for Nick, 1982-2010


There's a shout from the water:
a man is struggling with the current,
his mouth fills as he goes under.

He clears the surface, spits out salt,
finds clean air, gasps it in,
shouts again.

He is drowning.

He knows it.

His voice leans out in all directions,
asks assistance from everything that hears.
Everything that hears measures compassion
and the weight of that current.

Everything loves that man.

Everything knows what he knows.
Everything reaches out a hand.
Everything loves him.
There is a whole world of hands,
he must choose among them
or surrender to them all.
From every direction, hands reach,
fingers straining:
"Here!"

Sometimes he grasps with the strength of the rescued,
his grasp is slick with brine;
sometimes his strength fails him.

Sometimes he knows the direction to dry land;
sometimes a wave takes him, and he forgets.

Night is coming;
courage grows smaller with the light.
How can he survive another night?

His voice grows smaller with his courage,
becomes infrequent:
his face begins to disappear:
nothing that hears can trace him in the dusk.

Until the sound of waves alone
Make the shore an empty place
Everything that hears allows
their hands to drop
whisper to one another:

He is gone.

(0)

Plum was heaven
Plum was stem
Until the season's turn
And early rain's intention

Until the bud's desire
Until the blossom-burst
Until bee pollen-scattering
And Sun's divine attention

The fruit imagination
Until its flesh uncovered
Until its curve encountered
The touch of tongue and teeth

Until the sweet surrender
The sugar-water tendered
Wash us stem to heaven
Bud-desire, blossom-burst

(0)

The warung was four walls and a roof, twelve tables and a door, twenty-four slight and elegant locals, one pallid westerner, and me.

The walls weren't really walls, as we would imagine them in Europe or the States: what would they keep out? Woven bamboo that allowed light to escape and the afternoon breeze to enter, allowed the quiet river of Indonesian conversation to course in an out, to mingle with melati blossoms and diesel... and the fire of equatorial sun, and the overripe stench of durian... and the pulsing twitter of the bird market...

Maybe at this distance the memories merge. Maybe the cities crouch together there, near the bottom of the well of time, and the street restaurants begin to blend together, the whole of my history perfumed with flowers and the memory of intimacy and of war.

Maybe the other ex-pat was aware of me; maybe he was not. I watched from my table in the corner, recent inhabitant of central Java, still... innocent in Asia. He sat at a table alone.

He sat at a table and he would have been alone, accompanied or not. His clothing was traveled, and washed when possible. A three-day beard. And a disanima that drew the eyes as silence draws a listener.

-- There is a body filled with stories, I thought.

I thought, as a foreigner myself, of making acquaintance. There is a sharing that can take place between the traveled: I have seen, you have seen. I thought of saying hello.

The silence hung on him like a shroud. The stories clung to his skin like parasites. When he moved his hand it was against the gravity of histories; he was slow; he was buried in memories.

Suddenly, I understood him. -- Of what I have seen, what can I share? Of what I share, what will be understood?

A poet, an author, delights in the challenge, delights in making the invisible seen. Your life becomes a conduit, your eyes and sense of touch the way in, your voice and your fingers the way out. If you speak, you reach out, and something finds you. But a traveler alone... a traveler alone creates countries of himself, takes in til sated, cannot stop eating colors and words and time, til glutted, grows more and more removed.

He hardly lifted his eyes. Only once. Only once to scan a scene he had seen hundreds of times before: himself as an outsider, adrift on a sea of culture and history and people, those whose roots reached down to water, while his were cut loose and wandering. He scanned the scene and his eyes drifted over the familiar unfamiliar, round in a shallow sweep that would admit look for something new and not find it, would allow nothing more. Unshared is as good as unexperienced.

His eyes found mine. Empty-full. Empty-full. The other ex-pat. The other Other. The bottom of the well. The depth of the waters.

I finished my meal, feeling suddenly lonely. I made my plans to return home. The sooner the better.

