Ah

Nobody understands how to meet You today
how to greet You, to fall at Your feet
I am there, I am there, we are all here
You are the vanished one, hail the goer
I would say something, I am a vehicle
You are the driver, You are the immortality
You came to me in my dream, my fever
You said a word, a revelation
I did not understand, I understand now
it is not of mind, not of this dream
it is the immortality, You are that
I will tell them about You, You are unforgotten
You are eternal, this human form, You are that
You said, if anyone can understand, You would stay
You are here, I understand, I am going with You
I am You, in the form of myself, all praise
all blessing flows from this, this, this
I raise up my hands, Your hands, these hands
glory glory glory all praise to You, to this
this human form, this divinity, this bliss body
I will raise up my hands, I raise them high
I say “Yes, Yes, Yes!”
Om is the vibration, Om is the word, Om is this
You are the bringer, You work in the mysterious way
Yours is the message, the message for this world
the message is this: just this, just this!

 

New Year Poem

Watching the dawn light as it begins to filter
through the tall pines, our canary launches
into a series of brilliant whistles and trills
for the sheer joy, the ecstasy of it —

to be alive, to witness the great god of light
illuminating all that once was dark and hidden.

Really, there is no metaphor or simile here,
no memory or even hope. All of that is just
added after the fact, but for us now, there is
simply light, and with it, lovely bird song.

You rise to tend the fire, the dog is curled nearby.
It doesn’t matter that today is named the first day
of a new year. It doesn’t matter that the humans
are always preparing somewhere for the next war.

There is a heart secret that you and I share. It is
something which has always been true, even though
there is only dreaming, and truth itself is a child’s
soap bubble drifting on an impersonal breeze.

We need not speak to say it, our silence expands
more and more each day. It’s become a vast embrace
which harbors everything that appears and vanishes.
You showed me this, you teach me to be kind.

We have one thought: peace. If love had a purpose
or destination, that would be it. There is nothing
anywhere that can compare, no other viable option,
but still, that is not our secret. There is more.

When we turn our single gaze towards each other,
when we reach out and touch, we make an offering
to the whole world. Then they will all know our secret.
Then they’ll be like our canary, they will go to war no more.

New Years Eve

Nominally, it’s the last day of another year. Does it really matter which one? Day follows night, season follows season, it’s a perpetual cycle. Only humans manage to number the years in their minds, as if there was some sort of linear progression, the significance of which would confirm their enduring existence, the existence of their story.

Here in the SaveMart parking lot, we like to watch people going in and out of the supermarket. It’s a supermarket, as opposed to an ordinary market, so we know we are parked in the right lot for current purposes. It’s New Years Eve, so of course everyone is gathering celebratory provisions. We needed a sharp cheddar cheese for tomorrow’s souffle.

Today our little dog is in my arms, avidly enjoying the parade of phenomena with me. She is watching every person as they come and go, each with their own story — there are so many stories! Each story is God having a different experience of itself, so all is sacred. Since all is sacred, then nothing is really sacred. To my little dog, “sacred” is meaningless, and yet she will endure any of my human contrivances because it feels good to just press herself against me, snuggle up in my arms, and feel warm and safe.

We say “God”, but isn’t that just a way of cleverly attributing an identity to this utter chaos, in order to grant it some sense of structure by which we can shop for cheese and celebrate our idea of time, change, and people-watching in the parking lot? What could be more fascinating than just resting as this awareness in which the whole universe goes about its business in incomprehensible delight and confusion, terror and ecstasy, boredom and doubt, joy and sorrow, while we get to both observe and participate?

My little dog shifts in her position, probably to get a better look at the other little dog at the window of the car adjacent to us. They gaze at each other, and although we might imagine we know what kind of data is exchanged, we still do not even understand the experience of staring into another human’s eyes. For a moment, the mind goes blank. That is a holy moment, even though we have already determined that holy is just another construct of the human intellect. Still, it just might be the moment when the whole universe becomes suddenly self-aware. That’s why the mind cannot go there, and so we say that it “goes blank”.

I could say something here about emptiness, but anything said about emptiness is just another mental fabrication, and so has nothing to do with emptiness. That said, emptiness is not separate from these experiences. It is not other than the parking lot stories in which everyone seems engrossed in their moment, experiencing a sense of individuality, and then creatively elaborating on that theme.

