The alarm goes off at 4. I will myself to my
feet, not for a grand mission, but to catch
a flight. In the predawn darkness, driving the
101 to the 405, I recite Clifton, Keats, & Limón
In Guangdon Province a young father rises early
for work at Doubleeagle Industry Limited, where
he operates the plastic-injection molding machine.
It is rote, if loud and dangerous work…
I was seventeen when I read Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen
a couple pages at a time, putting down the book to observe
sunset drape itself over my mind, falling asleep thinking
of not thinking, hearing a flock of birds and imagining myself
Leaves gather like un- sold goods. Need help, asks the rake. Just browsing, I say.
Both the atheist and the believer have it wrong.
We are not mere bodies, nor do we have souls.
Heaven would be a room strewn with books
and nary an errand to distract from reading;
“Children found ‘butchered’ in Israeli kibbutz…” – CNN
I dream a rocket’s aftermath smells of cracked pepper,
that it sprays not blood and shrapnel but mint leaves,
ice clinking in delicate hand-blown glass; that its
thunder is a hundred-thousand bumblebees come to
pollinate a black-and-white world, devoid of flowers…
Don’t shoot the rats pillaging dumpsters,
or the man with rat-like eyes and rumpled
suit, who orders they be set ablaze…
Not the shaded table by the pool
where I point out a hummingbird eating nectar
and my son asks, “You mean like I eat pizza?”
I remember coffee-flavored ice cream at the Royal Scoop,
how it made me long to be old enough to drink espresso
like Dad. I remember stepping off the plane into the sweet
humid air, the tissue-paper feel of the Lei around my neck,
Is it wrong to love this world like a newborn swaddled in peach skin, beech-tree bark, silt at the mouth of a stream whose headwater is starlight, is ocean-honey, is upwell of grief? World we once called mother, how we […]