(0)

Maybe it was - seems long ago - I danced on a flickering flame
and my feet would burn if I stood my ground
and another tongue, insistent, called my name
and I'd lean into tomorrow as though I were bound to the wind

Where does an echo lead? I heard a sound, I turned; again;
the globe as it spun was the head of a pin
whose angels (lost souls, too) so crowded in
they jostled one another, profane, divine, profane, divine

So I spent my days

It's easier, now my earth has cooled, to love what is and has been:
laughter heard in another room
a smile, a hand, another land that falls behind, a wake
the chance we take, to dance, to love, to burn, to drown, to learn

(0)

First I believed in magic, and then I didn't, but that was only because I had learned - or been taught - the wrong definition.

You see, when the faeries existed, back then, when the spirits existed, they really did exist. When a quarter appeared under my pillow (or was it a dime? or was it a note carefully written by someone watching out or me, from another world?) it was physically, but magically was not, by the hand of my father or my mother. When I read C.S. Lewis' amazing words of hope and of challenge, it was not as if those worlds and those creatures existed; they were there as real and as tangible as my breakfast, and realer, perhaps, and more tangible than most of my lessons.

Why is two plus two true, while a spirit watching over me is not? Because I can hold two oranges in one hand, and two oranges in another? Is it because, when I put my hands together (in prayer or thanksgiving that I have -- can you believe it -- four pieces of living juice clutched in my wanting fingers?) is it because I hold four objects I can count? Is it because I can trade an orange and receive an apple? Maybe we are comparing apples and oranges. Maybe you are looking at a fruit as something more solid than, probably, it actually is. Certainly, you are looking at a concept of addition as more than a bit magic, which in fact it is, looking at an equation as somehow more substantial that a thought, like the wall of a house, or a brick, or a birth, or a departure. Plus one minus one. Zero.

First, I believed in magic because I didn't know the trick. That's what I was later told, at least. I was taught, later, that magic in fact was trickery. That the definition of magic was "lightness of hand", someone confusing the eye, or deluding the mind. This took place at more or less the same time that I learned gifts were purchased in a store and wrapped; and the magic and the spirit of searching, of reaching out toward someone with love and curiosity, of listening carefully to hear desire, of creating sweet illusion, of becoming part of a story, of taking part in a global illusion of generosity and delight, the magic that had existed was suddenly cheapened or emptied of value: a trick, like telling a little girl she wasn't her mother's daughter but an orphan, like telling a little boy that he is loved if he behaves, like telling the mother she is good if her children never stumble, like telling a father that success is measured in what he gives his family.

I was taught that magic existed on the surface of things, as though the reality of an orange was its mottled peel, not its miracle-explosion of sweetness that came from... good lord, where did it come from? Don't say: the branch of a tree, the flower, the bee, the trunk or root, the soil, the seed, don't say any of that. Just keep going back and back until you can't find the orange, can't find it anywhere, and then say (with the slightest gasp, with your eyes widening): magic!

I was taught that magic was a stock-market transaction, was a Macheavellian political ploy, so that all I needed was enough insider information, all I needed was someone to leak the truth, and I could rip the lace from that pretty fabrication, and there would be another naked mythology, another story, I would be safe from lies, all stories at their heart falsehoods, and all in all is Story.

The beauty is... that there is beauty. Ahhh - here's the secret: close your eyes; I'll whisper it. Imagine me standing behind you, with my hands gently on your shoulders. You can feel me lean toward you. Imagine you feel safe. Imagine my voice whispering close to your ear, (shhhh, read these next words in a whisper) so quiet no one else can hear: "This is magic: the beauty is that there was always something beneath it all. And you knew it all along, since you were very young. You arrived here being part of it. You came here with intimate knowledge of it. And even if all the logic of the world can paint the window black... ha ha! it can never paint out the sunlight. Because sunlight is magic. And logic cannot find it.

