Election

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.

I voted for my grandfather’s bones that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles

under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies

South along the shores of two continents.
I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring

of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,

and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken

by white men or brown, because it is written in star semen,

new moons, thistle sap and weevil hieroglyphs on prairie oak.

I voted for ancestral bison scrawled on the seeping

limestone cavern of your heart.

I voted to erase straight lines, right angles,

and every surveyor's plat map.

I voted for the sacred curve of rivers and hills.

I voted to keep the edges of the vineyard ragged

and ungleaned for the hungry stranger.

I voted for lonely pilgrims who wander

in the ambiguous land between male and female.

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,

a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted lupine

for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse

for every colony of maggots!

I voted for the mule that Jesus rode into the city,

proclaiming forgiveness of debts,

who is the same mule Rumi rode backwards into exile,

gazing Eastward toward eternal loss.

That mule, I tell you, will be president.

I voted to compost and manure the floor of the Senate,

entangling 100 senators in hemp moss and honeysuckle.

I voted to turn the dome of Congress into an enormous

hummingbird feeder.

I voted to wash away both white and black

in a rainbow of tears.

I voted for a motherland where politics dissolve

into folk music, story-telling, fermented cabbage,

totem-carved hoes handed down from mother to son

in the fire-side quietness of heroic listening.

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore

that cannot be erased, for it becomes the dust and rain,

and then a tree again.

I voted for the local, the small,
the brim that does not spill over,
the abolition of waste, the luxury of enough.

I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers,

more recess in school to cultivate play,

more leisure, tax free, more space between days.

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence

and the price of a thrush song.

I voted for ten million stars

in your next inhalation.

________________


A poem from my book, The Nectar Of This Breath
Chalk mandala by biology teacher Karyn Babaian.

This Breath, This Body

No one escapes the miracle

of embodiment,

not even God.

Don't you long to return

to where you are?

When the Teacher says,

you are not your body,

say, I Am.

This moss-green stone is your body,

so ancient it was here

before you were born.

The Milky Way is your body

pouring over the mountains

of the spine.

Stranger, I too am your flesh.

Bound by lymph node,

gristle and tear

is a heart that has no edges.

A bee asleep on a withered mum.

Each quark of you a circle

That can't quite nip its tail.

The light that has not yet reached us

is your body.

The fragrance of next Spring's flowers.

Musk of an elk on thistle.

Consider also the dark matter

of dreams.

Your dreams are my bones.

Don't you long to return

to where you are?

No body escapes the miracle,

not even God.

Thoughts won't enlighten you.

The past won't comfort you.

The future won't complete you.

Love happens in this moment,

this breath,

this body.

Published in Braided Way Magazine, 9/9/2023
Photo, Mt. Adams, Outbound Collective

Strange

Strange. On this Sabbath evening in September, I feel a new season in my bones. I want to throw all my poems away. Toss them into the sky like moths and let them be drawn into a dark flame, where I can hear them crackle away into silence, leaving not an ash or cinder. But of course moths are life, and my poems are just words that feel so worthless and empty now. O silence, Word-womb, you who are both Lover and Beloved before they become two, let me pour these poems and this mind itself into your terrible consuming love-fire. Even the elegant moth of God's name, and the wings of God's form, amethyst and gold, emerald and diamond. I surrender this breath to your annihilating sweetness, where Mary burns up in Christ, Christ burns up in Mary, and nothing remains but the fragrance of adoration.


Image by Matt Collishaw

The Stillness You Seek

The stillness you seek inside

is all around you,

effervescent with stars,

hungering tears and

waves of otherness.

The strength you demand in

in a noble leader

is the heart-crushing softness

of your own breath.

The touch you yearn for

in a lover's nearness

undulates through your own spine,

fermented nectar

rising from the green earth

to kiss the boundless sky

through this body.

I keep telling you, dear friend,

you seek the one you are.

Lonely?

 

You are not lonely when you are truly alone. You are lonely when you hunger for relationships. And you hunger for relationships because you have no relationship with your Self.

If you have not met your Self, you are in for a marvelous surprise. It is like the Hamsah swan who wearily circles, searching for a resting place, finally settling upon its own reflection on a still lake. The swan thinks, "Who is this divine Swan that welcomes me to her breast?" not knowing that he alights upon the mirror of his own Soul.

