i could be in kiev or gaza

 I consider mortality

Cuff says i still have

Blood pressure

Despite seven days

Red mouth following

Surgery. Oral surgeon 

Doesn’t seem phased

Not his blood, I guess

He figures

non-mirrored non-image

 I admit it

today’s leadership

today’s administration

is troubling, hard to stomach

but here we are

afterthoughts in a non-coherent 

set of absurd statements

yet longing for care and compassion

here’s what to do

go within, find there what is needed

even if without is overwhelming

within is where true dwelling enlightens

when the world gets turned inside out

it becomes a non-mirrored non-image

those looking for their own resemblance

see nothing but the gaze of God; haecceity

time, it’s on our slide

 I was thinking about changing the world

but then I thought, change it into what?

I was thinking about changing the word

but then I thought, change it into that?

And that’s what I did.

That.

Now all you have to do is do that.

You’re welcome.

You’re well, come!

Slide on in.

There you go --

that’s that

and write down useless notes

 I once took those walks. Morning beach, low tide, wind song, dog prints. Of many southern Maine beaches, Biddeford Pool had the curve and point, behind the big house an Irish or English round stone cottage, where I imagined I lived whenever I passed.

(Many things about this place are dubious.)

I'd like to retire there and do nothing,

or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:

look through binoculars, read boring books, 

old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,

talk to myself, and, foggy days, 

watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.

(--from The End of March, poem by Elizabeth Bishop)

It was the middle-time of my vagrancy. Not here, not there, not this job, nor that, a wandering promise with no payoff, a diminishing debt of detachment, seagull stretching toward fishing boat abaft piling on wharve with blue tubs of bait standing ready in their desultory smell.

Forty years gone by, friend from then, housemate, will visit with wife in a few days. We had a place there, two streets back, close enough to the ocean, not the dream place, but good enough winter rental.

There’s not much to see in the sea. Rising and falling swells. Stones at shoreline laced with faded and frayed green lobster line telling of days gone and owners gone. The old big doors and open wall launch for once big rowing station rescue boats at coast guard outpost their now quiet stories garbled with small shifting stones rolling in crosscurrent tide against sea wall.

I got a ticket once for leaving car there when I walked the length toward Goose Rocks. I never paid it. I’ve dreamt they were coming after me.

Forty four years in Maine, over half my life, the broken wooden traps have given way to bent green wire ones in small coves wedged between boulders smoothed by wet repetition.

You don’t have to live by the shore. It's close enough.  Sit there in pickup with coffee and bland donut for dunking. Visitors from away with iPhones and Nikons finding gems to take back with them, or those with enormous telephoto lens, their intimate nearness to take back to Photographic Workshop on their way to the big glossies and coffee table books.

Even back then I was a vagabondo trasandato -- a scruffy vagabond with no eye for anything lasting -- a single wave on a long shore of sea wall knowing how to deflect a glancing intrusion, shunted off, back out to lowering tide, a smashed trap now holding only stories of what once was thought to be caught.

this no-name thing has got to end

Tao has

no name

excuse me --

what shall we call you?

Tao has

no response

walks off whistling 

with (as) the wind

step aside, let him through

 perfidy

has no boundary

watch, watch

there -- the stepping

over -- oh my sweet

lord -- the shamelessness

ok, ok, calm down

it’s only moral turpitude

only ugly example

nobody cares anymore

we’re all angry, want

revenge, so what if lies

blind us -- perfidy

wears a smile, dresses well

everyone loves the pluck and

brazen rashness, the winning

we love a winner, let the good

times roll, we love a winner

with a third perspective

I’m always in a fog.

Does that mean I am always with God? 

"And the Lord descended in the form of a cloud, and Moses stood with him there.” (--from Exodus 33:7-11,34:5-9,28)

Maybe fog and cloud are different.

Maybe there is no difference.

Is that what the Gospels teach? There is no difference?

In our world difference is the only thing there is.

Better than, less than, more affluent than, better educated than, holier than, than, than, than.

