As June nears end

Something's happening here.

Prepare for the worse.

Expect nothing.

Else.

Tao through and through again returning through the opposite

Yes

is where no

goes when it

sees 

what is 

sourcing

everything

after leaving a cardboard coffee cup on windshield wiper of grey Saab in Rockland

I received an email.

I responded.

 About the cup, there was nothing in it for me. It took the poem. Wiped away a tear. Never said a word. Very French. I drove away wondering if it would notice how moved it would be when it rained. 

Nah, I figured, it was all about agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships. She (there, I admit it) was ... done with my lips, holding her, done with black pickups. 

Our morning snacking was over. I'd looked into her ... and felt an emptiness only Wednesday could reflect back.

About that, I had to finally come to terms with something nobody should have to face in the hours before noon, namely, I'd had no cereal, just coffee and -- (donut ask me to go on) -- this town is in my rear view.

You never know when poetry will distinguish or disappoint. Yves Bonnefoy's poem about Ceres, especially the final stanza, does not disappoint.

Still, one must be philosophical.

Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself venting to a friend who’d been a literature professor. I told her I was unsatiated by the course—it felt like when I had discovered poetry and found, in practice, this most lyric of arts often meant writing about flowers or describing an epiphany in the grocery store checkout line. My friend laughed. “You know your problem?” she said. “You thought that philosophy would be Truth and poetry would be Beauty.”
Apparently, this is Ben Lerner’s problem too. In his new book, The Hatred of Poetry, the poet, novelist, and MacArthur “genius” argues that if you love poetry’s promise of transcendence, you must also hate poems for their failure to keep up their end of the bargain. “Poetry,” Lerner writes, “arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine.” The only problem? Poems are ultimately human rather than divine in character. “As soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem,” he continues, “the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time… but when you wake… you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.” 

 (--from, What's the Matter With Poetry?, by Ken Chen, The New Republic, 23June2016)

It is hard to tell anymore where words come from or go; whether they create what we call reality or merely try to describe what we'd like to think of as a factual verifiable world.

That falls away, the sorting and fascination with distinctions.

One is left with white clouds in blue sky through green leaves.

Spadini

Just at dusk.

When thoughts of day begin to dim

Bird song

Begins to say good night

Soup warms

Last drops of earlier rain fall from roof to porch mainsail

                         . Armando Spadini .

trees

So silent they stand.

So still they peekaboo with sky and water sun and reflection.

So may we be for one another a place of silence, stillness, and reflective inquiry.

If you ever change your mind

Nothing.

It arranges itself surrounding solitude.

A yurt near brook.

Tired. 

Day quiets. 

Trees watch.

Sunday evening transitions

Millionaires play basketball tonight. 

Others end zen practice with the words, 

"May all beings come to dwell in their true home.”

 Moon is bright --

 wind blows 

 spring away