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Stephe Watson Jul 2019
1:08 Meditation, #128


Scent to Find a Monk-


Sometimes the Monk is

not

Home.

     Check Anyway.


Sometimes the Monk is

not

aWay.

     Check Anyway.


Sniff Around,


  Wait.  Sit.  

Birdcalls, Thoughts...

Distractions, All.

Pay Mushin No Shin

at All.


  Wait.  Sit.

Stay Vigilant,

Stay Immanent.


  Wait.  Sit.

Sometimes the Monk is

a Chip Monk.


A Sneeze?!

Satori?


  Wait.  Sit.
Stephe Watson Mar 2019
The blues, the blues, these Blues, the Blues,
The Blues.  The Blues won't stop moving,
but haven't gotten to going.  They're a-move,
they're soluble insomnolence, they're
indefferant irreverence
in reference to reverence.
The Blues won't stop going,
but haven't yet left.
All day, I've sat on this Furthest Shore,
unsure if they'd ever get to outgoing,
if they'd ever get to outflowing.

All day, I've sat and worse yet,
all night (we know the nights are the
very darkest sorta pretend-to-be-blackened blues),
sat on this dew-damp Distant Shore,
unsure if I'd ever get to outgrowing,
if I'd ever get to outgoing.

The blues, the blues, these blues, the Blues,
The Blues.  The blues won't stop wounding.
I won't stop choosing.  I won't stop two-ing.

Tilting at horizons, I hold anchor to
Torii.  Summum Bonum, I insist it be.
(Can't let it be.  {whatever it is.})
(Can't let it be.  {whatever it isn't.})
Gateway from humdrum to hallowed.
A red atop blues, also unmoving.
But still in its unmoving, still unmoving.
How unlike the blues.  This red, how unlike the blues.
Stephe Watson Aug 2018
I’ve sat on a bare-damp chair.
out on the North deck
where the moss blurs the lines
between itself and algae and lichen
and me.  Me, who wouldn’t know such a line
if it were less blurred...I’m not so sharp as all that.


I set my glasses down on a stone table.
Beside the cold-soon tea.
I watch the wind coming, first through the reeds.
And then shifting the banana leaves.
And soon the birch curtain crowding out my
writing place.  My righting place.

The labyrinth is hosting some flowers.  A dragonfly alights on an altar of crystal
and stone and birch branch.  And offerings.  
The dragonflies seems to (me to) re-write spider lines
or maybe ley lines.  A frog just leaped from a tree past my feet.
I’ve lost my word lines, my throughline.
This frog is now in the leaves by the ivy under the bees.
Looking so green.  Leaf droppings dropping on its head.
It’s green head.  Like an emerald in a mountain’s side.

Now a rustle.  Just beyond.  But not that far.  Like feet away.  But beyond.
Another distance.  Another limit.  Another world.  A bank-robbery escape-mode
Squirrel is making off with what it made off with from the free-to-all and undefended
(and legal, too) pear tree in the far yard.  It leaped upon the birch trunk and then, startled to find me unstartlingly well...just here.  And unstartled.  Paused to set its claws in bark.
It teeth gripping as fifth grip the rind of an unripe pear, its size, if I might compare,
the size of its head without the ears, without the hair.  This unrepentant squirrel leaped                  from
     here
to
     there
all of which was over there but just there so basically here.  (Just not here here, more there.)  It found its place to contemplate me.  To observe.  It made no offer.  But of itself.  Which, really, is all that we can do.  It chuffed a few times but it seemed to me that this was more to do with why-not-give-this-a-try-but-I-don’t-know-why.  It’s belly flush to gray birch bark.  It’s tail extended, and caught by a breeze that the leaves were not informed of.  A deceiving breeze.
Soon - which wasn’t soon, it was minutes - the squirrel scrambled up the birch and branch-to-branched its way to overhead and then out of sight.  I may have smelled of peanuts as I’d just emptied a jar.  I may have been the deceiver.  I may be the lone believer that I might know at all.

The frog hasn’t yet moved.