 “Than” is used to introduce a second element in comparison.

But is it meaningful to say there is no comparison with God?

God is.

We are.

This is.

That is.

But no comparison.

No second element. 

Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it “here and now,” for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencing before one’s eyes or under one’s foot is no other than an expression of suchness. In other words the thing-event is disclosing its primordial mode of being such that it is as it is. It also understands a specificity of the thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, or vice versa. 

 

As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” that is “a positionless position,” where “not two” means negating the dualistic stance that divides the whole into two parts, while “not one” means negating the nondualistic stance occurring when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation. The free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot be confined to either dualism or non-dualism, neither “not one” nor “not two”. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/

In that cloud, what some call God, might also be called positionless position.

It might also be referred to as presence without appearance.

Like health hiding behind the appearance of ill-health. Or life hiding within the appearance of death.

(It is too hot to move today. Indicators say 880, real feel 1000)

It often amuses how some always want to appear the smartest in the room, criticizing and conducting (in their view) a series of outmaneuvering comments to diminish what has been said. It is how they practice two.

Others . . . (never mind.)

The only cloud meaningful today to most people is where our computer data is held. It is perceived as safe-keeping or is the focus of cyber-crime, data-theft, and identity theft.

We’re not much interested in God.

Profit, yes; power, yes; pederasty, yes; perverse greed, yes.

Almost no one wants to be in God. 

Almost no one.

Almost.

No.

One. 

Not two.

Maybe...three.

the calculus of facing what the day brings

 church remembrance today

Martha, Mary, Lazarus (he

died, laid in tomb, was called

out) -- damn -- he needed

a bath, everyone said so

so, what are we to think?

I dunno, shit like that is rare

dead is dead, mourners mourn

have some food and drink, say

goodbye, hit dusty road, go

where the living go on living

for now

doesn’t seem fair, like trump

figuring to pardon Maxwell lady

export minorities to other countries

rake in any and all money he can

smile, golf, pontificate, scowl

he is not Jesus

nor his followers christian

people die throughout country

shot and knifed and mowed down

by cars, hardly any of them brought

back to life, even if they wanted to be

this is nothing else

 if someone points 

a gun at you

fires it

remember this --

because this

is all of it

others will talk sad

will ask why

will give opinion

but you, you will

know this, and this

is all of it

a version for now

 Christ Jesus

One With God

Allow Us

Within 

This (Your) 

Way

couldn’t guarentee

Inch by inch

Monday steps forward

Toward noon

Second by second

I have counted the end

Of caring about Monday

So many I’ve worked with

No longer say good morning

No longer say anything

mors non est mors, sed vita est vita

 The dead are hard to see

From across field, dog barks 

There are no mirrors

There’s nothing to see

Even if i were

Looking

priorities

 Starving child in mothers lap

Starving child on bare mattress —

His wood shot went off to right

Tee it up again

mu

 I met the Buddha on the road

She smiled

Wished me good morning

Walking up hill

Safe and sound

Unmolested by no koan

a shadow that never leaves

Being a Buddhist is like being a Christian.

We ask “why?” without wanting to know.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts. If a person speaks or acts with an evil thought, suffering follows him, as the wheel follow the hoof of and beast that draws the wagon.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a person speaks or acts with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.

Dhammapada

We ask “why not?” and begin to laugh.

Siddhartha and Jesus sit across the room, shake their heads, look at each other.

Good company, both. 

beauty on the water

Walking mountain yesterday, lightheaded and weak from recent surgery and seepage of blood, the quiet green of ground the watching blue of sky. I am not alone in my solitude.

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”

(from Wendell Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”)

“Yes” said no-one there. “Yes” responded nothing seen.

Green ground and blue sky surrounded the walking.

Redwing blackbird chanted evening vespers.

I made it home.

With several steps to spare.

As Tháy finishes his words about zen and saving the planet.

johnson and proeneneke

Mountain men

Utah, Alaska

Hardy, colorful