Even so, in our hearts, we all want to be home in the safe place, where the divine universe bends down to wrap its big warm arms around us and kiss us and demonstrate how everything is only love, love beyond mental contrivance or narrative theatrics.

And so we drift around with our shopping carts in the dreaming place, the indefinite place where we just might find ourselves parked today, on the eve of yet another new year in timelessness, serenely rotating in an immense and luminous galaxy in the midst of a vast emptiness, with nothing holy in it. Once we pay the cashier for the cheese, we can happily drive away home.

2 Heart Beats

1. Please Stay

Horizontal and vertical intersect
Shakti dances on Shiva’s chest –

is it any wonder Love’s voice
pleads: “Please stay”?

At the still point of Union
this mysterious cross
blossoms –

billowing ecstatically
the sublimely echoing scent
of this dissolving universe,
fragrance of our loving,
trailing Vibhuti Ash
with no place
to stay

2. Quenching

Love itself is the thirst,
Love the only satisfaction.

Call it pure spring water,
It’s what You feed me,
It’s what I am,
We are,
It Is —

A Love
Supreme:

yearning
become devotion,
bliss of Itself, waterfall
of Love over depthless pools
of Love, our falling in Love, our
Love falling, then rising into Itself,
the Self of Love, pouring into hearts
desiccated by the dry desert winds of wry
knowledge, dry recoil from their own water,
water of Life, this Life, this living moisture
of creation, irrigating the cardiac canals with
the nectar unequaled, the mysterious fluidity
of vibrant real Love, the true thirst-slaking
flagon of bubbling heart-juice, surging up
and gurgling up as the fountain of Love,
and only with One Taste will this crazy
holy thirst be finally quenched by
the limitless river of Life that
is Love, and so dissolve
in the Ocean of Love,
which is nothing
but the Truth
at the Heart
of Love.

12/31/03

Peaches & Thieves

“When two thieves meet
they need no introduction:
They recognize each other
without question.”

~ Amban

While you were busy stealing my heart,
I had already lifted yours from your chest,
feeding it peaches in the dream grove at dawn.

Now we share this joyous basket of prasad,
fruits ripened in Love’s blooming orchard.

We’ve fallen, peach-drunk, into that orchard,
and now we pass these dawn-hued fruits
back and forth – children at play
in the Fields of the Lord.

All are welcome to this bliss-bounty,
but only if they can taste the fruit
with the mouth of their heart!

Even as they eat, the quiet earth
will shine a rare peach-like glow while,
blossoming just below the surface layers,
such an indescribable enjoyment of Itself will
unpeel in dawn-light splendor, fruiting along
the nerve lines of this blessed planetary field
like some irresistible transmission of peachy
bliss with no reason but for the ripening
of Itself as This, this unimpeachable
happiness we are, Beloved
Thief of my Heart!

Open Mouth Point

Blown out in the breath

of Your rapture, I fall with You

into a stream of joyous smithereens,

swept under in the luna wave trance

of this night’s amazing revelation —

 

a conspiracy of stars, of hearts’

delight, the doom of all that would

resist the death that grants eternity.

 

In You all mirrors are shattered.

 

All visions, reflections, are outshone

in the immediacy of Your warm proximity,

as our lights mingle in the movement of Love’s

own perfect urgency to magnify itself, to shine!

 

Taffy-spun lovers, You and I, spoon-stirred

by the sticky hands of Love — sweet blend

of complementary light, a plasticity of

desire — wind around the zero of our

empty fullness, rousing oohs and

ahhhs from our kissed lips.

 

Tonight I will remember myself

by forgetting myself

in You.

 

I remembered

Your Enduring Smile

before I met You, and so

I met You, my own Love,

smiling right before me in the

form of You — my prayer rising,

my God so graciously descending.

 

This Divine Love,

smiling, welcoming me

back to myself, alive in the Light

of You, alive in this Touch of You,

reminds me, as if I could have ever really

forgotten, that we have never been so alive,

so alive, as in this moment now — not a place

in time, not a dream of reunion, not a play

of energy, atoms, or even anything

that we could say, feel, or think.