Something is buzz-whistling.  In the grass?  The trees?  The soil?  The sound rises and the tone
shifts.  The pitch lifts.  I cannot say if it is insect.  I cannot say if it is amphibian.  I cannot say if it is electric and thus man and thus unwelcome.  Cicada?  Frogs?  A hummingbird just fooled me into thinking I knew something about speed.  Something about color.  Something about birds.
Something about Nature.  Something about need.  Something about life.  Something about something about my self.  A partial-second lesson.  The teacher came and went.  The teachings stayed behind in mind.  I have so much work to do.

The far birch, placed in the yard for a long-ago dog
seems to offer up a peach harvest this year.
(At least when my glasses are off.)
The landscaper says that all the birches are yellowing this summer
this year this near to the midsummer and this far from the far flung
and far colder cold slumber of December and November and October.

The blue spruce has a still-for-the-first-time-this-season small flock
of oriole.  Or sunset-breasted, warbler wren throated tipped somethings.
I count seven.  Or six.  No, eight.  Wait.  Nine.  Uh, now eight.
Oh, there’s one!  Oh, no matter.  There’s some.
Too flighty and flittery each blur-glance I’ve had all year.  And I've tried each time
to secure them (sharply) in my lens.

The ducks converse as they arrive at the pond’s far edge.  About to traverse the
turtle-hiding waters, the en-flowered pond’s surface, the distance between heard and seen.
I reach for my glasses.  The birch leaves in yellow have fallen and lied.  Belied to believed.
There are no birds in the tree.  That I can see.  That I care to see.  Autumn come early.

A hawk glides past my edge-of-can’t-quite-see.  It’s loping-like arc its own pleasure...to me.
And, I imagine, it.  The meadow is blushing in purple, ironweed.  The jewelweed, too is a star-field of twinkling orange.  A constellation by day.  A bowl by the winter-blooming something (jasmine?) is concentrically coming awake as drip drip drippings are drop drop dropping.  A yellow-spiked caterpillar treks through the detritus of the unkempt bits of the beside-the-garden which isn’t so much a garden as a place I once planted and once planned.  A spider fast-ropes down to investigate and, as it happens, to pester.  The caterpillar twists and tumbles.  Righting itself, it plods on in its stretch-curl way as the spider ascends to the invisible upper home in its way.  The frog hasn’t moved but I notice and note its **** has two bumps.  Like its bulbous eyes in its front which, as I notice and note is spear-shaped as is its hind.  I wonder at defenses.  It is still.  It still is still.  It’s stillness is still stilling.  Until...I move on.  My fastest is not footed but mindful.  Not mindful but of mind.  I am of a mind to move the mind along.  The caterpillar closes the distance.  What a distance to it it must be.  It’s face is black as an undersea shadow.  It has spikier spikes of black here and there.  Likely in some pattern but my mind has moved and so, here and there it will be.  My story.  My pattern.  My refusal to change.

The mushrooms where the spider met the yellow fellow, though.  Sesame-seeded.  Decorated.  Pimpled.  Bejeweled.  A tawny cup beside a stone behind the frog.  Soft mustard-dotted.  But now!  A new frog where the old new frog had been.  This one a leopard toad.  I think.  (I shouldn’t think.)  Browns upon browns with stripes and blots and dots.  Tans and browns.  At the end of the birch twig is now the first frog.  The green-headed bumpy-butted one.  The leopard in tiger lily patches watches the caterpillar (a different one?) clamber though the unswept unkempt.  

The frog, beside me in ceramic keeps time for the timeless.  The throat bellowing.  As though feeding a fire somewhere where Earth is turned to plow.  We all make our own ends, don’t we?
Stephe Watson Oct 2018
The wet lichen
and I
sit upon the dew-slicked
outcrop of boulder bits -
both preternaturally verdure

Each seeking solace in the
space
each seeking what we need from
air
Inclined to commune here, both
'til
the sunrays fade-
my companion soaking sun from
without
and I, I seek a subtler, silent
inner light

We two ourselves
had thought perhaps
to sitstill alone
here
And having found (of course,
of course) a fellow
sit-seeker here
changed course (of course)
and sat astride this
same (but not for long,
only for long) stone

What'd've been an I
(grumble,sigh)
was now a we you see
and I, as well was never
only I but, rather I
as I'd not yet known
and my body and its songs

The lichen too
composed
of two
sat as seeming One
but was as much
a fibrous mesh of fungal
strands sit-seeking
along with its
(not hosted but self-same self)
algal (not plant, not animal; not
either, not both) or cyanobacterial
bits of cells and life material

So together, apart and as much
as One
we looked down
in late-October dawn
into the pond
(to see the sun's rise and blush)
and each and both of us
hoped then to find and feel our Light

Then, through the rising
warm mists,
I sought the Sky -
cloud-filled with cattails’ tufts
and there at last
(of course)
through the irreal fog
(annihilated obnubilation)
I saw the fog
and clouds as One

We two, too
were One.
From my "Old Meditator" series.

