A Smoke With The Buddha

After forty nine years
of meditation,
I feel like sitting on my porch
and smoking
an Arthur Fuentes Hemingway
"Short Story" cigar
with the Buddha.
It is perfectly all right
to desire.
It is perfectly all right
for the breeze in the pines
to sigh, and for flowers
to carry on so silently
the way they do,
making colors.
To spend a summer evening
among roses and weeping
begonias,
having fallen again
and again in love
with the same body,
the same harmony
of all small parts
we call "the soul."
Because this is a world
of desire.
Each yearning is a breath
of what it yearns for.
A world of
indecipherable sacraments,
the squeeze of a hand,
the taste of sugar
that a hummingbird knows.
This is a world where
every earth-frail shape,
even as it perishes,
points inward.