"Hamsah" in Sanskrit means "swan," yet also means "soul." The Upanishads deem this sound to be the natural mantra of the breath. The mantra means "Aham" (I am) "Sah" (God). As in all true mantras, the syllables can mean different things at different levels of consciousness. It is the sound, not the meaning, that is important.

Breathing in "Ham," you feel the thrill of golden light invigorating your heart. Breathing out,"Sah," you surrender to boundless Presence, the One who breathes your existence.

Who are you, really? You are not this name or that form, you are "I Am." Who is God, really? God also is "I Am." You and God are both the diamond effulgence where the syllables "Sah" and "Ham" dissolve into each other. You are the oceanic kiss of sun and moon. Every creature is a ray of your divine light, a breath of your divine love. You mother the world, just as the frailest creature you meet mothers you. Through your incarnation, divine life streams forth, then merges back into the creator. Why wait til you die?

Bodhidharma and the Emperor

When Bhodidharma, known as Daruma, brought Buddhism to China, the Emperor Wu demanded that the wandering beggar appear before him. An imperial scribe read a list of the emperor's merits, all the hospitals he founded, all the homes for the poor, and all emblazoned with the name, "Emperor Wu." Then he asked Bhodidharma what merits he had achieved. Bhodidharma said, "Don't know."

In the bindhu between your breaths, just for an instant, be held in the gentle palm of desolation. Let your next inhalation be a wing of desirelessness  gliding up your spine, ringing the starry bell of night in each vertebra, turning the cells of your body into chalices of golden fire.

Then the imperial magistrate read Bodhidharma the royal laws and statutes, after which the emperor asked him,"What law do you follow?" Bhodhidharma answered, "Don't know."

Gaze into the mirror of Seeing itself. Let radiant beams of emptiness hallow the face of the Invisible. Let your eyes be yantras that precede creation, opening a way to the darkness of love.

The exasperated emperor commanded the high priest to recite the central verses of holy scripture. Then he challenged Bodhidharma, "What are the essential precepts of YOUR religion?" Daruma replied, "Don't know."

Words and phrases congeal out of pure silence to torture your mind with worry. Let them disperse into letters and syllables of delightfully meaningless but inspired phonemic vibration, the sounds a baby makes after drinking pearls of breast milk. Let this garland of angelic burps and giggles enfold your body with a fragrant circle of protection, each unfading petal a bija, sacred name of the Unknowable.

The emperor banished Bodhidharma from the capital and prohibited him from teaching anything whatsoever to the people. So Daruma wandered to a forest cave, where he sat quietly, staring at an empty limestone wall that seeped droplets of fresh water sparkling in darkness.

Now listen down deep and undo the knot of this world. Hear to the hum where hearing arises. Let your silence re-calibrate the wobble of each atom, healing the bodies of all sentient creatures.

In the solitude of his cave, Daruma said nothing, thought nothing, dreamed nothing. Yet he was wide awake. Thus the teaching of the Dharma spread rapidly throughout the land. Thousands came to him, wishing to be initiated into his teaching. They also ministered to the sick and the poor in the natural course of their lives as Buddhists, but never did so for the purpose of accumulating merit.

Can you breathe out everything you ever thought you were against, and surrender the argument? Cherish the subtle luminous flavor of not believing. Resist no-thing. If your restless mind must mutter some words, then whisper Daruma's great liberating maha-mantra: "Don't Know."

Footnote to the Story of Daruma

A Life Coach told me I am important. She charges a lot but evidently gives great advice. She said I have an important mission to accomplish that no one else can perform. I will guide the earth to healing and illumination. I will be published and famous and attain "abundance," which I assume means lots of money. Then I talked to some of her other clients, and she told them all the same thing.

So I hooked up with an Enlightened Yogi. He told me, as long as I devoted my life to helping his movement, teaching his yoga, and preaching his knowledge, the universe would support me with perfect health, wealth, and recognition. But I got tired of being a soldier in his army. I didn't feel free.

One night, when I had pretty much given up hope of doing anything noteworthy for humanity, the Master of Foolishness came to me in a dream and said, "You are totally insignificant." I know that, I said. What should I do about it? He said, "Why do anything about it? You are insignificant. So what? You are nothing but a bubble bursting on a wave in a swirling ocean of chocolate chaos. Plop! You are here. Pop! You are gone. About 50 people will come to your memorial service, and after that, about 5 people will ever think of you again. Soon they too will be gone. So just be insignificant and dance like a bubble of foam on a wave. Forget about yourself and feel some compassion for all those people who are trying to BE somebody, to sell something, to get published, to get heard, to get remembered. Their urge to be somebody is the root their pain. You, on the other hand, attain perfect freedom and weightlessness, you dance like a bubble, because you are completely devoid of importance."

