marion morrison at the zen center

(for zuzu)

the fabric is on fire

against the skin

and rising 

toward clouds spun

of cardigan

in the barricaded

meditation hall.

from under the rubble 

all is quiet.

jesus calling

each barb into place

along the hollow axis.

the Masters

tangerine keisaku

broken open in an offering

of volatiles.

the hall expands

to hold the prairies and canyonlands

in which you are

always all one.

the sparrow flies

over a palimpsest of mud kanjis
the dogs have written
in sacred ink of
earth and rainwater.

the cracker

transubstantiates

to sugar

for the body

to burn.

hallelujah.

Letters from the Outside, #54

I love the blue nights of a late second quarter Moon. The days fluctuate wildly from mud to several below. The tree has been unornamented and waits a proper Viking funeral between the shed and the wheelbarrow. The calendar ticked imperceptibly into a new solar year, one gifted with an extra day to help even the odds. I have always been fascinated with the idea of being born on The Leap Day, aging technically one year for everyone elses four. The tide reaching its flood to full and drawing me along with increased fervor and industry, a welcome friction from what seemed some interminable desert of entirely barren and mesmerizing dunes.

A dry, balmy day sees me down the road in one less layer than I probably should be, ignorantly exuberant in the alien weather. Its when im walking that I feel what it must feel like to be human, as when im dancing I feel a spirit coalesced into flesh. The sunlight changes everything; when it runs to earth unencumbered everything is bathed and unified, and when the wind veils it in dense parades of vapor each piece into self-focus recedes, moving through the aperture of our awareness from the Source. Miracles are germinated likewise in the great plains of Soul and rise through us, true phenomena, channeled Light.

The wind roars on the far side of the valley and the Sun runs a golden crust along ours. The cells dilate, the heart buoyant momentarily. A vertebra from the deer whose bones I wrote were turning into road offered itself to me today, spared somehow from the mower and general decay, transverse processes elegant and intact, the body an evident valentine heart shape and the arches especially long, fine and curved, as to resemble wings. Its a fine sign after shattering the inherited crystal bowl, whos loss was so deep I didnt realize it for a few days afterward, and I havent yet released myself from the regret. There is snow at last to last to spring, cold as cold can be around here but it cuts down on the mud, which has its own devoted season, or used to.

Im writing this bit on the day we've set aside in celebration of a man reviled while alive (better him than palefaced slave-holders and white perpetrators of genocide) and I was writing to a friend about a frank o'hara poem going on about “...the idea of an undercurrent, real, true, meaningful things happening just beneath our distracted reality facsimulation...the quotidian struggles, the titanic, original forces. how the meta and the physical overlap to create the shifting, shitting spectre of man...

...i tend to view the physical world, its denizens, as transubstantiated symbols. blood and body, bread and wine. you, i, the ocean rising into clouds, the cornfields with their countless sweet embryos. its all something else, something greater,” and I remembered a quote by the good reverend himself: “Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Heavy on the aldo leopold and william james lately.

Already half-way through january, four months to see through til the last frost date, but even that is receding toward the equinox. Tuesday night the wind is roaring and I cannot sleep. These, the kind of nights my soul craves a-roaming, wrapped in the brown cloak and shod in the seven-league boots, standing and striding by turns through copses and meadows, mingling in the powerful magic of heavy weather. There is much to learn on a night like this.

In my dream I dreamed it was my birthday, and I was loved. A ways from shore a little rowboat made its way along to land and the people disembarking, once estranged, again opened their hearts to me. And a channel and a sweatlodge and im ready to turn my lead box into a hollow bone. The more it opens, I feel the creature-fear rising, and this fear assures me im on the right track. The fear calls for a great flood of Light to clear the space, to dissolve the fear into love, a vital transubstantiation. But rebirth is no less a struggle than the first.

Well, the snow didnt stay, and the damp desolation seems unnatural and grim. Ill take hard -going in the deep duvet of the late-january snow over the cold mud and colorless skies of some weak nuclear winter.

I was blessed to be in some woods when there was a good cover of snow and I followed the soft arrowheads of rabbit tracks and they led me down the hole. Hawks and crows crying out over and in among the high bare branches sketching out old Raven in a Navajo blanket, facing west. Unclosed just that little bit, and my whole center of gravity rolls like a raindrop to the tip of a long lanceolate leaf and pauses there and offers the view from a telescope the other way around, small and far away until its returned to the Earth, blending with everything. Only the roads retain enough cold to keep the snow on them. Everything is pale and frozen and exposed, the hard wind funnels through the valley and roars across the highground.

We love you.

TRANSPORT from Noah Kalina on Vimeo.

for golden boy, at seventeen.



(birthday, michael stipe).