Once, I thought I was dying. Actually, quite a few times more than once. But one time in particular, when I was young, when I was much closer to the magic that we all know exists, I thought I was dying and it didn't bother me. Quite the opposite. I had been reading on my parents' living room sofa, with... I don't know how I was seated, exactly: if I did, perhaps I wouldn't be typing here tonight... with my legs up on the back of the couch, maybe? and my head in this odd crooked arrangement, sort of upside down. You know how flexible kids are. I was so engrossed in my reading (it was C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle) that I simply went further up, further up and further in, and suddenly -- for those adults who need to get out their black paint and have an explanation, even though it is completely beside the point -- maybe I cut off the circulation to my head, because suddenly I felt myself spinning and falling and disappearing and...

... spinning and falling and leaving this all behind. All what? It was... the lights of the world were flickering out. Had flickered out. An instant or forever. Sound? The last thoughts I had... I didn't have thoughts. The last feeling I felt was

... something opening brilliant beyond, wonder, wondering, wonderful, my spirit leaned into it...

Just as suddenly (for those who want reasons, probably because I fainted and fell out of my neck-constricting pose, probably the little ship righted itself, probably the body didn't want departure, probably it was nothing but a little trick of the body on the brain) suddenly all of this Here returned. My hands loosely held a book. There was the smooth/rough texture of the upholstery on the skin of my cheek, the slight musty smell of Minnesota-summer fabric. Afternoon light on the wall. The curtain hung sheer and still, without breeze to move it. There was a breath... mine? There were sounds of dinner being prepared in the kitchen, dishes, sink, probably my mother, possibly my father. There was the book in my hands. There was the roughness of the page, minutely rough. There was the book in my hands and the last words I had read came into focus.

I took a quick breath in - it was a gasp. I moved quickly. As though emergency, I moved quickly, to try and remake the moment, to try and place my body how it had been sitting, to lean back into the magic (where was it? the door had closed?) to leave, not out of despair but out of desire, not running from but running toward, not from fear but for knowledge, toward the homecoming.

If there is sleight-of-hand, it is the hands that make it. But where there is magic, it is the soul that creates. I swear, it is the juice of the orange, and just as surely as that juice exists on my tongue, and dribbles down from my lips when I bite into its obvious flesh... just as surely as that sweetness exists, so does the equation that two plus two does not equal four, that two plus two is in fact nothing, that God exists, that the devil is our own trickery and our own denial, and that the impossible is just as tangible as it ever was.

We just stopped believing in it.

(0)

Spring has arrived with its signature flourish. I enjoy the recognition. It began years ago with delight

The snow's crust hardened then softened, then became lace through which the roadside stream could be seen, happily (did my happiness make that water happy?) spilling and tumbling downhill past our home. A small stick in a small hand makes the hole wider, tests the depth and speed of water, light infiltrates, the sparkle falls into and back out of the little river. Raise your eyes: follow the stream through its tunnel as it gathers contributions and finally bursts through the ice and crystallizing snow, spreads into the street. Follow your sight, stand and look downstream, then follow it... you must, you must... uninsulated boots, waterproof except for the pinhole in the right toe, through which the cold drips in, spring, spring. Walk downhill where the river leads. Where will it lead? Beyond your small horizon, certainly. The trees arch overhead. They are elms, you later learn. Somewhere sun has found leaf loam and heated it until its fertile fragrance is all around you, then whispered away with a breeze. The trickle becomes a stream and flows into the field where the skating rink has dissolved into slush; stream slows, soaks into the marsh, into reeds, into trees, away toward the lake. Where has curiousity carried you?

and now the body has opened again after so much cold, so many times, it is a reunion of old friends. At least from my side - maybe New Life doesn't take much notice of my relief, my smile at seeing her come round. Its that kind of relationship: I take the warmth I can, and do my part to accompany her while I can.