I awoke in a sweat. What a terrible fate, I thought. I'm becoming nobody. So I went to the old man who sells cigars in a beat smoke shop he calls, "Cloud of Unknowing." They say he used to be a zen monk. I told him my dream and he said it was the best damn dream he ever heard.

Art: Konoe Nobutada (1565-1614), Meditating Daruna

Work of Silence

Do you want to do the work of silence?

Do not do.

The work is to dissolve.

Above all, do not fall in love with the doorman.

No affairs with the gatekeeper!

Even if the guardian at the threshold
appears as Lord Buddha, or Jesus,
or the elephant headed boy, remember,

The Guru just holds the door for you.

Pass through.

The Prophet and the Prophetess

are only the butler and maid.

Give them a tip as you enter, or a little kiss,

but pass through
and do not do.

The doorway is very low and you'll have to bend

so you don't bump your head

on the lintel of your own sternum.

Find the hollow beneath your chest,

just above your belly.

It is night when you arrive,

the darkness between breathing
out and in.

This darkness is also a door,
the formless portal everybody passes through
as they are melting,

the gatekeeper, the pilgrim, the wanderer,

rich and poor alike.

In the silence of annihilation is a tiny flame

with an aura gold as the sun

and a red hot body

with a cool blue heart.

Pass through that dot,

which is the last door.

Of this gate, you yourself are the keeper.

All gods, saviors, and messiahs

dance around it like moths

with crisp burning wings.

For them it is a catastrophe,
for you a liberation,
the infinitesimal amethyst sky.

Trillions of cells in your body awaken,

every one a door,
each with its own bell, its own radiance,
its own syllable of praise.

The earth bathes in the music of your tears.

This is the work of silence.


Photo: Shutterstock

Empty

You are an empty vessel.
The crystal crack in you

is shaped like a vast

bolt of lightning.

These tears are not yours.

They are nature's tears

spilling through you,

nurturing the loam.

It is Autumn now,

time to settle and lean

toward mothering darkness.

Time for the beauty

of inexplicable sorrow.

 

 

Photo: old unsitable bench in my backyard

The Well Inside Water

 

Everyone has a plan
but God.
She just weeps and sings.
Teardrops may be many,
but the sorrow is one,
a benediction, 
the luminous nectar
pouring from ancestral eyes
that gaze out of the well
inside water,
beholding the beauty
of a world not quite,
not quite,
a world that gushes
from seeing,
from the place where
we all go to pray, 
the place
where we kissed
before we were conceived.

Photo by Donna Kennedy

Mothergold

 

Sabbath morning.

Season of not quite Autumn.

Call it Mothergold.

Let silence blossom

through your smile
or your tears, they spring
from the same source.

Listen to the last chrysanthemum.

Petals of time fall softly

on the stream of Presence

and float away.

Be bold.

You have mighty wings,

the inbreath, the outbreath.

They carry you to the kingdom

where you Are.

Find a new earth
in the stillness

between thoughts.

Plant seeds of peace

here.


Photo from Gardener's Path

Lila

First the Beloved is someone else. Then the Beloved is within you. Then you are within the Beloved.  In the end, or was it the beginning, you both dissolve in a silent explosion of energy with no name, no boundary, no duration. A dahlia bursts into a thousand petals, yet there is only one flower. Without a Word, creation blossoms, flares out, leaving no smoke, no ash. What burned? Your mind. Neither Lover nor Beloved remain, just a thunderbolt of stillness lost in deep listening. Love is the flower of emptiness. The void blossoms with heart-rending beauty into an unendurably beautiful countenance. Thus every mystical tradition, at last, speaks of the face of God. It is the gaze of pure awareness into the mirror of pure awareness. The subject alone, without an object, turning to behold the Christallized essence of its own Self. In adoration you cry, "Krishna!" "Amitabha!" "Lord Christ!" But your very prayer changes the Beloved into someone else, and you fall into a thousand more lifetimes of seeking. Better just be astonished, with no idea why you dance.

Your Radiance

 

Your radiance outshines the earth.

Wormy loam, composted dahlia,

moldering racoon corpse,
newborn orphan.

All have your face.

Your radiance outshines the mind.

No thought contains you.