Letters from the Outside, #53

An honest november chill sets in. You can feel, in the all-night glare of the new christian rec center (Im pinned down on all sides now by incessant electric lights, the cross and old glory) the snow pressing against the black bottoms of the clouds that cover our moon. The last logs of last years stovewood go into the licking heat of the hearth and tomorrow we go to get a fresh facecord. This morning taking out the recycling I am blessed by the sight of a big beautiful fox trotting down your driveway.

Late thursday afternoon the snow comes in fat flakes falling fast into night, four inches of winter briefly blessing the valley and followed by what feels entirely like spring -- warm and wet and gentle and after a week, in the last few days before december, a cold rain that aspires again to snow but has held off for the weeks since I last worked on this letter, balmy and bitter by turns but devoid of snow. Now counting up through the first week of december, the night is warm, the buffed blue overcast sky reflected pewter against the broad deep creek that runs through the valley toward the lake. The wind is only in the tops of the trees, fingertips up a vertebral ridge.

I bought fifty pounds of sunflower seed from the farm down the road and walked the blue dog over the bridge to deliver, with much stealth and good wishes, a lunchbag of the stuff for Sister Mother, a great friend and admirer of the birds. With the cat population as it stands around here, I cant claim to carry four stars from them, but try to repent with suet cages and black oil silos. So good to see the goldfinches go gray, the more marvelous an infusion of Life through the feathers in the spring which we seemed to have borrowed a few weeks from in early december – damp air and the muddy ground, one expected crocus and birdsong. But then just cold without the snow, bitter and bone-deep even out of the wind, the culvert water too cold even for the dog, and chargers of ice on the puddles at the side of the road.

Finally today, a few days before the Solstice, there comes snow. Snow never fails to help me feel better. The glass glitter globe dr. zhivago romance of the whole thing, my reindeer herding d.n.a. thrumming, the deep need to ramble through some lonesome woods and disappear into the sleeping world. Traffic on the walk can be heavy, and most certainly jarring. It works against the desired contemplative reward of my ambling and, standing there still with the dogs pulled up against me, considering the rocks and sticks and whatnot on the verge as the hrududus barrel within feet of us, our motley knot, I think well, if it hits us, itll be quick.

And how excellent it is to come in from the cold with red cheeks and bright eyes and have a little lunch and sit by the woodstove and write to you, knowing that this time next year you will have been three months again my good neighbor, in the flesh.

The pasture has gone from brown to grey, with only cut hay and fen reeds shining golden before and behind the bare black sketch of trees in the riparian way. The Chestnut leaves sound like bones and bamboo windchimes while the eye slides around over the imperceptibly shifting blur of the sky. Something about me here, pinned at the bottom of the wheel, when the world holds its breath before the strong winds of springtime stretch the muscles of light over the bones of winter, brings me inevitably into a torpid and viscous melancholy which only now, the eve of Solstice, sees me rising through.

I dust diligently, of all unlikely things, and bake the rest of the cookies cut in the shape of a heart, like the ones on a card, a valentine. I do Suns and Moons and Hands and Hearts for the most part, whatever holiday we're in.

I dust off all my chunky bead necklaces flocked in beggars velvet from lying on the dresser exposed and they glitter tucked into a little box for proper keeping. From the array im chosen by a bone Maori Koru, offering the bright beginning of a fiddlehead fern, a spiral dance perpetually returning to its point of origin, a soul engaged in change and awakening.

The winter holiday comes and goes with the black roar of water on cliffrocks and the vast silence of night in the middle pacific. There is palpable relief as it passes, stepping out from the curb into the muscular whoosh of a speeding truck inches from its hot metal engine.

Yesterday one had to drive south into the hinterland foothills of unbounded pasture, cornrows and looming, alien windfarms to see a quarter-inch of snow in the furrows and beneath the trees. But today it swirls like the inside of a souvenir snowglobe and I leave the house only to bring in more wood for the stove, to let the cats and dogs come and go, and finally send this letter to you. I putter and muse, nurse a persistent illness, reflect on my freshly minted resolutions.

The light grows, 2012 is upon us, and I try and turn my face to time with an expression of love and wonder. But what an excellent year for liberation. 

We love you.

"i quit cigarettes cold turkey for about eight days and after that started rolling pipe tobacco and smoking it in my brown housecoat in the late morning next to the woodstove.

the neighbor in his little frontloader moving the earth around is, after three weeks of ten-hour days, a sound i have yet to get used to --

coming up from under everything else the incessant roar pricks my ear in this season of burning.

if i roll my own cigarettes, i rationalize to myself,

i smoke less for shorter durations and the fume is prettier.

there is also the fiddle factor, the aura of ritual, and the devils bargain.

i have not bathed in days.

i sit staring out the window, waiting for the light to change."

the friday song.

for gurldogg

Dream Song 28: Snow Line by John Berryman

It was wet & damp; white & damp; swift and where I am
we don't know. It was dark and then
it isn't.
I wish the barker would come. There seems to be eat
nothing. I am usually tired.
I'm alone too.

