A Little Meditation on an Encounter Between a Zen Master and a Western Student

 

Student: Who am I? I am bones, skin, and blood.

Where do I go from there? Perhaps to this:

to become one with eating. … But to be honest,

I have no burning desire for kenshō—

for seeing (見) "nature" or "essence."

I get easily tired — the Way is terribly long.

—Roshi Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen

 

Whence do the roots of false views come?

Those that gnaw and feed

on what always knows within?

 

Oh, what is one's own

when one dies,

and what is the truth?

 

Is it like a body one thinks one controls,

one's exclusive claim,

a property with sequestered access?

 

Why, can't you hear how the gods laugh

just now?

 

Just think how much emptiness

one has to stir, build, inflate

to keep the truth away, at bay,

 

to let what is false and wrong stay,

be one's familiar company

whether in life or death.

Precession of Those Violin Clefs (Or Why Geometry Negates Emptiness of Space)

 

Ever rising as they go or come

with heels up high,

striking thus a note,

even the soundless

tremulous treble,

Trismegistus,

“three times

greatest”

spiraled clef—

set to undo—open up

new melodies

 

not unlike when it comes to

the transfixing sight

of eyes melded in one lock

with that lock itself

turning into its own

allowing key,

 

and, in that elation,

the unheard-of

forges its own hearing

and the unseen yet

makes time itself

both agape and still

and yet seeded,

enraptured, rich—

like the flesh of fruit.

After All—Isn't Advertisement Itself From Avertir, to Turn, Make Aware and Warn, And Thus Make More Manifest?

 

Modern cities' skylines

add a peculiar title

to our civilization's

strangely routed curve—

 

which one random ad

from the FIFA World

Cup Final, 2026, US,

divulged at last to my eyes

in its blunt, randy act.

 

Old temples used to mirror

a cosmos writ down small;

then those temples

became banks

 

to run mankind's busy flow

through their books,

taking from each

toll and cut,

still donning

ancient garb.

 

But now they look—just plain

as mushroomed cemetery slabs,

meant to raze, to edge

the lots of mortal minds.

 

Underneath, they keep

an ever freshly watered ghost

whom the soccer ad revealed—

giving its finger

to everything in Heaven.