Yesterday I was playing a local brand of frisbee with my daughter Bela. Since our accuracy was not always of highest caliber, and the wind conspired to fly our disk closer or further from our outstretched hands, we (equally conspiratorial) devised a more interesting manner of fetching. Who wants to walk grumbling or apologizing in such fine weather, when practice is just to be Doing, without expecting anything to be Done? Here are the rules, in case you wish to play:

1 - if the frisbee falls behind you out of reach, you must do backward somersaults until you come within arms' length
2 - if the frisbee falls in front of you out of reach, you can choose cartwheels (if it is far away and you need to make some mileage) or somersaults, either "standard" or "diving"
3 - if the frisbee fall to your left or right, you might log-roll, or shoulder-roll.

As you might imagine, once we began this rather entertaining (for the cartwheeler) or amusing practice (for the cartwheel observer), our throwing accuracy went rapidly downhill, until the recipient was not left wondering whether he might actually catch the frisbee, but which direction and how far she might have to tumble to reach it.

Somewhere along the way the frisbee arrived at the top of the small rise, just near the deck. Having realized that backward somersaults uphill are rather a lot of work, it was immediately discovered that forward somersaults downhill are not only no work at all, but tend to become a sort of perpetual motion that leaves the tumbler looking and feeling not unlike a cartoon armadillo, become a ball, and rolled so many times over and over at ever increasing speed that the eventual decomposition -- of ball-ness, or perhaps the reclaiming of extremeties of person-ness -- was breathless and dramatic.

Seventy degrees and soft grass merit delight, the kind that removes the knots of winter from the mind, the impossibilities from the joints, and grants that love, this love, of old friends in reacquaintance... whether you are in the company of a daughter (greater likelihood of somersaults)... or a lover and those beautifully tangled gymnastics... or no one at all but your own lifting spirit, light of rebirth, cio da terra as the Brazilian song goes, light and life, light and life.

Someday I will try to translate all the nuance and love of living that is in Chico Buarque de Holanda's song of the earth.

O Cio da Terra

Debulhar o trigo
Recolher cada bago do trigo
Forjar no trigo o milagre do pão
E se fartar de pão

Decepar a cana
Recolher a garapa da cana
Roubar da cana a doçura do mel
Se lambuzar de mel

Afagar a terra
Conhecer os desejos da terra
Cio da terra, a propícia estação
E fecundar o chão

(0)

Somewhere among the trials of innocence, lessons of winning and losing.

And then: that young mind, that open heart, has almost no distance to travel, from saying "I won" to "I'm right", and... ah! Then my dear hearts, dear children, you have lost your sight, your liberty of movement, and each step forward will be a step to be retraced.

I have taken a few lessons from another text. I traveled, I went as far as I was able, to Asia -- such gratitude to an early lover, who was my guide to losing self, how could I have done it alone? -- and stayed until I could not recognize my thoughts. They came and queued up at night, they spilled onto page after page of notebooks, they tripped out into the night over a bowl of gudeg and a cup of sugary tea, they danced back and forth from my west to their east, a blurry trance of who? who? who am I? I seeded doubt like a farmer seeds rye, deliberately, to defeat the ragged weeds. I embraced doubt, with love, like a man embraces his partner, or a woman embraces her mate. Ah, into that beautiful blindness.

I met a woman who looked strong in her mid-life, yet felt weak as a straw in wind. I met a woman as frail as age and ill-health could make her, battering her legs til she shook, beating her kidneys til she urinated blood, erasing her husband in a War, erasing her wealth in peace... and she was strong as the temples that stood in the ring of fire for 3000 years. I lost words. I found others that explained things better. I watched for myself in others' eyes, and sometimes... when the weather was clear... I saw both the other and myself.

I think what we lose, when we begin to believe in winners, is the ability to listen to our enemies. We lose the ability to trust there is truth, in so many shards and facets, in such ways... in ways that appear explosive, in words that sound destructive, recriminating... because we humans, you know, are not so skillful in finding coal and seeing diamond. It is only heat and time make the difference: coal is diamond. You are me. Life is death, yes, yes let's make colors out of whites and blacks, my eyes are sharper than night, and so are yours..

