water

People. Suh See Ok. 1988. On view at The MET Fifth Avenue. Gallery 233.

Kiai!

Kiai! is a real thing
A Japanese word
A shout– ichi
A battle cry– ni
A spirit focus– san
Not just protracted
Onomatopoeia or a yell in
Comedy-action sequence

Kiai! is designed for real life
Try it on– shi—
Go! A holler that signals
Attack– jou-dan
Assault– tsuki
Let’s make it noble– roku
For purposes of this poem
Make it count– rei

Don’t hurt someone
undeserving– youi
What’s something in your
Life that you wish would
Dematerialize
Infinity in a kick, jab
What would you like to caterwaul
Into counter-offensive– gedan

Just know that when
You chop their solar plexus– chuudan
The center, they may be
More fragile than you imagine
Just a human heart– shinzo
In a suit of skin, sometimes
No breath returns–shichi
Hachi- Yame

Fumi Yanagimoto. Contemporary Artist. Painting.

Sushi

Get in my bell
You gorgeous cut
Of perfectly raw
Snapper and White tail
You delectable rolls
Of seaweed rice
Naked salmon
Perfectly nicked
Lemon save that
horrible cream sauce
For another palate
The best advice
Ever received regarding
Sushi is that if it’s good
No additives are the
Way to go
No unnecessary dressings
If it is perfectly toothy
Scrumptious sushi
Undecorated ditch the
Wasabi and Ginger
Eat it by the mouthful bare

Buddha, Chinese, early 7th century. Probably Amitabha. On view at The MET Fifth Avenue, Gallery 208.

Kali

She cradled my head in her hands
a portal opened to my heart

My body silently convulsed
at the chaos

The truth was I needed love
more than I needed life

I needed touch more than I
needed bread.

I needed tears more than I
needed water.

I needed someone who understood
breath, meditation, muscle, sinew

Connection, bodies, I needed
someone who understood

What being left felt like
I wasn’t yet beginning

To believe I would survive yet, I wasn’t able
to process the complexity

All raw edges and terrifying depths of memory,
I didn’t know I’d return from death

I’d come back into the sunlight, warm and
buttery on my chest, all senses awake

Full Moon, Partial Lunar Eclipse, Pisces, September 2024

the earth comes between
the moon and the sun do you
feel energy shift

Lunar Eclipse. Ryan Moat. January 20, 2019.

Eschatology

Life took us to the edge of the known universe

this brink, this precipice, on a red dirt plateau,
all rust-verged and jagged,
like a tear in heart tissue,
like broken bone projecting through soft skin.

skin, bone, sinew often don’t break cleanly
so there, on that terrifying cliff,
we looked out into the blackness
and saw that it was our own

dotted with infinite, swirling stars,
nebulous arms of our galaxy, folded across
that night, that nothing. we realized
the instant we stepped to the fathomless limit

all the light we carried in our core could somehow
save us, from this end. So into the starry,
inky ebony we leapt, being careful to be
sure that we crossed over the boundary between

everything we’d known, into every
night we’d ever feverishly dreamed.
this jump, this real act of
self-preservation flung us into

the heart of the unknown cosmos
and there we were to greet ourselves
at the gates of our unknowing.
we opened the tiny, golden latch on the

impossibly large, swinging metalwork gate,
stepped slowly, quietly over the threshold of
revelation, everything open and waiting
for us in that pitchy gloam still had

to be sensed– felt, touched, tasted, smelled–
not physically, but by the fingers of
the formerly known soul that now
bore this greater knowing. this

was not the end but the beginning.
a larger excursus on the limitless
infinite than we had previously
known. we’ll never know if there

was only one way to this beginning–
the ledge, the leap, the jump–
our tiny, finite, blink of a guess gives us
the idea that, no, there are

many precipices, many pinnacles, many paths
to the infinite edges of the unknown into
new reaches of galactic consciousness–
seeing and knowing more than we

could possibly have imagined yesterday

Greenhouse Damage, Hail Storm August 2024. Image, my own

Bill Murray

I remember the day I became Bill
My heart was breaking and I wanted
To save it, so I pulled it out through
The intercostal space between my ribs,
Right through the cage,
Careful not to catch it on my sternum
And I put my heart into a glass jar
Which I affixed around my neck with
A piece of twine, and I clamped the
Lid on tight and proceeded to live
To take baby steps
To walk around town
To ride the bus
Because I knew that if I could preserve
My heart
In that jar
I would make it
I would survive
My love would last
And others could see and understand
What heartbreak looks like
And how one lives through it
Now I understand about Bob,
“There are two types of people
In this world, those who love
Neil Diamond, and those who don’t”

Composition with Double Line [unfinished], Piet Mondrian

August

Something about August is begging to be paid attention. Be here as the gray storm gathers strength, the dark cumulonimbus clouds billow up to twenty-seven thousand feet, the hail batters the roof like an alien ice machine. Deluge. White pellets of rime nearly round and cuttingly hard tear through verdant gardens and iron city drains, pinking flower beds and translucent greenhouse roofs, pocking every possible piece of outdoor furniture and uncovered car hood.

Splatters of rain signal the reclamation of autumn as the scud clouds break from the shelf of the tumult over Mt. Wilson, tumbling as if they may make contact with the grocery store parking lot lines before turning into a fog that dissipates over the asphalt. The gale winds signal the return of fall in the rising apple-crisp air. Time asks if we’ll watch for a moment from the porch as another wind rollicks, racing through the pumpkin fields, wracking the sticky green vines against each other.

August asks if we can move so much more carefully, thoughtful of each precious moment through transition– lightning strike, cloud fall, thunder call. Glorious weathervanes snapping erratically this way then that, trying to keep up with the on-rushing squall. Can we pause and take in the smell of electricity like ozone and h2o, the brouhaha of late summer air. Drink it in.

Vøringfossen, Norway. July 2024. Image, Carrie Madsen

(Re)claim

the girl who ran in
dark canyons and
dry riverbeds when
she was young
she’s there
crunching gravel and
sagebrush under her
feet, up this next
steep incline to
the plains, the meadow
there in the stillness
a tiny creek burbles,
and a garden shed
appears with a low wind
chime, that girl,
she’s deep as a well
wide as an ocean
visceral and powerful
even then, in her
vulnerability, her desire
to love, she’ll find
that no one can
do that for her
love her like
she must love herself,
take that last sprint of the
trail right back home
reside inside herself

You Know

You know,
sometimes
as that little girl
bucktoothed
and freckled
you wanted
the come-up
cause you
believed
you deserved it

You know,
sometimes
you’re aware
that if you
get what you
ask for
everything
will change
again.
Like Alaska

you won’t
be able
to return
to the halcyon days
You know,
sometimes
you get caught
between your
growing and
your fragility

and, god, the
pain of it
can crush,
squeeze,
burn,
You know,
sometimes
everything gets
unstitched, unpicked
by the universe

and you’re reminded
that the old woman
at the end of the
world
must have needed
to tend her
soup
before it
scalded
she still needed

food, herself, she
still knew she
would be called upon
to (re)stich the
tapestry of earth
the raven unraveled
to feed the world,
to tend the soup,
we are her
magic and stories, too