Smoke of morning rays
caught in gauze
of ebbing mist —
thus in unison all
quivers and dithers
on time’s inmost cusp,
waving through the eyes
on a wizard’s wand.
Come and see yourself
this brief séance
so carefully dosed
so that a pharmacist
and an artist appear as one —
with an act of delicate shock.
Summer's sleeveless blues
and nude degrees earned—
how do they grow such vine
from sun and earth,
so eager to be pressed,
even though one cannot be
sufficiently prinked with shade
or stay enough overdressed
in beads of pearling sweat
and their unctuous sheen?
And still, on the winding way
of such a drink and taste,
vine boughs grow all gnarled,
not unlike the gargoyles
by those exalted tiles and eaves,
with their tips and heels
well tied to blood and flesh
to be offered to a pious mouth
from within the covers
of a book and holy Mass,
where the church holds
its perfumed navel as a cup,
and those devils on the outside
surely pour in—like the builders
whom Solomon himself,
with the harem and the Queen
of Sheba, invited and let in
on the secret over which
wing-clad dames kneel,
thus offering a bath,
or even a whole temple—
beth, lineage and house—
with pillars reaching
for the sky, like bread
pushed down into wine.
O, didn't Plutarch already
tell us that Osiris and Bacchus
were rather the same and one,
and so were Dionysus,
the cheery one, and grim Hades,
in that one little verse
from weeping Heraclitus
that reads like a footnote
when a scholar needs to hide,
saving the rest of his book
for less diligent eyes
to see by passing by?
But what else could
that God of Death
wish for—or ever need?
From time to time, once in a while,
in Café Slavia we would sit—
Rudolf Matys—and only now
I came to see, to know—
all that time my companion was
both Matys, hence Matthew,
“Gift of God,” and Rudolf,
that is to say, a “Famous Wolf,”
a strange and distant kin
to an Adolf, once a visitation
from the West in my dream
near Arkansas’ Little Rock.
And among other things
he asked, “How is Mr. Křovíčko,”
meaning George W. Bush
(for in Czech bush is křoví,
a křovíčko is little bush,
and křoví evokes
something, someone
who is hiding—skrývá—
“behind bushes”—
which could be
even a wolf himself.
Wine watered our talk.
And we even talked of Onegin,
and, to Rudolf, neither he
nor Pushkin meant too much,
except that Holan tried to mock
Pushkin’s rhyming scheme
but then let it be—
and all that novel’s talk
of Russian soul and love
Rudolf cleaned up
in one little detached coda
about what he missed:
instead of just sending
Onegin away from her lap
with a note of proud,
yet aching love,
Tatiana should have
used a clue Pushkin himself
offered out for sale—
when he wrote that, in his gaze,
a woman’s foot, especially if
in public under a table’s cloth,
beats each Diana’s breast
and any Flora’s cheeks
(Onegin I.XXXII):
so why shouldn’t—or didn’t—
the lady, as a men’s and poetry’s
good student, learn how to bob
and move Onegin, that well-bred devil,
with nothing—but the meter
of her toes?
After rain,
the sky clears
but already
beneath
where our breath
and feet pass,
earth exhales
water that fell
back to the sky.
But that rain
falling from above
is life to trees and grass,
and flowers bloom
like colored sounds
on the ends
of playing flutes.
Thus, in turn,
pipes of scented bloom
send on the trail
of mist and cloud
their elusive breath
that fuses into breeze
until it bears wind
that brings back rain.
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.