So the pages of the texts so difficult to decipher were those from minds seemingly so foreign from my own, that even to hear their thoughts leave the tongue was occasion for pain, such deep hurt, and the expected response of anger, or of retreat. Enemy.

I remember a time when I had thrown myself far out of my element -- ha ha!, and not the first time, nor the last, this desiring soul would step into jungle or desert or war zone to find that herb or spice or fragment of history that would help complete it! -- I had taken myself to a farm on the sprawling prairie of southwestern Minnesota to open the land, and seed it like a lover. I found the life of a farmer somewhat less romantic than that "lover" image. I also found that the landowner felt threatened by us in many ways. His behavior grew more erratic as the pressures of the season and toil began to deconstruct my Self. So many crazy words! He used fear and his palette and made demons that all wore my face. "You are dangerous! Dangerous!" He shakes with fury, with fear, he stabs his finger at me like the barrel of a gun, he is driving slowly at the end of the quarter-mile driveway, watching us, making us watch him, pacing like a trapped creature, trapped, somehow, on an endless, horizonless landscape!

Because I found the Mystery when I went to Indonesia, because in some way I left myself behind, I listened through the fog in my lessor's mind, and hear... a foghorn, why not? I heard the lesson that he held -- that insane son of a bitch -- the lesson he carried in his being, for me!

Tonight I received a similar lesson, from one whom I believed I would never accept a word again. Sometimes, those who challenge us most ferociously are in such close proximity. And because they share a space and time with you, with your body, with the currents of your mind... they know you, even if they call you "enemy", maybe because they do; even through their angers and their struggles, the mirror of the world is there, they are it, as scratched and muddied and fogged as that glass might seem: right there in front of you. Condemnation is the inability to use stillness and wisdom to dissect that stormwash of thoughts: condemnation is lack of sight and no great finesse, the ability to see diamond in a seam of coal.

So the lesson of my lesson -- no, I will not share it with you, though I am so grateful(!), to have been given a grain of truth about myself! Like one of those missing puzzle pieces you have been searching for all over, you want to finish this darned picture! and there that person is, standing beside you, hand open, with one more piece offered in an open palm...! -- the lesson of my lesson, the fact that I learned from an unexpected and personally untrustworthy source: that lack of trust closes your ears. The Teaching and the conduit for that Teaching, our teachers, they are all around us, and not always, probably not often, maybe rarely in a form we can recognize from within our fixed ideas. So I say (to myself, and why not you?): never stop listening. You can measure, but be most careful of your science when you see your mind begin to take sides. It will always side with what you already know.

Undecide there is a winner: there will be no winner, ever. It is true that in some voices, your skill may not be such (not yet?) to extract the information that you need. Leave it: you know how many voices are around you. All reciting lessons for you, an incessant mantra, a prayer, a brothers' chant. No need to waste your time, and don't waste others' time, if your ears aren't open to receive.

  *

And words, these words? Attempts to hold a few flashes of understanding, fireflies in tonight's jar. Whether we live better for our words, or worse, will be decided later, when those we did our best to love help us from this life.

(0)

There are two kinds of roads.

I see the first so clearly: I can allow my eyes to drop from the horizon for a moment, and there are my feet, one before the other, one after the other, while the world slips away underneath a pace at a time. That's about two yards, if I am running, or one if I am walking with purpose, and maybe only a foot if I am sad and feeling slow. I can close my eyes and see that progress. I can close my eyes and feel my weight, feel the world's attraction, and the gentle roll of heel-to-toe that's like a dance, we learn to stand and swing to it, and make our lives the music of accompaniment. Those magical shoes you put on early and can't take off, that dance you to joy and to sorrow, from birth to death.

I guess there have been enough paths in my history, I don't need to walk to feel the walking: here's a path of black cinder from an old lava flow, with its chalkboard scraping sounds of almost-glass against almost-glass; another trail of tumbled granite at the top of the world; and then the stairway of stone (stone again!) worn down by the feet of countless pilgrims, on their way to some temporary salvation.