Reflecting from the Now on the Then...

A Taoist possibly lamenting Buddhism.
Stephe Watson Nov 2018
The sun's setting,
though it may leave you darkening,
is the start of the burning
far under your soles.

The browning now crinkling of
Summer's endlesseeming greening
is but the start of Springtime's
asylum in Xylem.
Phloem's sweet ware will
flow in 'em somewhere
down the line.
It’s pithy, I know
but life is born in death.
And though, come Fall,
trees seem seemingly sapped,
there's an inspiration transpiring.


The firepit's cooling
it's embers cast only shadows
and shades of memories of warmth
and story
and light...
None gather round, the gloomy.

The dormant circle
an ashen reduction
of oak and of fir
but its blackdust when wetted
(yes, ink!)
and dipped in by brush
will one day,
with luck,
be the source of a poet's
enlightening words.

The monarchs have gone -
a silent orange rustle
and, all at once,
the milkweeds go dry;
the once-green
stalks stand stock still,
Rods of Asclepias whose
seedlings are ever
the earliest snows.

Leaving home:
wherever the Earthbreaths may
take them -
bleak, brokenhearted,
hope in a coma...
How unlike the joy of the
flutterbys whose time now
has fluttered by, a chorus
as uttered by
the ungiven hope
who, though unasked,
has wandered the winds
to bring its daughters
(each healing, each hopeful)
a deathgiven panacea
to lands now in their
own limited unlimited Spring.



And you!  I know
your (sic) fiercely pretending
not to be crying.
Hell, to never've cried.
I know your lifework is
'manly' (your words) or
some other idiocy (my words)
and unbroken.  Hell, unbent.

But think on this:
if she's gone far enough,
far enough along,
far enough away;
enough time gone by
since you broke into One
('broke in two' is NOT how it feels),
if enough not enough Her
has passed,
then she's also
more than halfway back
to you,
to Whole.

Nothing can go,
nothing is lost
for there is no
'away' within this Here.
No one now, either
at a loss -
for the knowing
is nigh.
Even the knowing
cannot be going
for long 'fore returning;
the yearning is turning
from far-off to nearby.



The Sky lives as well
in every dark puddle.
Its blues, now on Earth
where all even All is at Home.
For John Shreffler whose images are the sole inspiration for this poem.  Thank you, sir! :)
Stephe Watson Oct 2018
There is no drought.
There is no rain.

There is no when...
There is no then...

There is no unmoved mountain.
There is no wishless fountain.

There is no forever thing-
Every day is Winter;
Every day is Spring;
There is no forever thing.

Every cloud is a rain cloud.
Everything is fearless,
everything is cowed.
Everything is peerless,
everything is arrogant.

Everything is bowed.

Everything is silent,
everything is loud.
Everything is promised,
and all is disavowed.

Every cloud is a rain cloud.
Everything is lost
sometime/someday/somehow
after it's endowed.

There is no drought.
There is no rain.

There is only
(there is only ever,
there is ever only)
your impatience.
Stephe Watson Jan 2019
I spiral happ’ly in,
I feel my flesh
dissolve to wet, to
gaseous mess
and flow flow flow
into the asterism
that is her extra latte French roast
Eye...

She asks, “What do you see?”
I see Himalayan diamond dust,
the wind as particle, sharing the
Sun in glints.
I see spiral arms and accretion discs.
I see stardust, moondust, lovedust
in great grand colorful interwebbings of
lust, of truth, of song, of delight, of Us.
I see RGB Grand Walls of stars;
organized in mind but cosmologically
principled.
I see the possibilities of galaxies -
Unformed
              Adrift
                                            Reaching
  Cooling
Collecting
  Heating
Sparking.
Life giving life.
Lifegiving, Life.
I see an unspoken Universe
of Dust -
Awake to Dance,
to dance to Life.
I see Love.
I see Beauty.
I see worlds not yet.
I see suns unshone.
I see comets unknown.
I see tidepools.
I see fields of fuzzies.
I see Seas.
I see mountains and valleys.
I see Forest.
I see Love.
I see her, and in her,
I see a world, a cosmos, a way;
a way I’d rather be.
A way I’d rather live.
I see Love.
I see her.

