Ode To Emptiness

You say you have a Guru?
Listen, your Guru is empty.
If he or she is really a Guru, they'll tell you,
"I am Hollow. I am Nobody.
Nobody will save you."

Give up concentration
and you will attain one-pointedness,
because your heart is every bindhu in the Void.
Become the dark
and you will give birth to original light.

You're waves of emptiness.
This is what you're made of,
a ripple of no-thing in a strange quark.
Each cell of your flesh is hollow,
your belly hollow, your veins and bones,
mouth, ears, nostrils, anus and eyeballs,
your vagus nerve, all hollow, dissolving
into dark matter this instant.

Your fireplace is hollow, your kitchen stove,
the dome of your temple, your mosque.
Your toilet bowl is hollow.
Christ's apostles worshiped the vacuum
in the left ventricle of their own hearts.
They called it God.
But Dogen called it the Empty Circle.
The Holy Spirit, Ruach Elohim,
mysterious and sensual,
flows in and out of your vacuous lungs.

Hollow the tree of life at the center of the garden.
Hollow the stem of a rose.
Hollow a well, a wadi thirsting for Spring rain,
a valley fruitful and green,
a mountain cavern hiding jewels of fire.
The Great Mudra of Supreme Compassion
is the gesture of rainbow stillness in a hollow cocoon.

The earth is hollow, the solar system hollow,
the galaxy spinning like a top on a groundless black hole.
The edges of your flesh are the fractal stuff of bubbles.

This very moment is the echo in an empty bell.

Whose breath blows the ocean of voidness
into the foam of your body?
A single word of un-creation,
a pinprick can pop you,
like the sound of Basho's frog.
Listen, all creatures are made of granulated space,
the grit of emptiness: cow-pods and stars,
poppies and tears, the tiniest Ayin Soph,
which is the time it takes moonlight to pass
through a beetle's crystal wing.
The memory of your baby's face at your last breath.
Milk drops spilling from a lonely nipple.
An insouciant sperm.
Your shout in a dream.
Bell chime of a red winged blackbird over the wetland.
The froth-sigh of ebb tide, evanescent on the sand.

O pilgrim, pondering your crinkled map of papyrus!
O seeker, bent with the past and future on your back!
Why drag this sack of old stories
across the flowering meadow of Presence?
Drop the worn handle of your father's weapon.
Pour out the satchel of yesterday's breath.
Let the universe arise in your forehead, a new creation.
Let the sun melt in the palm of your hand,
the useful ruins of evanescence.
Let the full moon glisten from your open wound.
Friend, your emptiness
more solid than a diamond!

Art by S. Maruyama, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York