There were softer roads, that felt my passage and then quickly covered it up: maybe winter's wind blew snow across my way, or ocean's wind, loose sand, or leaves or other light debris sailed across my trail, and left my footsteps scuffed, untraceable. There I was: there I was not. There are two kinds of roads, and one of them is met by the bones and by the body's sinew.

The other kind needs a guide. And you are it.

Usually, when I am traveling inward, I walk along the lighted avenues that those before me cleared so well. Usually, the inward road (where my calloused feet cannot wander) is to remembered places and comfortable benches and sunsets and glasses of sipped wine and smiling eyes... smiling eyes and those little gestures of affection, a hand that reaches just for the joy of touching me, or the play of minds as a joke unfolds like legerdemain, as much surprise for the speaker as it is for those who listen.... Usually. It is fine, really, to have places we remember here inside, where we felt warm and safe, sanctuary from the winds and waves outside, where everything is right, and our way of being and seeing is contented with small things.

The road inward has those broad avenues.

You know, though... what attracts me are the alleys and the byways, those twisting trails that lead perpendicular to my direction of travel, small tributaries or siphons that drop a few unique souls from the hinterlands onto the main highway, or steal them away from these populous regions onto a wild chase into the trees, up and over the ridge, to heaven knows where! I am attracted to the unexplored, because there is something much larger than me, larger these small ideas I carry like a moth-eaten comforter around my shoulders. Oh, there are edges of the universe too large for my conception, and an endpoint to this my life which is rather too difficult to grasp.

So, I think: there's something there will open my eyes wide. Maybe over that hill? Maybe around that curve of the road? Maybe in her arms. Maybe in the next song. Maybe tomorrow.

When I speak of the inward road, I am not talking about a particular way of going. Yes, sure, you can meditate; sometimes the eyes of the heart are more open when you are still like that. Or you can watch your feelings as they dash and spark through the mystery of yet another day alive. You meet someone, you shy away: what was that about? You meet another, and your hackles (should humans still have hackles) rise, ready for a fight. Or you can just live your life and do your best to notice what goes on, down the Well, what you can change, what you cannot; how you might open; how you might not.

I think that on the external road, you meet everything that is not you, and have to hear its echo and make its metaphor of yourself. And on the internal road, you meet nothing but yourself, and must find your echo and your metaphor in the ten thousand things that meet your eyes. If you do decide to stray from "I am perfect because I think it so", or even if you don't, sooner or later you must meet a self that is not as welcome, the tough teacher, the one who throws the windows open and shouts "Come outside!": see you, just as blind and hurtful as those you judge, just as fragile and just as strong... just such a sweet heart and just such a brute. What that road brings is a poignant clarity to all of your aches. You know what hurts: don't you feel it every day? Don't you dream it at night? The distance growing between you and your love, and you powerless to change it? The aging of your children as they become masters of their own lives; their departure from your home and from your influence... and from the warmth of your arms: no, far worse, those small and precious bundles of life that were like sunlight in your arms, you carried them as though you embraced the sun, and now... that time is past, and your arms feel useless, empty now, and cold.

What I find at times along the inward road is really quite anguished. I have to stop and give the sad creature crouched there some needed attention, some Good Samaritan nurturing, if I am able to evoke the Samaritan in me to tend myself. And other times, there are flowers and images of such beauty. Sometimes my eyes in that mirror are gentle, and so strong, and so welcoming of love. Sometimes the scars and lines on the face show a resilience and a strength of purpose that leaves me quite breathless.

Sometimes I just see a life, a stranger in the street, making his way to work.


What a preamble!

All I meant to say was that... on the inward road the other day I found another place where I was just human, after all, smaller than I imagined, and needing human help to rediscover trust, again, again, when the door of the heart has been closed against hard weather, and the body contracts like a shell around that stain.

(1)