your path is always behind you
weeds in the garden flourish
unconcerned
their days are numbered
Sitting in the garden, drinking China tea,
smoking a favorite cigar,
I speak aloud lines from worry free poets,
finding myself the same.
February sun recedes into shade –
simple pleasures, simple life, simpler man.
too much money denies the pleasure of a simple life
with life not turning out
as wanted, expected, hoped –
why this gratitude?
what good fortune:
stopping,
the smell of roses
Each day death takes lives beyond counting,
yet none who live think –
this day
death
can come to me.
(Adapted from William Buck’s translation of the Mahabharata)
true enough: we cannot be happy in the future,
we can only be happy now, in the present
the same is true for unhappy
go figure
not distinguishing pain from suffering is itself suffering
to be utterly without hope is also to be utterly without despair
past and future exist only in the conversations we have about them
each moment is as it is;
to say that it “should” be some other way
only burdens the one who says “should”
Earlier I wrote — “the peace that passeth understanding can’t be understood.”
What’s worse, it can’t be experienced.
Then what, we may ask, is it good for?
And, of course, the answer is — it’s good for Nothing.
the one free extension is almost done,
taxes are due in three more days,
I have no IRS approved excuse for delaying any longer;
I could do them now,
but there’s still three days
instead I write thes lines;
absent a true emergency
they’ll be filed on time,
they always are
I used to worry and call myself a procrastinator,
now I worry not and just call me me
gratitude arises along with the preference for what is
what turns you on is what turns you on . . . and sometimes it surprises you
in America one speaks not of the attendant sorrows of aging lest one be thought old
a critical distinction in living an examined life: your experience and your explanation of your experience
what once was unimaginable
has this day come to pass –
sixty-five
you discover your own path at the end, if there is one
when does the past become the present and the present, the future?
the illusion of certainty is just that, an illusion
low over the valley,
honking geese,
blossoms of fall
Granted a shattering glimpse of crystalline quiet early,
I came to understand it late.
Finding no one to explain the Unexplainable,
I kept a different kind of quiet;
drifted along some usual ways –
school, jobs, career, a run in public life.
Now and then, in a seeming desert wander, would peace descend –
alleviating for a while the dis-satisfaction of dis-ease.
These days I dwell inside my cottage in a large and fertile plain.
Through my doors a river runs. I do not interfere.
Without reason I study poetic lines revealing Way;
living unfolding within a gift of ease.
(with thanks to Wang Wei)
hopping from the arbor up the roof
grape thief jay
flies prize away
so simple, yet so seeming hard to accept:
there is nothing that is not It
mortality appears
when the obituaries
could be yours
suffering includes the vain hope that right now things can be other than they are
having the “truth” won’t set you free, but it will blind the hell out of you
living always occurs, only occurs, in the present
the denial of aging is the denial of death
neither the flypaper
nor my hand
keeps the fly
from its appointed buzz
never too old –
college town shop girl
smites heart with smile