When Up is Down (guest post by E. Dōgen)

Perhaps when up looks up, up is down.

Maybe when down looks down, down is up.

Cloud Within a Cloud

Perhaps there will be a soft, murmuring voice in the sound of the just-after. Nothing you can put your finger on, or name, or run to tell your friends about. A cloud will appear at the axis of heaven and earth, a hovering veil carrying the possibility of rain and the promise of life. Portal, or dark auspice? Though the answer is not revealed, it is not hidden, much as the bird’s path is the forest when dewdrops wet the early morning moon.

Maybe as we enter the cloud the reason we don’t see, hear or know of it is that it is not anything remarkable. Yet it forms the circle of our way and is never cut off. It follows the stream within, passing through us as the tea and rice of our daily activity. We set out to follow it. Is this old age, or not?

The Bench Faces the Lake

Perhaps far out on the lake three small sailboats glide, tight white triangles of light no warm wind can loosen. Today the lake shimmers with the glossy blue backs of hungry swallows skimming the surface of the water. 

Maybe a line of geese walk single file across the picnic grounds. Reaching the edge of the lake they slide over rocks and slip in without a sound to join ducks and swans gathering by the dock. One handsome drake with colorful plumage makes way for a white goose with a rough bump on her beak. One brown female mallard is smaller than all the others.

Last of the Last (collaboration with Anna Kamieńska)

Perhaps as I look through my file of recently written poems, I read the last line of the last poem as if it were meant to be the last. How will it sound then? Will it reveal to me the meaning of all?

Maybe as we rush to the final point, the active gift of gathering impressions eventually disappears into nothing until only ashes of words remain. Poems pass through us like air, for this you don’t need more than a few words the cool breeze tells me. Arguments, disappointments, losses, suffering – this isn’t punishment, it’s almost a favor. Otherwise the poem would disappear and life fly away, requiring a more difficult clarity, a more imperfect order.

Tomorrow Never Comes

Perhaps the sky calls me, the wind calls me, the moon and stars call me. The dance of the fountain calls me. Smiles call me. Tears call me. A faint melody calls me. Come, come! Everywhere and everything calls me, everyone that longs to fall in love with a lullaby, the length of a rainy day, the seven clouds above on the sky’s top floor.

Maybe when to be contained so joyfully in the world’s beam is a pleasant entrapment, dear feet and hands, lips and eyes, remember, it’s the right of all that live to have you here. Hiding in the pillow next to you, I hold myself tightly and whisper softly into my own ear, my mouth half-closed. It's as if something long awaited was just about to happen as I cradle my head in the hand of a name my mother used to call me - a beautiful word remembered from long ago.

Taking Dreams for Memories

Perhaps we long for the lifting fog to permanently soften the sharp edges of rugged tree trunk and jagged stone, to smooth lines etched deep under our aging eyes. In this way nothing is better than blur, soft like a child, lines without a blade in them. 

Maybe as the new goes on replacing the old, a pristine love arrives in us each morning, fresh as bird song after a balmy starlit night. It gently spreads through the air until a small wind arrives and blows it back to earth, note by note. Carried away by a quick-moving stream, it moves along and continues to sing wherever the water is going: a flicker of eyelid, a turning of cheek, a sudden unexpected touch.

Behold the Butterfly

Perhaps the butterfly, wings etched with stars, moons and suns, is nothing more than an expansion into lightless light, darkless dark. Once set in motion she passes from spray to spray along unkempt meadows where grass blades pushing upward are as seeds completing their shape; where the music of finches darting overhead composes a wordless song.   

Maybe it is in the form of a butterfly that we might most enjoy the springtime, dallying with leaf and flower as nectar rises in the rigid stems of blossoms bursting open within its flow. Before long a rustle in the grasses calls for our keenest attention, as here as anywhere the slightest pinch or flick of motion or sound conveys an impression of something living everywhere within, born of the same small twig of pulse.

