i enter an empty temple.
it’s not silent.
footfalls resonate
&
floorboards creak.
but flickering flames
&
sleepy-eyed Buddhas
are quiet enough
in an hour,
the monks will filter in
with great punctuality:
monks, young and old.
(i would say, “and ages in-between,”
but they all seem young or old.)
there will be chanting,
and the din of finger cymbals
and deep-toned drums.
and i will leave
for the solace
of the world
outside the temple.
the hawk's head-shifts are precise and follow in rapid succession... and then cease it lifts one feather at a time as if sniffing its pits it shifts from talon to talon, and then once more it seems to be settling in, getting comfortable for a long stakeout... and then it's gone, diving off the ledge, disappearing into the city valley
tweets & cheeps i hear them all: dainty expressions of tiny birds i hear them amid the neck-stretched caws of jungle crows & amid the circling screech hawks weightless birds: flitting & jumping, flitting with wings blurred to invisibility & jumping: bounce - bounce - bounce
Feet feeling rock, until one loses the ability to tell where the sole ends and the mountain begins. If one were rooted like a gnarly cedar, it would feel no different. When there is nothing but mind, there is no longer anything to differentiate...
We need a flow of wild ideas, though some will drift ever onward, into the vast nowhere: beyond application or reason. One will catch on the shore, others will pile into it, becoming a beaver dam of bad ideas. Unstable? Maybe. But the flood will rise, and lift that stuck idea, and send the whole logjam spiraling out to the deeps where maybe one idea will float apart, and find the light that makes it look worth chasing.
In a patch of Deccan wetlands, I see the cattails of my Hoosier youth. Half a world away, and nature grants me continuity that culture can't provide. I am transported to my youth by a common landscape. Indiana -- India, names almost the same, but ever so different... except the cattails.
a rocky monolith, jutting from the sea, is smashed by waves. overgrown with moss & gnarled trees. battered brutally & unrelentingly, and yet unchanged & unmoved. birds confidently settle upon the rocks & take off again, leisurely.
victory in the palm of the hand (specifically, the winged, laurel-bearing Nike -- goddess who personifies victory) it's a bit on the nose as is the bent front leg as if standing on the chest of a vanquished foe as is the looming, nothing says victory like looming (unless you're a weaver) but victory is never so unambiguously glorious as it's mythologized
nine miles down an old dirt road that runs the valley, the road disappearing before the pass, fading into a footpath, and then into a vague notion in a rare turn of events, i can see - but not hear - the whitewater that's running back toward from whence i came, and then on to a sea in some distant country i sit on a grassy hilltop, feeling i'm far enough down the road to be at peace
arrayed in pairs, mythical guardians stand aside a stone staircase the tourists seem undissuaded by the figures - be they freakish, grotesque, or mean the most dismaying of them may be the ones with a warm, polite grin... and a lion's body
the !n(tro)verted yogi 