You call me animal but I am not your predator. You bear your teeth to mebut I cannot see past your smile. You are nocturnal, like all hunters of fame, yet your eyes are domesticated. Your ears are attuned to the sounds of warm-blooded noises and North America means nothing on your map. You wear your hair with feathers, […]
nature
A Scene from Cumberland Bay
Before his sister could budge him out of the way, Mendon climbsdown the rabbit hole to a window in the stars where everything worth seeing is hidden inside a half-devoured pine cone.
After Meditating On My Front Porch
I again realize that mindfulness is noticingstillness, how the ink on my paper has more than one color of black and feels fluid as silk. And how the hard plastic wheelsof a stroller across the street, scraps the gravel, making soundslike crackling embers. It’s noticing the stillness of a solitary pine needle pulsing in the sighing wind. An […]
Nature’s Deadly Wake-Up Call!
In this new series with Bro. Ananda Kumaraseri, we’ll explore the Buddhist teachings in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Bro. Kumaraseri will focus on how we can reorient our thinking to one of authentic Buddhist liberation, so that we are no longer constrained by old assumptions and biases that are hurting our chances […]
Humpbacks 2
Before the finneddinosaurs of the icydepths were disappointed bythe steamships of men, they casttheir ballads into the velvet abyss, waiting as mothers do with untamed hearts, big as school buses
The Persistence of Memory
Before the finneddinosaurs of the frozen deep were interrupted by the warships of man they cast their love balladsinto the vast abyss, waiting,with hearts as wild and big as schoolbuses, for their own answer.
Listen to the Wild
be wounded with her be empty and homelesswith herbe a light among her trees the turquoise darknessat 3:20 amencounter her be exquisite with herponder her like the longpour of a Guinness at an Irish pub on a slow nighttake a measure of hercrystal beauty her stained-glass beauty awake in her stomachheal with herbend with her have faith in her next breath dare to land with […]
Rise
where there is no religion but God and moon and landand sea and the gathering of otherswho are ready for you to believe.
Stormy Night
There is a loneliness to hail dropson a tin-roofed cabin. The woods and flowers and secrets ofmountains are lonely. So are the trails, ponds, and bridges; the vanished sources looking for a beginning. Dripping drops a million years in the making. Falling asleep in the wounded soil of dreams.
my favorite cage
is made of porcelain white bars, surroundedby ringlets of fire, red hot and orangeas daisies consumed bythe summer sun. Those cornerless bars, alive and fierce as fractals, daring me to eclipse my freedom.