Reversible Universe

Perhaps sprawled in sunshine he dissolves, pours free of his shape. Sliding along her back and legs he fills her with the warmth of a shadow unmoored. Brief kiss, rough and real against her cheek he becomes one with all joy and ease, the one within her arms. He is the best of what is left for her: a little honey, a little sun.  

Maybe much as his fingertips once read the fine print of airy messages, she now proceeds with poise and self-possession, never again looking back the way she came. She misses him, yet refuses to be pulled in by grief’s pliable eye, and finds in each morning’s heart a home. Where is he now? some ask. Somewhere fluid and quick, not part of the sadness that sings in her, wrapped in knotted twine. He is part of night’s never-ending hum; the blueness, the newness, the spell of an endless summertime.

Perfume Saint

Perhaps while any poet can revive a wilted blossom or give the natural perfume of any flower to a scentless one, it may take a true saint to seize the color of there seen from here, the color of where we can never go, in which, without a word, the still here continues to flow into the dull, rushing sound that space and silence make, its footprints appearing as one unsleeping, ever pacing thought.

Or Maybe as the refreshing fragrance of rose wafts strongly from the center of her palms, the perfume saint extends her hands with a gesture of blessing which not even the flowers can touch. For as each person’s personal perfume gradually evolves, satin and sparkling as birdsong, if he or she will pause in the garden for long enough what is absent will soon appear as vivid and nameless as a bird in-between windows, not able to get out, yet not needing to.

http://www.meghanhowland.com/2013 

That Side of Life

Perhaps when morning sets in and the coolness of night moves out into the plumage of birds, we resolve once again to make a new start. Taking the hands of our sons and daughters we board a boat and sail off leaving the city behind until, as far as the eye can see, there is nothing else but sky.

Maybe here where we can write no postcards, we wonder, why is the sky is so grey? Is this the promised end? Along the horizon we glide as birds scarcely moving a wing, longing to cross into another age, to see that side of life that we could never see before. When darkness arrives we return to the lapping shore only to find the water has grown heavy and bitter with so many destinations to fulfill – water that tirelessly reflects the twitching lights of tall, glittering towers.  

No Enough in Nature

Perhaps there is no enough in nature. The winter grass is growing fast, yet who has time or desire to count the blades or tally even half the drops of winter rain that softened the ground to make way for them?

Maybe outside a fresh scent is drifting in the air. As it wafts through rooms of the house, across empty platters it comes to rest in a bouquet of flowers. Once there, it speaks to us. It says, the bright shower of good things is ever descending. It is all a giving. Enjoy it now. Let the crumbs fall (aren’t there birds enough to pick them up?)

Speaking From Afar

Perhaps only after taking a glance backward is it possible to pause for breath as I start speaking from afar, until the speaking takes me far, for what has been uttered is never the end but follows along the edge of a mourning dove’s wing striving not only upward but sideways, through and beyond the distance that drives her intentions so easily apart.

Maybe as my words are nothing more than stiff elbows protruding from the smallest softest chamber of my heart, even as so many excuses to not write them flutter their wings, a single sentence becomes the very compass that gives direction to my quest as I drift to the surface of this sandy trail so easily dissolved into broken thoughts and the hills around my house open out onto pencil sketches of early daffodils brightening the careful call of a lonely dove that slows the warming of this cold morning down. 

Another Something

Perhaps there is another world, but it is in this one, where something silently waits for dawn and hides in the heart of a shining tide in a place where horses still harvest the sun. Before roads came like traces, it patiently breathed in clouds and leaned its dreamy spine against the thick sunset to bring back to us something like home.

Maybe as we wait by the shore this silent unspeaking watcher brings all into sand with salty hands that turn our souls into seagulls. Away beyond where there is nothing left to guess, each earlier wave born echoes the whispering more weaving hundreds and hundreds of rings of sunlight together before taking them apart.

