The Task** - Poem by Jane Hirshfield

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair -
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the  light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Metempsychosis**

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off -
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

What does it mean when
Our impish curiosity at forty eight
grows tired and ridiculously became
an Ancient soul at twenty three?

What is poetry heard when
Our otic form invaginates
to a nothingness shape
worthless for publication?

Who inherits money when
Our optic evagination
lives large and expands
sideways not in Academia?

When do features play at
Our theaters twenty three
weeks less computationally
intense than forty eight movies?

Where Is Rogue One seen when
Our self-organizing map
projects friends and faces
onto a understandable dimension

Our two faced goodbye, Ciao

are when hazy mornings rise
in O'Keefe's blue note
meeting our Aloha
surfing stem cells reduced
in the returning space-time
tide to a 1D-film

We have two ins but only one out

I like Jane Hirshfield
California Zen
Sally Jane Brown Witherell
O those Toledo Mudhens!

She loved me like a Rock
I miss her gentle voice
The silence is eternal
Bold Jimmy Joyce

Went to Kyoto for the temples
Remember the train station
Kamakura Buddha
Snowfall cedar destination

Beauty, Ruby Bridges
Hopes for American schools
Trappist Abbey updates
Frederick swimming pools

                Cambrian!