Notes About The Poem
From my "Old Meditator" series.
Reflecting from the Now on the Then...
Snow, Snake, Snow, Birds, Sickness, Sitting
So many, maybe millions
No, billions. Trillions?
Of stars, a quiet, hot snowfall
of white stars; sandal season squall.
Each birch tree here outdoing
January's record accumulation.
Weeks of hour after hour after hour
upon day upon day upon day of
birches' burstings into snow tears
seed of children as-yet unrooted,
unsown, ungrown, unknown.
A snake came to discard its boundaries-
Rubbing against me for some many
minutes. Trusting and patient;
or...oblivious to time and me
Then? A bluebird who
seemed to Steal the Sky
and carry it in her feathers.
So much so that looking up
I was shown only gray-
Gray piled on grey, and here
only this bird shone.
Then a woodpecker- her red
neck spot a singular cinnabar blot
a calligrapher's littler chop drop
a dalliance in dun
a dalliance with joy!
Otherwise grey with white streaks
bordered in black.
She landed too.
Beside me in purported meditation.
I mean, if I had been successful
at the measureless practice I'd not've
remembered what I'd been there to do.
There by the Spruce, there by the altar
to unseen faeries, in crying distance of
The Grieving Tree, a yellow willow a-weep.
And then, the third day, I sat-
convinced of my path and this need
to sit there, on that Way, trying to do better,
to do less, to be better, to be less.
So I sat, convinced of the rarity:
The snake come to slough her skin
and rub alongside my leg where it
met and nested and nestled my foot.
Both died, or so it seemed. The Buddhist snake-
Given new life, ouroborous of life, after
shuffling off its mortal matte coil.
The woodpecker, from nest to laid-to-rest
Now lay, an offering, on altar stone.
I say both but it was three-
the Skybird too! Dead of thievery.
Dead and witnessed by Third Eye, this
third "Why?!?!" And so I? I cried and I
I sat.
So I sat-
weeping with tree,
weeping for she.
For the bluebird died too!
There where the snake came,
there where the noisy-billed'd be.
She stole and savored the Sky
and Came to roost with this guy.
And by that same leg, with not one
single chirp, arrested her motion
and toppled over brushing my leg
with a blueSky wing under a darkening,
darkening, blackening, sky.
So I sat.
And then.
So I sat and then...
This fourth day alone,
beside faerie stone
A barred owl came down-
afraid not of Death.
Afraid not of Life.
I was neither surprised or amazed.
So I sat.
And sat.
And yes.
This owl then passed.
Just as the last
came to their last
in ev'ry each day passed
This owl then passed.
Dark eyes went hollow.
Lids slipped over soul.
Fluttered up like a helium dream
Six-foot up and then, suspend!
In no hurry to melt into Earth,
and no hurry to dissolve into Heaven.
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