Tag Archives: Writing

Bought A New Plant

Nice day today, with the sun and all,
So I bought a new plant.
A Citronella plant.
Beautiful word, Citronella.
It smells like lemons (wasn’t expecting that).
We want clothes and dishes and bathrooms
To smell like lemons,
And I think we all know why that is.
I’ve heard it keeps mosquitos away, too,
So I’m thinking “bonus.”
And such a surprising thick trunk,
Like a miniature tree, strong and straight.
Lovely scalloped lemony leaves,
All green and starched at attention,
Such a healthy Citronella!
I bought a new pot for it, too –
None of your plastic throwaways
On a day like today.
No, this is pastel orange porcelain,
With fancy swirls.
And I laid it in that pot as tenderly as a babe,
Gave it fresh stinky soil to feed on,
Tucked it in with pine bark mulch.
And even in a poem about my new Citronella plant
It seems I can’t help but mention
That everyone’s yelling about the government,
Losing friends over the government,
Can’t think straight for the government,
But this Citronella plant?
The government doesn’t even know it’s here!
So I’m thinking “bonus times two.”
I’m excited to have it out there on the patio,
Something new for these new days we’re having.
Maybe it will bloom like in the pictures.
As for what the squirrels are thinking,
Who knows?
But I’m going to go out and smell it one last time
Before I lock the patio door and get ready
To wake up to see you again, Citronella,
Please don’t leave us soon this year,
Stay strong, stay green, stay lemon-fresh forever.

Alabama

Listening to Ravi Coltrane
Playing his father’s “Alabama,”
Looking at dead leaves, dead grass, dead light,
Dead world in February.
Always we bury something, lose something,
Throw something away.
Sometimes we stop to remember,
Like Coltrane did.
Saxophone ashes flicker and burn,
Drums hammer coffins shut,
Cymbals scatter shrapnel.
I had to look up what “Alabama” was about.
I was five years old,
Unaware of losing things forever.
But I have lost many a thing since,
And just for this morning,
They all sound like “Alabama.”

Being and Time (Meditation 7)

Sitting in the train compartment, I look at the ticket in my hand – as big as a tablet, thick as animal hide, stamped so many times with the same origin and destination that it is nearly solid black with ink. Stealing glances at the other passengers, their random faces and bodies continually changing as if a hundred tiny storms sped over their surfaces, easy voices rising and falling in a chorus of shifting keys and accents.  Anxious, I feel my face for the thousandth time, relieved to find the pins still hold it in place.  The conductor appears abruptly beside me; it’s forever shocking, even though I always carefully rehearse this moment. Looking at me with something like sympathy, it gives me back my ticket. “We’re not stamping it this time,” it says in a multitude of language and voice. The wood of my compartment begins to warp and crack; frantically, I feel the pins holding my face give way, the flesh snapping like rubber bands. “This is all I packed for,” I manage to dribble through my crumbling lips, but the conductor is gone, and I am swept up in a river of morphing bodies onto what is already changing into something other than a train platform, everyone melting into each other with boiling faces and spattering conversations, me with my precisely composed face giving way, clutching my ticket relic, not at that destination I had persistently imagined but a bewildering array of shifting gates like a house of mirrors that the others are happily flowing through like water, and with a surprise of excitement I realize I have no idea how to work my new body, or what a step forward even means.

(Thoughts on chapter 7 of Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen And the Way of Being Time, by Dainin Katagiri. My intention is to write a poem or brief meditation on each short chapter as a way of summarizing my understanding.)

Being & Time (Meditation 6)

I’m failing at this god thing.
The plants on the patio rebel in their pots.
I have given them a home, however cramped,
And I water them when I’m not too busy.

Clearly it is not enough.
Their brown stems, their shriveled leaves,
Drooped in prayerful mockery.
They are not impressed with me.

I hover over them, annoyed and confused.
I worry if they still have time to please me.
Over my shoulder an oak tree towers,
Imperfections on proud display.

Look at me, it implores endlessly.
See how my branches never make sense.
Some of me giving birth, some of me dying,
And all of me right now. What other place to be?

(Thoughts on chapter 6 of Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen And the Way of Being Time, by Dainin Katagiri. My intention is to write a poem or brief meditation on each short chapter as a way of summarizing my understanding.)

Being & Time (Meditation 5)

How do these things happen?
A bell rings. A door slams. Someone laughs.

It’s enough to make one think,
And we’re eager to oblige.
That bell is too loud.
Why slam the door? Who’s angry?
Who laughed? Did we miss the joke?

What holds us prisoner
Is missing the joke,
Wondering who’s angry,
How to not hear the bell.

Laugh sometimes without knowing why.
Feel the silence after the slam.
Let the bell toll on, and on.
Know that prison is only for those
Who want more than anything to be free.

(Thoughts on chapter 5 of “Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen And the Way of Being Time”, by Dainin Katagiri. My intention is to write a poem or brief meditation on each short chapter as a way of summarizing my understanding.)

Being and Time (Meditation 4)

I’m a stand-up fabulist; it’s a living. There are plenty of others on the fable circuit – at least, that’s what I’ve heard. I’m too busy making up my own myths to really know. It got started when I was young and I imagined how bad it would be when my father got home, or how life would be different if I only bought that thing. The fantasies and nightmares piled up; there weren’t enough closets, and I forgot most of them. The best parts of the craziest ones I managed to hold on to, working them into brilliant new legends, until finally I felt ready to go on tour. I had sweated out some really killer material: fat, juicy lies and delusions so impossible I almost forgot how absurd they were. I drove into town after town, walked on the stages of a hundred motels, eager to begin talking to myself again. I applauded myself from my usual table in the corner, and on the stage I breathed that applause like air. But the motels always quickly faded and I sped to another, brighter-looking motel, desperate to begin talking to myself on an even bigger stage. Why it took so many years I don’t know, but I discovered the motels were all owned by the same person, and all of them were built in the same slightly disappointing way, and always it was just me in the audience – now glancing restless at my watch, now staring embarrassed into my gin and tonic. I was bombing every night; the tales trailed off into a pitiful wish list of lies, with no art to them at all. One night, I stopped talking and listened. For the first time, I heard things: the clink of ice in the glass at the table where I sat watching me, my own breathing in the nearly empty room, the clattering of the club’s central air system. There were no stories in those sounds, no grand motels to come, no shitty motels to drive away from. I walked off that stage, went to my dressing room, and looked in the mirror. I saw only everything there was to see.

(Thoughts on chapter 4 of “Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen And the Way of Being Time”, by Dainin Katagiri. My intention is to write a poem or brief meditation on each short chapter as a way of summarizing my understanding.)