaku, said, “if you cannot follow the simplest of directions, if you…
-
AKEDA
My father never walked me up a hill, never asked two servants to wait below, never bid me be strong, never asked me to have faith in the Lord, never raised the blade only to see a ram in a thicket. My father never did any of these things and so I have no special…
-
FROM BEYOND
“Call your mother,” she says. She speaks in the voice of my mother. It grates on my nerves in just the same way it always did. I listen carefully. She repeats herself. I reminded her that she died two years ago. I tell her I tried to call for months after her passing, but there…
-
TELLER
She claims to see the future in a glass orb, in the palm of a hand, in the cards spread out on a small table. He knows all history is written in books is retold in stories is buried in successive layers of soil beneath the city. Neither walks along the shore see this wave…
-
TOOTHLESS BODHISATTVA
He will tell you that the distance between a tear and a laugh is the span of a mother’s arm. He knows the duration of sadness is identical to a shnork*. He cannot understand how you could have forgotten all this. He doesn’t know why you cannot recall that enlightenment is no more than a…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
an old writer and his words 