Duck Weather

The world wraps the cabin in wet for days.
Things happen. Enough water will damage
Almost anything sooner or later,
Even the sea. Think of all those glaciers.

The exquisite lenses of perspective
Sat on a log in the rains overnight.
Now everything looks misty, close, and dank.
The mountains withdraw. Birds quiet. Worms float.

Each small, local thing seems to lose its place,
Caught up by waterfalls, churning creeks, mud,
Blocked vortices circling in high meadows
Then rushing down rocks to cold, swollen lakes.

What a beautiful misery this is,
What monotonous, sorrowful solace.
What is it about wet weather that serves
As a kindness only to loneliness?

When it is silent except for the rain
There's peace, but any companionship's hard.
The wet creeps in, dissolves fellow feeling,
Invites mildew into each warm embrace.

The Things We Perceive

"Nothing in our brain is truly objective. Our perception is deeply and pervasively shaped by how we feel about the things we perceive."

Aren't there. Aren't that,
Aren't as we perceive them.
We know this because we've tested
Each other with various lies
And found that we fail to recognize
The truth that our ruses
Are designed to disguise.

Or they are there. They are
Whatever it is that we believe
They are. It is not the blind
Men groping the elephant
Nor the social psych subjects
Tricked by postdoctoral confederates
Who are fooled, except in our stories,

Designed, like errata
Notices produced by media,
To convince us the truth is
Out there, or in here,
In the text of our expert reports,
Vouchsafed by these very same
Revelations of precisely measured mistakes.

There never was an elephant.

There were only those few worlds
Of finite organisms feeling something
With necessarily limited senses.
And if that's not the whole truth,
Then design your own trickery.
I am that which perceives that I am.

Four Short Meditations from a Cloudy Shore

1. Apology

The poem is always better behaved
Than the brain that takes credit for it.
Even the most scatological
Or curmudgeonly, misanthropic,
And just plain hateful of poetry
Probably amounts to rebrewed tea.
Trust the honest, the confessional,
And the revolutionary least.
The naked will have the most to hide.

2. Sutra

We only think that we know what we want.
We only want what we think that we know.

We only know what we think that we want.
We only think that we want what we know.

3. The Dog That Doesn't Care

There's a boy on a lawn, throwing a ball.
There's a dog on the lawn, ignoring him.
It's summer, or almost, in Canada,
But the rain is still raining every day.

The boy wonders why the dog doesn't care
While his mother, inside the house watching,
Wonders why everything about her hurts.
The dog gets up and goes into the woods.

There's a boy on the lawn, tossing the ball
To himself and catching or dropping it
Between fits of showers, while his mother
Talks on the phone inside. The dog is gone.

4. Watery Ear

The lake is dark this afternoon,
No gold underwater today.
One duck keeps croaking urgently.
A chainsaw buzzes in the woods.

The globe is warmer somewhere else,
One supposes, and colder too.
The brain sets up scenarios
From memory of the unseen.

If a mind could stay here, right here,
Emptied of the news of the world
And thoughts of greater importance
Than a dog's bark, a fish's jump,

The soft, continuous echo
Returned by the mirroring lake
That sums raw wood and village sounds,
Would that mind be released or trapped?

Fiddlehead

Take off your shoes, old man,
And quit your complaining.
The light tonight is mild.
You still have your senses.
You sit in a green world
And tonight it is spring.

You remain in your world,
Your miseries are mild,
Sweetness fills your senses,
And the squirrel complaining
In the hemlock at spring
Loves life like an old man.

All Politics Are Local

The union of this body
Seems to be coming apart.
Cells in the feet have rebelled
Against the stoic-celled heart.
Cells in the brain crawl away
And refuse to do their part.
"Save us from this flesh!" they pray,

While pretending to themselves,
They are anything other
Than what everything else is
In this parliament bothered
By back-bench insurrections,
Against the rules that smother
Rebels' hopes of redemption.

Clouds of Water of Clouds

What is my mind making now, crazy thing
That won't leave itself alone one moment?

I would like to think that fog is out there,
Just as it appears, rising off of pines

Like the backdrop for a Japanese poem
By a long-ago Zen master in robes,

Something requiring precision to catch
With the correct thinking, correct science,

But I'm quite sure that this is only me,
Only nothing whatever once again,

Hearing sad music in a wet landscape
In which what is is inseparable

From what was and what I imagine
Might be about to be, all this fog,

Rolling down from glaciers, up from the lake,
Wisps fingering through me, mind made of trees.

Is That So

"The koan is something like, 'What is this?' or something, but it's not that, exactly."

Wise or foolish, there's no escape
From being aware of being
When all we are is awareness,
Unless we are no longer there.

And what is it we're aware of?
Myself, I'm nine parts fantasy
And, most of the rest, memory
Torn up to make more fantasies.

It does sound like a good idea
To give up the fantasizing
And live only in the newest past,
The ongoing just-gone called "now,"

But the delta of the just-gone,
However complexly braided,
Is expansively shallow marsh
Sinking in the gulf of the past.

Whatever it is to exist
While all tangled up in living,
To be aware of existing
Is to imagine existence,

To imagine swimming upstream,
To want to return to the source.
But awareness is neither fish
Nor water, only the river.