Slow Fullfillment of the Flowers

Perhaps the moment the eye of the mind is filled with the beauty of natural things, from under a cloud shadow our thoughts emerge and ascend to the open glow of sky.  High above songs of winter birds fall like rain as we receive open hands of air tinted with the lonely blue of distant hills that enriches our blood and nourishes each closed bud alive in its cloak, each thin green bough hidden under cover of brier.

Maybe as the next refreshing wind will lift our hearts even further up from the trodden footpath of cold, hard earth we continue to carefully pick our way around dead ferns, decaying leaves and short grey stalks spiraled with thorns. In spring when hedges thicken green and meadows shine with buttercups, we will enjoy them all the more having traveled the same places when bare and having witnessed the slow fulfillment of the flowers.

This Strange Something

Perhaps something is creeping around the forest waiting to be seen, felt and heard. A strangeness that comes into everything growing. A dim but distinct luminosity that inheres in all.

Maybe this strange something will eventually lodge itself in stars, stars that swell to dawns that burst forth into fountains of gold, rose and purple where birds sing in hidden gardens behind the perfume of trellised vines. Before long a sleek black cat will rise, yawning, and the change will become apparent to our skin, ears and eyes, prepared for almost anything now, and we won't be surprised when news beyond any mind’s guessing comes in a way which can not be easily told since no one knows for certain where it came from, or where it will go.

Moments of Sleep at Night

Perhaps moments of sleep at night are the distances from star to star, as dreams – expressions of the day’s sight, song and sound – weave themselves together and follow each other like fireflies, as if all of this singing, flying and dancing was a job.

Maybe even as we are made to know little of our dreams, they most certainly know us. All through the day they go where we go, move as we move, and are privy to our innermost thoughts. Over time, as we are constantly dreaming – sometimes with open eyes and sometimes with eyes closed – we become as dreams ourselves, vanishing as if dust into a mounting wind, leaving behind no trail. Where can we go to find ourselves again? Such things cannot be easily spoken of.

Resisting Intelligence

Perhaps we are engaged in an endless war that never feels like a war. As our torturers turn affectionate, offering us free Vitamin Water, they whisper, there’s no chance of getting out of this, but we admire your willpower to remain as swollen doors that require strong shoulders to push them open, we really do.

Maybe, as roped and shackled prisoners sweating and suffering, often out of breath, we have cried out every name we can think of to describe that living part of us that has gradually slipped away to the cemetery in an effort to throw them off. Part still-formed twin of the very garden that founded us, we resist becoming the blank glare of a square luminous flux without shadow, the child’s afternoon without the child.

As If

Perhaps once again, the room itself is the “elephant in the room”. Because we cannot see it, cannot put a finger on it, this Here and Now, so fleeting, continues to require and concern us. It is the screened-in porch open year-round.

Maybe as we sit with our cup of melting ice cubes, wincing from yet another loss at the roulette wheel, we continue to risk everything we own. Hour after hour, we are birds circling a full cylinder of sunflower seeds but never landing, searching for that thing we are looking for but cannot name, that thing we would know if only we saw it, that thing that has moved into our bodies and multiplied in every tissue.

This Forgotten Language

Perhaps while sitting in your chair, you simply disappear. Then what would be the point of remaining occupied, always doing something, obsessed with action, if whatever you had done also disappears; if everything you once started and were currently working on was suddenly finished?

Maybe for just a half-second you are not… and then you are again, and the world continues. Your eyes are open, the flower is there. This forgotten language that surrounds you has wide arms to welcome you. All along, it has been awaiting your attention.

Ingenuity is Equal to the Maze

Perhaps the times when nobody is in the landscape are silent and lonely. Yet there are inconsistencies. It is not that there is nothing to say when there is nobody there to say it. This can go on and on… 

Maybe knowing my craft tells me we are not all brave. We may have to trust ourselves. I have had some expectations, and observed that the vast sky did not hinder those small white clouds from flying, but it is no use trying to look on it as a calling, or to look on it as not a calling. Better to let things come and let things go.