there is a ma-ai -- an ideal interval -- the perfect gap in space & time & space-time there's a ma-ai: between setup and punchline & between punchline and laugh between inhalation & exhalation between listening & speaking between receiving & countering between swinging & hitting too rushed and momentum is smothered to slow and momentum dissipates there is a ma-ai for all things that move.
The Wet Hex by Sun Yung Shin
the tractor idles in the end-row, chugging and sputtering, with a rattling exhaust flap soon the tractor lurches into straight-line locomotion, chugging down the row, carving out furrows, peeling soft, black soil aside the cut worm does not forgive, but neither does it know what hit it -- some thunderous storm, monotonously rolling nearer - becoming more all-pervading - until it starts to fade, but by then the worm is halved everything becomes something else: worm aerates soil and then becomes food for the tugging bird
I heard the dead children, their voices lilting on the wind. The war-torn twice born came crawling in under the wire, bloody and shell-shocked, but among the living, but the rest floated away: their words becoming both milder & more raucous, never fully drowned out by bombs or crossfire chaos.
scribe & chronicler: face unknown, name unknown, soul laid bare by way of words -- words that reveal from the inside out -- it's not the way we're accustomed to getting acquainted we're used to surface learning 'til we scratch through, but here we have: no name, no face, but deep insight
Thang Tong Gyalpo, They called him: Maker of Iron Bridges, King of the Empty Plain, "Excellent Persistence," & Madman of the Empty Valley You might not like your bridge-maker sharing mind & body with a madman, but some of his 15th century bridges are still in use today.
sunlight pours over the mountain, cascading into the valley, drawing all eyes into its blinding whiteness too much light enters my eye just as too much information, sometimes, enters my mind and, yet, i peer through the searing pain - just for the view
two tender, little mushrooms stand amid a mossy expanse i'm moved by their intimate proximity though i don't know it to be anything other than a random molecular fact, and yet it speaks to me, and i feel proximity & distance all the more intensely
granite bubbled out of the jungle, and - upon it - they built a temple its walls were anchored into stone until its walls were the hill, and the hill was its walls and no one could find one true point at which one ended & the other began was it built to be closer to the heavens, or further from hell? not by people for whom heaven & hell reside in the mind -- unattainable by velocity, inescapable by distance -- constant traveling companions only confronted head-on maybe they wanted it to feel permanent, knowing even that granite would crumble in due time
skyscrapers rise & fall storms hit & wither waves crash & recede nature neither blesses nor curses, despite the constant counting of its boons & banes; its bonanzas & broken bones one who can feel grateful in the face of ignorance & imperfection is free one who feels suffering in the absence of perfect comfort will never know freedom such a one as that imprisons himself in a cycle of imagining & coveting a perfection that has never existed
Tiger Riding for Beginners 