the sound of morning rain

Even birds

don't cry now;

that bloodshot

one-eye may have left the sky.

Miyazawa Kenji

Seung Hwan Chung

                                

It was a stranger’s bed, and it was made out of stones and branches, but it was empty and you were tired—you slept there anyway. Forty days and nights passed before you woke up again, and when you did, you discovered that you had a new name and a new face.

You had walked a long way to get to that bed, across a valley that spelled fresh and clean, and the stranger who owned it was a woman fresh from a shower. She wanted you as much as you wanted her, and so you answered to whatever name she called you.

After making love, you are hungry, nearly starving. You ate the grapes, you ate the bread and hummus, and you licked your fingers clean one at a time. There was no clock. You did not know the time or where you were. What is the difference?

It was a stranger’s bed, and it was made out of stones and branches, and this time you were not alone. Still naked and bearing your touch and your seed, she lay down in the middle of the bed, and you climbed on to join her, circling around and around like a dog.

____________________

Winding the old clock, I ask it
about all of the hours it has shared
with me. No answer,
just the sound of morning rain.

_____________________

Shivering on the north bank,

Putah Creek rolls on under my reflection.

The creek moves along

But my reflection remains still.

A cold winter morning in Winters, California.

____________________

There should be a sentence that accurately describes the world today. 

One simple sentence; if I ever think of it I'll file a copyright.

____________________

I am tame, yet I am wild all the same. Think of me as you would think of a seedling tree in your front yard; you didn’t plant it, yet it grows there nonetheless. Will you uproot it or leave it to grow toward the sky, toward the sun, toward the moon? Life is about growth, and life is about about choices. Life is the tame and the wild sharing space together. 

____________________

On the sidewalk past midnight, I wonder what this town would be like if we had monkeys.

James Lee Jobe 

"Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream of the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies."

Gary Snyder

Yokoyama Taikan

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