Green Linden Press

Devotion

                                     
“Poetry not rest” is trouble’s answer,
rising before the sun, setting out
in a gray light to the dull grumble
of thunder to balance the words
bottle or old wooden chair or bluebird
on a line’s life-or-death tightrope,
struggling to add color to the canvas,
purple or burnt umber, transcribing
seven violins crying in the willows,
or simply cutting a stem of rosemary,
the deep smell of earth for inspiration,
the earth and the grave, never resting,
working from sheer will and memory,
working with quill and ink if need be,
knowing trouble and rest won’t last,
that no one has the cure for this life
though we honor the day with words,
name the plow and extol the hammer,
knowing that even the poorest poet,
if a poet, is at a desk in a corner
of eternity, already long dead,
laboring to transform death to praise,
never wearying, never once losing faith.

(This poem is available in our store  
as a broadside signed by the author.)

Walking Meditation


Normally I do a walking meditation 
in my own yard, making the rounds
in summer on a ritual path that weaves
between sunlit boxwood sentinels
and a small, well-tended rock garden.
How easy it is—the sound
of birdsong in the air, a fleet
of high clouds on a sea of blue—
to think of nothing. But once,
during a troubled, austere autumn,
my mind brooded and became
unruly. I found myself in a ryokan 
in the remote mountains of Izu, Japan.
A ryokan is a traditional country inn,
like the inn where Kawabata lodged
and wrote his novel Snow Country.
I was a mere tourist, but my retreat
had ponds with carp, a red footbridge.
I slept on a tatami mat behind a shoji.
I bathed in the hot springs. I ate well
at a low table, served by a kneeling girl
whose laughter and kindness healed me.
At night I was given a painted kimono 
and walked through a bamboo forest,
moonlight touching the towering trees,
paving stones under my wooden sandals.
I stepped slowly, respectfully, quietly.
My mind was the wind moving
through the bamboo’s green columns.
I heard the dark counting its blessings
and branches saying prayers of gratitude.

Folly


In eighth grade, whenever I visited my sweetheart,
I’d cross the wide bridge over the Lafayette River
and ride my bike down Norfolk’s narrow streets
past a garden with an arbor-temple of wisteria
that sheltered a ten-foot-tall bronze Buddha.
It would be years before I knew to call it a folly,
an absurd piece of garden architecture, a madness
meant solely for delight. In all my hometown,
where coal dust rose from the coal piers and fell
like black snow on our houses, there was nothing
like that garden with the smiling, seated Buddha.
The folly always lightened my spirits as I rode past,
and whatever despair or hope had troubled me
would lift as I pedaled—fast as I could pedal— 
toward Lilly’s house.