Stopping By Woods \ Cold Night Old Friend

Alan:  My seventh grade English teacher declared that I would be “my generation’s Robert Frost” because of some doggerel or other I’d handed in.  It was an off forecast, but perhaps the following is a long-delayed response to that burdensome prediction.  “Plow,” by the way, means a snowplow.

Stopping By Woods

Meeting Ryokan on a back road

late, one glum afternoon

(he was staring into the trees,

their clotted flanks,

snow flecking his cloak like dandruff;

the grind of a plow approaching from the distance,

and more forecast),

he looked at me, grinned:

“No promises.

Nowhere to go.

No interest in sleep whatsoever.”

Nancy: So little difference – a hut in the mountains, a cabin by the sea – and the quiet that is filled by a thought, a smile, the snick of an ember.

Cold Night Old Friend

Before I had the door open

Ryokan was talking . . . and I

was tired of the cold and went

down to the city but oh

the flapping of paper . . . bells

on every corner . . . something

awful, the little drummer boy . . .

He sighed and pulled a bottle of wine

out of his robes.  We didn’t need

to talk, just put another log on the fire,

it blazed up, just you, me, Ryokan, and

now and then the tkk of a falling coal,

waiting out the longest night.

Ryokan's Night Journey \ Yaqui Well

Alan: We are blessed with our night sky – one of the last places along the east coast of the U.S. where you can still see stars by the thousands - although light pollution now smears the horizon here and there.   How many stars, how many constellations, must Ryokan have seen!

Ryokan’s Night Journey

                 “If someone asks my abode I reply: the east edge of the Milky Way.”

Over his hut the stars.

What did he name them? how shape his sky?

Night after night, winter, summer, watching:

dip, turn, rise, vanish.

Were there beasts, hunters?

Rice paddles, plows?

Or were they stones, way-marks?

On a night this cold

did Ryokan take his stick

and ascend through snowy woods?

Those bright ones, hanging there –

were they a question? or a path?

Nancy: The “well” was nothing more than a pit deepened every night by coyotes.  To the coyotes we owed the small grove of trees, the chattering flock of birds, the broken shards of pottery that showed us the past.

Yaqui Well

From here you can see the waterhole.

No one comes but the birds,

no one laughs,

no one kindles the fire,

no one pours from the dripping jug.

It is broken.

They killed the pots,

killed the tools,

tore down the shelters of brush

and burned everything.

Everything was gone,

the coyote songs, grandfather songs,

the first man and first woman,

the beginnings

and slow steps on the sacred ways.

The circle was broken.

The only path left led to the end of things.

They killed the pots,

and took the path of unsanctified bones.

The water is a sweet secret in the ground.

Coyotes come in the dark, and dig.

Ryokan Under The Great Circle Route \ the animals

Alan: Ryokan has come into our poetry in many different guises.  For me, he often leaps unexpectedly through time and space, hopscotching “normal” existence, a sort of Zen poet Dr. Who.

Ryokan Under The Great Circle Route

Ryokan watches the contrails

spread across the stars

under the moon above Mt. Kugami.

Portents of a future

glowing and fading in the dark.

Too content to sleep,

he takes his brush, writes: “In the void of no-being,

all things are.”  With five quick strokes

draws moon,

mountain, three lines across the sky.

Nancy: I wrote this after hearing a news item about the siege on National Public Radio. 

the animals

                                          Sarajevo, 1993

zoo under siege

keepers at first

ran the gauntlet

bent double

food for the beasts

dodging bullets

the beasts

were old friends

had no nationality

but war is insatiable

war ate the food

war ate the keepers

the beasts ate the trees

even the bark and roots

even the dirt

one another

ate even their young

even their mates

today

the great bear

died of starvation

except for the mortars

the zoo is quiet

unless you happen to hear

ghosts

or wind

in the rubble

a voice saying

leave this planet

while there is time

Driving Route 127 \ Always Seeking The Growing Tip

Alan: David Kresh once wrote a poem that quoted, as an epigraph, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s wonderful “Bright moments, bright moments, bright moments, right now."   Here’s a “bright moments” poem from the road.

Driving Route 127

Occasionally there are moments

traveling a perfectly ordinary stretch of road

topping a perfectly ordinary low rise

to glimpse between the upraised arms of trees

a perfectly ordinary small hill

floating above an implied but unspecified

minor valley

the heart spasms itself so happily tight

you could die now, and should,

making of this a final vision

and grace.

Why then must we keep going over

and down the once again

imperfectly dull miles

knowing our real death waits

patient and banal

to flag us as we round some future

unremarkable blind curve?

Is it we so desire

just another such moment and another,

or suppose that to pause in one

will trip this coherence instantly to decay,

or fear that our minds will hurry forward regardless

leaving our bodies stupidly for all to see

forever dumbstruck and agawk?

Nancy: If you suppose that the following hints at some argument with certain small magazines that mistake the merely fashionable for the truly creative, you’d be right.

Always Seeking The Growing Tip

Hidden behind a cushion

of epidermal tissue, behind tough

expendable cuticle, the active

meristematic cells do their thing.

Which is: to penetrate, to pierce,

to pry, to make a way through grit,

to thrust through rubble, to crack stone;

to suck, to sip, to eke.

All this in the dark, even

rejecting light, tropic,

these cells, this growing tip,

to gravity and elemental stuff.

Elsewhere, coteries form and dissolve

around umbels, around corymbs; much

is made of this panicle or that,

even of ephemera, that have one

– only one – day in the sun.

In the dark, the growing tip is always pushing,

always ready to differentiate; if you are seeking

the growing tip, never look where it was yesterday.

It will have gone, on;

always look in new ground.