Swimming

“If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality in it. So just to do something without any particular effort is enough.”
Shunryu Suzuki



To make something of these times I 
must make something so I will find 
a frame in which to nail my thoughts. 
I cannot beat this lone silence

and I cannot take this seedless 
greening anymore, this yearning 
growth that knows only down and in,
only dragging my thoughts into 

the night where I cannot find them 
though I remember having them, 
remember how they felt if not 
how they looked, remember them close 

and warm, and thought them somehow grand 
or at least telling at the time 
I barely had them, but now? Now 
I barely have them even less. 

Now I am not sure if I have
them or if they have me. Now they 
are lost in their own depths, swimming 
silently in the rolling black 

medium of their making. Now 
they haunt me in their bare being
and unmake me and swim through me
and I will make nothing of them.

Vacuity

(a continuation of sorts of this poem, in a strange sort of a way...)




what are these things that we go to and get away from,
these masses of matter that we shun, shy away from
and then are drawn inevitably back towards—
or if not inevitably then more often than not
more strongly towards than away from so that
we are always having this going—
this coming and going, this to-ing and fro-ing—
these lines and circles in the woods where
even chaos is a kind of order, a kinder order
than we are used to, than we deserve,
a kind of overlay on these things that
defy this definition, all these definitions 
since nature abhors lines and circles as much 
as vacuums and yet of what is this universe 
mostly made except the stuff of which it
isn’t?  

Missing (part 4)

Are your words still with you?  Did you
carry your stories deep into 
the night and leave them like luggage
on a railway platform, an age
and more down silver tracks, with just
the wind, the stars, and leaves like dust
blowing and hissing in the dark?

This silence leaves a fading mark.
The thing that took you left your face
in bodies unknown to you, lace
filaments tracing what the eyes
of others cannot see: the ties
that generation takes away;
the look in eyes that cannot stay.