Through tears,
I see
the limitless warmth of an unlimited
Un         iv         er         se
in her tawny toffee coffee
Eye.
Stephe Watson Sep 2018
The rain may fall
but, once fallen,
it's rain no more;
(merely) water.

The motion makes it
not ocean fractals
of just any kind;

it's movement that gives
it its name,
its energy,
its force.


I too, am rain.
Stephe Watson Oct 2018
A hush envelops
(or is hunted down, demanded)
A particular general stillness outlasts
the here-and-there leavings and goings of
everywhere

else

The crunch, familiar always
and always, somehow unfamiliar
of buckwheat hulls...

I sit.
The world's exhalations
my inspirations -
inbreaths of trunk and mouth
inbreaths also of xīn (心)

The headhome of the mostly-me,
like November waters,
phase-changes from
finicky fluid
to quiet, cooler tumultless
ice which, oddly melts the heart

And soon, and soon
(or longer, yes usually longer)
the phase becomes sublime

And then
and yes, and then
(and, yes and only then)
and all at once...




nothing.
From my "Old Meditator" series.

Reflecting from the Now on the Then...

A Taoist possibly lamenting Buddhism.


#ZhanZhuangZazenAKACatchingSomeZZZs
Stephe Watson Aug 2018
The ****** plugged the culvert.
Overnight.
Again.
New growth, cut short.  Chewed short.
Grasses.  Mud.  Stones.
Branches and leaves and muck.
Roots from the far-below.

And this time.
A lotus flower.  Sprinkled in dirt.
But alabaster otherwise.
Atop the waterstop.
Brilliant as a clear mind.  White as an,
an as an an an anything overexposed to the point of
newness.

Bees in the rain.  Tending to purple
spires that no one planted.

A hawk in the birch again.
Green heron plummets toward the pond’s
edge.

10:08
Outdoor shower in thunder.  It calls.  She calls.

Poem ends.
For Sarah Noble
Stephe Watson Jun 2019
I leave damp mudprints
there where I met the shore.

The dragonflies' dances,
the goslings scrammed,
and I for now (or 'lo, for once)
exhaled.  Edges do that.

A turtle somewhere spied me
not spying a frog; quick to leap.
And splash!  My eyes follow my ears.
A biped clown, here at a threshold.
A stronghold of thrushes.
And red-winged blackbirds...
briefly visiting tufts and reeds.

When I go, I think it likely
no memory of me will remain -
no indication, no story, no song -
but for there where my callous
kissed
the muck.

Invert puddlings, concentric whorls.
A fish somewhere, like I,
determined to visit an edge.
Marks with its 'foot'prints,
lips breaking the tension,
a visit to the start of Sky...
now gone.

We each leave our prints.
We leave each other's
memories,
in time.
Stephe Watson Dec 2018
There is within me
a moon-
a twilight Cézanne,
a barren Bhutan,
a dim-lit Rodin,
a mirage-less Sudan.

There is within me
a moon-
a post-war Japan,
a loveless Quran,
a last place at Cannes,
a Carson 'n couch
(without his McMahon.)

There is within me
a moon-
a 4th place finish in Laussane,
a certain Cohen sans his Suzanne.

a moon
a hunk of frozen rock, reflecting
gold sherd from all around
a spark in the dark, wholly drowned
the shiniest, hope-giving speck for years unbound

up close though,
should one
ever
dare to come
(of course none
ever
shall/have)
the sharp and unworn, no-color regolith

ever
alone, alone, alone he is
ever
on the verge of dirge he is

unhappily repeating to himself-
repeating to himself,
repeating to himself,
repeating to himself...

to himself,
to himself,
to himself...

by himself.
Poetry-ply / Response Ability /PooretReply


Thank you and a bow to
Heath
(AKA Taoist Poetry)
whose poem,
posted on 11/5/14
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100005264928556&fref=ts
inspired what follows and which begins:

"There is within me
a forest man..."
Stephe Watson Jan 2021
I believe I believe
I believe in the stars
I believe in the sound of the rain
I believe in the seas
I believe in the ear on the track and the sound of the train.