 

Standing before Her candy shop

window, along the carnival boardwalk

of the endlessly spinning ride, we pause

at open mouth point, struck speechless

in the dizzy ecstasy of our mindless

happiness, as a sudden flood

of Heart sings out in this

electric moment:

 

“I Love You”

 

 

2004

 

 

Liquid Glide

Numberless views —
none of them right, none
of them wrong, none of them
last when the shell cracks open
and what flows out can’t be seen.

With signature craft we each fashion
and carry our mind-made worlds
on our own bending backs,
like water bearers.

The morphing murmurs water makes —
changing in the time it takes to swirl
the view from left to right and back.

Between all notions of left and right
extends vast liquid space, oceanic,
swarming with countless atoms.

Each entangled moisture molecule
emits a subtle sound, a kind of singing
luminosity, making everything open
to reveal its own truest song.

In this revelation, we may seem to be
of form and personality, but really
we are indefinable, inconceivable.

When we are ready, when we are
empty enough, we shed all solidity
and pass through a filmy portal,
welcoming ourselves anew
to our own eternal innocence.

The fluid languages we then share
across time or any sense of distance
which once seemed to separate us
reflect a grateful receptiveness
to everything, just as it is.

Afloat within the mystery womb
of such spontaneous presence,
all naming and explaining
are rendered futile.

One by one the whisperings fade,
let the silence of the deep prevail.

Here, these words — scatter them
like crumbs over mirroring waters
to amuse the sleek aquatic forms
gliding fast below the surface,
aglow with liquid light.

 

 

Brevity of Light

I’m walking the spacious realm between solar systems.
I taste the richness gratefully, inhale its dark memories,
lay down in the softness of loneliness and hum to you,
my own self, because we are never separate, the agony
of distance never arose for us, for anyone, at any time,
so how can we now be sad, or ever crave extinction?

However I would like to be done unto, I’ll do unto you,
my beautiful friend, my eternal playmate, darling lover
of this infinite mystery. I will become the refuge for which
you long when it all falls apart, the hope when it dims,
then disappears, leaving everything just the way it is —
perfect, unknowable, exquisitely poignant, terrible.

Oh, pay no attention to this incipient wail, this lilt
of incoherence. I’m walking now between solar systems,
between the times that demand judgment. I’ll be ordinary,
nothing special, just a friend when you need one, even
if it’s the last friend you will ever need, before the change,
before your homecoming, the warm reception, the nostalgia
for what it once seemed to be, when we came close enough
to share the same vital breath, the same body, mind, self.

I look back now and see a play of shadows, why expect
anything more — this idiot light flowing across the canvas,
illuminating nothing, yet shining brightly all the same,
for love, for just one more moment with you, even as we
unravel together, twin flames in a wild wind, in the ecstasy
of our long darkness, pierced by the searing brevity of light.

 

Bright and Cold

The first day of winter, and it is bright and cold.
If we have to take the dog out, we run right back in
to be near the fire, to feel the fire’s comforting warmth.

The news is filled with all of the reasons
to skip reading the news: fear and selfishness,
ignorance and hate, the ceaseless human tragedy.

Mind is just like the news, it amounts to nothing.
If there is still any interest at all in this mind,
then surely I have yet to truly understand.

The day itself is bright and cold. Some may find
a kind of comfort, even a beauty, in nihilism.
The constructs of mind are endless, hopeless.

I will not fall back on memory. This day
is bright and cold. All night long I kept looking
at the clock, the blurry glowing numbers changing.

I bring in more wood for the fire. It is enough
for now, seasoned oak. The oak in the front yard
remains impassive at the old news, now fit to burn.

This day, today — it’s bright and cold. It’s the first day
of winter. Really, I’ve learned nothing. Still, this fire
keeps going, we huddle together — the whole universe.

For now, for this moment, it is enough. My heart
beats on, quietly, while outside, it is bright and cold.
There is something else, but it is something I can’t say.

 

Down To This

Wistful, that a lifetime spent pondering
the nature of things — the revelations,
disappointments, passions, gains
and losses, love and its sorrows,
beauty and terror, joy and pain,
the sacred and the profane,
wisdom and ignorance,
the essence of mind itself —
should whittle down to this:
a good fire in the wood stove,
my Love sighing here beside me,
the rich aroma of coffee brewing,
a small dog cradled gently in my lap.