Recent Poetry

For Joseph Haydn

This chamber form that he perfected--
Four fiddlers’ brief fraternity--
Became for us an unexpected
Blessing of quaternity.
For every time a string quartet
Is played, the broken world is healed
A little. Let us not forget,
Then, him through whom this was revealed.

Farewell Spiel

Note: The below is a speech I wrote as a farewell, as the company I've worked for twenty-eight years prepared to move from Boston to Boulder, Colorado (without me--I'm staying to telecommute).  It may be of limited interest to those who don't know the company or my colleagues. I'm posting it as I just like to post things I write here to archive them.

A Pebble in My Shoe

There’s a case in the Japanese koan¹ collection called Entangling Vines about a widow who supported the practice of a monk, setting up a hut for him on her property so that he could live there and do his holy work undisturbed. She provided him food and supplied his needs for twenty years, at which point she had an impulse to check the level of his realization: She instructed her beautiful young serving girl to linger a bit the next time she brought the monk his meal, to sit on his lap, embrace him, and see what happened. The girl did as she was told. Seated on the surprised monk’s lap with her arms around him, she asked provocatively, according the widow’s instructions, “What now?”
     The monk replied, poetically,

     An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter
     Nowhere is there any warmth

When Truths Collide

“The conflict dates from the day when one man, flying in the face of appearance, perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow of a tremendous tide—the day on which a first voice rang out, crying to Mankind peacefully slumbering on the raft of Earth, ‘We are moving! We are going forward!’ . . . It is a pleasant and dramatic spectacle, that of Mankind divided to its depths into two irrevocably opposed camps—one looking toward the horizon and proclaiming with all its newfound faith, ‘We are moving,’ and the other, without shifting its position, obstinately maintaining, ‘Nothing changes. We are not moving at all.’”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin¹

New Poetry, April 2015

How to Tell if You’re Enlightened

The sparrow’s song

Turns out to
Have been yours
All along. 

New Poetry, January 2015

Zazen

I took my seat upon the zafu:
Dhyana mudra, spine upright.
I figured pretty soon I’d get to
Shine with kensho-ish delight.

Recent Poetry, Late 2014

Morning Commute, 10/7/14

A funny thing happened
As I donned my helmet
And rain gear this morning:
My mind sped back
Thirty millennia to a
Cro-magnon ancestor
Of mine--I’ll call him Og--
Seated in his cave by the fire,
Looking out at the stars.