Every desire has your freckles.

Marveling at your body,

the archangel and the cow

gaze with one and the same eye.

Your foolish compassion
mocks every law.

No scripture contains you.

When you glance at me

there is no right or wrong.

I see you in the one I despise,
proving that Jesus
is not a plastic flower.

Your flesh is made of silence.
No mirror contains your
darkness.
Are you a cauldron
of molten paradox?

I keep you gold and warm
near my heart

so you don't congeal into
opposites.

When you burst out of my
center,
my center is everywhere.

The ones I feel sorry for
are those who still think
this world of pain and beauty
has a purpose.

They haven't tasted
a single spoonful
of your dust.

Your salt in their tears.
They are still sober.

Art by Andrew Wyeth

More About Dahlias

September morning, a dahlia on my porch. I finally thanked her for holding the whole summer in her hands as an offering to me. So grateful for her scarlet gush of uncreated silence into creation, through ephemeral shades of blood-umber bug-enticing sugar. Not once all summer did she complain about the state of the world. Not once did she sigh, "I am the victim, pity me, punish my enemies." With her immaculate unwavering gaze, so vulnerable in her thirst for simple water, her lust for the sunbeam, her root-cling into loam, she depended on me, as I depended on her. It was understood: "We need each other, the flower, the man, the mystery." Winter will surely come and she will center down into the bulb, like a pilgrim breath of light coming Om to holy darkness. Yet she will return, a true anam cara. Together, we have no story but Presence. The divine chaos of transfiguration happens only here, now, in this perpetual moment, never in the future or the past. We pay attention to the frail, the perishing. This is the strength of our friendship.

Photo: well, yes, the dahlia on my porch.

Song for Krishna Janmashtami

Has no one told you?
   The fingers of the infinite play your wounds

         like the holes in a flute.
      You could be an instrument for the breath

            that impregnates gardens.

Pressing your bruises, the healer makes melody

   pass through the emptiness in your thigh.

      Your scent fills him with longing, though you

         are but one of a trillion jasmine petals
            dancing in his exhalation.

God is a hungry ghost without you.
    Why not be his flute?

         So hollow, yet hollowness so useful!
A song until now never heard in this world,

    only in that one.
         This is the music of the body.

              That was only music of the mind.

The foreplay of Lover and Beloved

     is the path to annihilation

          where we get the concept of Zero.

              One is not enough, Two is too many.
The outbreath and inbreath consummate

    their marriage in stillness.

        "I do" is a mantra dissolving both bride and groom

             in the cup of Unknowing.

 

Renew these vows

     with each rise and fall of your chest,

          this is how to make the marriage last.
               When the golden dahlia bursts open,
                    do you count her petals?

When the Friend appears under the arbor
     of your ribs, do you even notice
          the two brown naked feet
               that crush the clusters in your heart?

Let your eyes be like withered roses,
     blinded to every abyss but God.
          Gaze into radiant darkness
               at the center of the sun.
Become the look that looks at you.

     Grace is a dagger, not an abstraction.
          The first gasp of this life was ignited
               by the last pulse of that one.

Now the cup overflows because the wine steward

      cannot stop pouring.

           The spinning sommelier himself is drunk.
                This is no miracle, just physics.
It’s how Otherness tops off the self
     and become a fragrance
          to intoxicate the Friend.

 

Don’t be an image in the attic mirror.
     Be a blossom rooted in the mud

          of kisses and tears.

If the wanderer can’t find her way Home,

     Home will return to the wanderer.

          Silence is the climax of thinking.

Modesty drowns in billows of wonder.
     No island to swim rhythmically to,

          no breast-stroke of prayer,

               merely a fin slicing through wavelessness,
a voice crying through your lips:
     "Don’t throw me even a thread of hope!

          How can I call for salvation

               when I am sinking in a wave of the Beloved?”

Friend, you have no choice.

     You are a burst of foam on the milk ocean,

          a ripple on the sea of birth and death,

               a teardrop in eternity churned up
                    by yearning for this alone:

 

A cry of pain and sweetness
     more luscious than “Govinda, Krishna, Ram!”

          savored by your tongue, in your belly,

               and on the soles of your feet.
No syllable contains this secret hymn of silence.

     All the pages of the Veda do not sing it.
          Only the curves your body

                can encircle the beauty
                    of its breath.
_________________________

Note: Krishna Janmashtami is the Birthday
of Lord Krishna celebrated at Summer's end.