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,
I'd say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.
Where are his note I loved?
There may be horribles; it's hard to tell.
The barker nips me but somehow I feel
he too is on my side.

I'm too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

 Letters from the Outside, #52

I used to want to know the names of the constellations. And then I realized that thats not who, or what, they are. Theyre what someone else saw, and thought enough of himself to want other people to see the same. I think they are more wild and lovely without our cultural imprints or mystical Arabic names. Now I want to know: which one do I come from?

And the next night a wide swath of western sky clothed in magenta, a freeze-frame of tone-negative northern lights, as if some great city over the hill was burning. It stretches in scraps toward the east, where I first spied it, thinking it the late moon rising in its wane. I stand out there and ogle, waiting for some arrival of a sign; the lonesome pilgrim standing in the dark and the cold of an intergalactic bus stop shelter. I find out later that, in fact, “Earths magnetic field was hit by a coronal mass ejection, enabling the Northern Lights to be seen.” 

Well Blessed Be.

I get a Hail Mary phone call from Sister Mothers older daughter, because who else do you call at ten o'clock on a monday night for foreign films on dvd (to summarize and submit as a power-point presentation the next day) in this town? Happy to walk in the late october night under the far-burning stars, Jupiter huge and heartening in the east, then come home to the wee warm hoosie and work away at the pair of fingerless mitts im crafting for Tamlin (from lovely stuff made of recycled plastic bottles in “Forest Floor” green). Impromptu pilgrimage to our Lady of the Waters and up the hill in all the wrong shoes, bees and butterflies, shale altars and sunlight in the meadow.

Working all week, driving east into the newborn morning, the sky is salmon colored, a pale, smoked pink shot with impossible rose and the cloud-shrouded blue sky of day. But the nights are clear, the stars are close and bright, and at dusk the waxing half-moon rides low and level, traveling west. An odd warmth for november after late octobers date with snow. I can still peg laundry up in the evening and have it dry by the next afternoon.

Im faring better this year than last, I think. Working helps, filling the day with someone elses business, being useful, and contributing to general funds. Standing in the glorious chill of nine p.m. November, I look up, as I am wont to do, at the Stars and the Moon and now Jupiter, which always cheers me, and I think, as I am wont to do, “I am alone.” a sudden and crowding presence like having a ream of paper made of charged Light let loose over your head, this fluttering, comforting, reassuring clairsentience of Presence. And then a kind of exorcism, retching into the forsythia for awhile and afterward, a clear, clean feeling, and the return of my sense of smell. An unusual calm, and the words, “I am arrayed with angels.”

I know more now about what I need to do, even though last nights dreams went unrecorded and gone. A hard frost this morning, but theyre still talking in terms of sixty degrees around noon. The houseplants are crowded for adequate light. I am thinking of giving aloe as a gift to whoever would accept one. Seven daughters all in one pot, spotted and stunted and doing their best.

I roast a squash, bake an apple crisp, finish letters long overdue. What a change in the way I feel, this serenity, spaciousness. It may not last, but ill be grateful for however long it stays, pages of Light, messengers of my Belonging. I feed the woodstove, throw a frisbee for the blue dog, take photos of the garden in her ravaged beauty, and pull seven fine beets from the ground.

The Lavender and Parsley still spry, the Calendula still sporting fine flowers (whose last petals need plucking), the Mugwort green, but everything else a black and skeletal remain bearing seedheads for the birds and next springs resurrection. Full Taurus Moon and I cant sleep, so I go outside and sit in the last of this long stretch of fine weather, the light of which, even obscured by clouds, is bright and the bare cuneiform branches of the Oak trees speak of coming rain, and then, if the voice on the radio is to be believed, of snow

which comes a few days later for one fleeting moment, thin dry bits of frozen dust that spangle the dogs back and arent enough to merit a shaking off.. I bring the old wooden chair in, whose resurrection is a winter goal.

Too many losses and regrets like the dead leaves rustling and whipping around except there is no joy in this pile I rake inside my head, and jump into. Next day the sky is an old grey batting but I get away with another load of laundry for little sails on the line. The green leaves of the lilac tree seem to spoil winters quiet dignity, obstruct the script of twigs against distant hills. For it being the grim season I am doing alright, and am ultimately grateful for the struggle I am allowed. In my dreams I cannot find my sword, and I am tempted to think it will take another few lifetimes for me to earn it. We love you.

for zuzu.

the friday song.