I’m in a cabana on a beach in Cancún looking
Upon light-blue water so warm you can walk
Right in, no need to adjust to the temperature.
Neither the moon nor stars alone allure.
Celestial lips may good metaphors make,
yet we can’t long mere metaphor endure:
we seek cliché for companionship’s shake.
Somewhere over Tulsa the pilot warns
we’re passing through a storm. Experienced
in flight, trusting the engineers who designed
and built this plane, we pop headphones back
in our ears, turn to our movies and TV…
The self-help book says life
is a set of competing priorities:
If this is more urgent than that,
do this. I nearly flunked out of
high school, ignoring such advice.
The alarm goes off at 4. I will myself to my
feet, not for a grand mission, but to catch
a flight. In the predawn darkness, driving the
101 to the 405, I recite Clifton, Keats, & Limón
The oak predates our house. How old
it was when it toppled, I cannot tell:
a tree stands for ages, sees war unfold,
endures tribulations, then in one fell
goes still. I hadn’t time to count its rings:
I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
Too much talk of revolution
makes me hungry, and there
is little in the fridge that makes
one believe in a better world:
Leaves gather like un- sold goods. Need help, asks the rake. Just browsing, I say.
Both the atheist and the believer have it wrong.
We are not mere bodies, nor do we have souls.
Heaven would be a room strewn with books
and nary an errand to distract from reading;