I’m no monk
I’ve no gasoline can
I’m no protest symbol
I’m no match for the believer with struck match
I believe in the unseen support of the choir
I believe we can sing out, shout out, or flame out
I believe we can’t tire out or put the fire out
I’m no monk
I’ve no match
I’ve not set myself afire.

But I believe
in the echo’s return
But I believe
in a soul fire’s ash-free burn.

I believe in the felled forest
I believe in the dissipating clouds
I believe in the march without rest
I believe in testing those testing us
I believe in the pains cried aloud
I believe in the speech no longer allowed .

I believe in the unvoiced voices
I believe in the tentative choices
I believe in the scarred bark
and the broken branch.
I believe in the disease’s footprint, this burl
I believe in the taproot, the sunshine; this world.

I believe in the electricity
I believe in the chemistry
   (Not in the wire, not in the flask.)
I believe in the electricity and chemistry
between two hearts with everything to sing
and nothing to ask.

I believe in the broken voice
I believe in the stolen tide
I believe in the dying breeze
I believe in the bald cypress, lonely on the cliff
I believe in the windblown tuft of seed
I believe in the healing palm and loving hand
I believe in the rot and the pebbles’ fate
to return to these beaches one day as sand.

I believe in the scent of frankincense
and the furry power of the purr.
I believe in the smile
I believe in the tear

I believe in the lamplight
I believe in the campfire
I believe in the stories planted in songs
I believe in the buzzard
I believe in the Sky.

I believe in the human heart
and the bird brain.
I believe in the whisper of pinecones
I believe in the spirit
   of komorebi,
      of petrichor,
         of kami,
            of qì.

I believe I believe
I may be deceived
but I believe I believe
I believe in the power of song
I believe in the shade and the lit
I believe in mosses and stones
I believe the weak are also strong, always strong
I believe in taking a stand and the power of sit
I believe in losses and bones.

I believe in the Elders
   I believe in forgetting.
I believe in the Ancients
   I believe in remembering...
I believe in the handprint in ochre.

I believe in the great and the lost
I believe in the good and the grand
I believe in the minuscule and the beginner
I believe in the mediocre.

I believe in the story of soot
I believe in the heart as well as the foot.

I believe in the canker, the scar
I believe in the cancer
trying to carve a life from life.
I believe in the piglet
and the nest-fallen, crestfallen wren.
I believe in the inbreath, the out
I believe in the powerless and the rumbling of stomachs.

I believe in the plaintive howl of the empty.
I believe incense rising in silken curl
I believe in the dragon and the caretaken pearl
I believe in the cold and the dying
I believe in the old and the ancestral
I believe in the young and the transcendental.

I believe in the moon a balloon
caught up in January trees.
I believe in the rain droplets
   (long after the Rain)
I believe in the dew droplets
clung to fern, clung to turtleback, clung to clay
   (long after the Sunup)

I believe in the frost-heave
of silent sod on a Winter’s eve.
I believe in the hoarfrost
I believe in the petroglyphic vernal pool,
closing in to itself, cracked and drying
and too parched to be crying.

I believe in the sweet pull
of angular momentum;
rounding a corner too far and too fast,
palming the corner or column
and swinging unaligned to face a new path.

I believe in the the cat's fur and the cat's purr,
the sound of lark and the scent of the larkspur.
I believe in the post-rain bejewelment of Winter birch branch.

I believe I believe
And though I know
I won’t achieve
the depth of belief
of a shorn-headed man in a robe
taking a match to himself for the globe
I continue to believe that I believe
in the many simple things
the many simple not-at-all things
that the mind brings to light
and the light brings to mind.

I believe in this moment
that I believe in this moment.
Stephe Watson Feb 2019
Trusting into, listening to,
and employing
Moon Medicine.

I accept such Light
as comes my way
flickeringly
from stars this night
and
reflect it all
to those who
find themselves lost

in the Dark,
in some Dark,
in their Dark.
Stephe Watson Jun 2019
The trouble, I find,
with Seeking the Tao

is that one leaves the
Now.  And somehow,
seems unable to grasp
the Sought; one ought
simply to seek cessation
of Seek.

— The End —