Days Of Disappearance \ Out Like A

Nancy: Ryokan, in his hut on a mountain, knew snow and isolation.  We, in our cabin on a bay, live snow and wind not unlike his – two hundred years ago.

Days Of Disappearance

                                    My abode is/ in winter seclusion/ on this white mountain in Echigo./ 

                                    No trace of humans/ coming or going.

Whirling snow

our tracks disappear as we make them

uphill, downhill

drifts are boulders

boulders are drifts

no one comes

bay floods the path freezes

Ryokan uses fewer words

more art than language

asks ("who?”)

good fortune to live here

this cabin, this life

when Ryokan comes

Epigraph from Tanahashi Kazuaki, Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan (Shambala, 2012, p.150)

Alan: I wrote this last year.  Today, a blizzard bears down on us, bringing high winds and up to two feet of snow.  The crows that ride our skies are hiding.

Out Like A

Poor March!  Are you enraged

that winter’s over, and no big storms?

Does the notion of global warming

frost you?  Your lion chases

the frightened lamb to the end,

though last week they did lie down

together, peaceful as Quakers.

It was only a breather.  Now

every tree tosses its electric mane

and all the air in Canada

leaps on us, over the border,

with a roar.

Moonset \ Ryokan On The Grand Tour

Nancy: The sun is life, but the moon is dreams.  The moon is female; the sun is sharp but the moon – this moon – is gentle, this moon wrapped in a diaphanous shawl.

Moonset

clock and calendar

apogee, perigee

wax and wane

This morning the moon sets

one spruce to the south.

Sets into a thin scrim of cloud.

Floods the room with light.

last fullmoon of winter

first fullmoon of spring

Even as I watch, light

washing my face, the moon

slips to the south

into the spruce.

leaves me reaching

leaning

toward the sky

the invisible moon

in the sky

Alan:  What would a quiet monk from a remote rural province on the Sea of Japan have made of the decadent glories of contemporary Venice?  Would he be reminded, unexpectedly, of home?

Ryokan On The Grand Tour

At Murano he watches

bright tiny fish swim from glass rods

into crystal seas.

St. Mark’s gold cave all sainted dazzle,

piazza iridescent with pigeons.

Everything millefiori, clattering the eyeballs,

nothing like cool Echigo.

Viewing the Canalettos, their milky aqua skies,

he suddenly longs for Niigata Bay, its pale-green

ice at dawn.

Myself – A Postcard \ Climbing March Hill #3

Nancy: Some postcards are maps of Maine with an arrow, “We are here.”  Some are more singular.  This is an “I am here.”

Myself – A Postcard

Gleaner, picker, digger, fisher,

sun-risen, sea bequeathed,

night haunted, haunter,

full-moon singer,

flower fed,

tide led,

wind released,

come to earth in search of healing,

needing, seeking, aching, owing,

borrows soaring,

rooting,

growing,

sends you seeing, sorrow, caring,

night songs, love songs,

runes,

and spells.

Alan: Again and again we struggle toward Spring, carrying memories like embers in clay, finding our way to warmth and light.

Climbing March Hill #3

Halfway up

     the trail grows muddy –

clouds sag in the trees –

     air turns dank.

Crows the only buoyancy

     in these dark woods.

Old path: familiar

     from so many years.

See?  How it’s worn?

     Traces of our steps –

our past journeys.

See?  Tracks of our friends –

     the dogs, the cats

who kept us company?

     I name them, one by one,

in my mind.  Call to them.

     Reach out a hand to touch.

Reach out an actual hand

     toward yours.

Who Screams? \ He Encounters Wallace Stevens

Nancy: Night sounds, day sounds, life sounds and death sounds – one by one we learn the calls and enrich our sense of our wild neighbors.

Who Screams?

Who screams in the night?

Who takes the path we carved between the spruce

and pauses (where my body pressed the grass beneath the birch)

and screams again?

Who claws at sleep?

Who walks our path at night and screams –

up from the cove, and past our door down to the bay?

Who breathes, and who is still?

Who travels on the path,

and makes the night air taut with silences and screams?

Who sleeps?

Who waits?

Who walks tonight on paths we used today?

Who screams?

Alan: Poems, and the poets whose minds they carry, meet across time and space.  The quotations are from Stevens’ “Of Mere Being.”

He Encounters Wallace Stevens

Visiting his rich friend’s villa,

alone among porcelains, the Chinese classics,

Ryokan reads... “the palm at the end of the mind...,”

rushes out, lost all day

among Otogo’s cool pines and moss-damp slopes,

breathing “bronze decor,” breathing

“fire-fangled feathers,” stick and

begging bowl in the hall,

forgotten.