For a dear and beloved friend in San Francisco, who was ordained into the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi on August 10 of this year.

WRITTEN ON THE WALL AT CHANG’S HERMITAGE

1.

It is spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echoes
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stormy mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

2.

In spring mountains, alone, I set out to find you.
Axe strokes crack—crack and quit. Silence doubles

I pass snow and ice lingering along cold streams,
then, at Stone-Gate in late light, enter these woods.

You harm nothing: deer roam here each morning;
want nothing: auras gold and silver grace nights.

Facing you on a whim in bottomless dark, the way
here lost—I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat.

  — Tu Fu (712 - 770), Chinese Poet of the Tang Dynasty.
  — Translations by Kenneth Rexroth (1) & David Hinton (2).

these quiet nights

after the storm
there is a hush.

a held breath
in moist silences.

after the storm,
these quiet nights
are all that remain.

we work hard all our lives
battling forces
we cannot defeat,

our voices mingling
with the roar of passing time.

but after the storm
there are
chances to wipe the water
from our eyes and
see with
uncertain clarity,
to rest our ragged throats,
to hope.

these quiet nights
refuel us

as
            dark clouds
gather

in
threatening
skies.

  — christopher cunningham.

From the GPP Reader: Selections from the poets of the Guerilla Poetics Project.

CC will have a new chapbook published by Kendra Steiner Editions within the next few weeks, as well as a limited edition broadside from 10pt Press. Both are bound to be outstanding.

THE STORM

1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
        the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!—
And a child’s dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy,—
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
The bulb goes on and off, weakly.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping—
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

  — Theodore Roethke (1908 - 1963), American Poet.

THE BLUE ANGEL

Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.

She’s a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.

Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.

She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the whites of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.

She opens her eyes, and they’re blank
like a statue’s in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings.

—you’d think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.

  — Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997), American poet

One of the things I really like about my new iPhone is the number of apps available (many for free) to expand its capabilities. One such program is the new WordPress for iPhone app, which gives the WordPress-based blogger the ability to update a blog from anywhere.

Most mobile blogging applications merely give one the ability to upload a photo with a brief caption over MMS, whereas this app gives the moblogger a good clean admin interface from which a full post can be posted, as I’m doing with this very post.

I’ll have to play with it more to figure out all its functionality but so far so good.

addiction is like this

sometimes there is nothing else except for the pen, the ink,
the paper, me, and the muse

Or get modern. Sometimes there is nothing but me the
monitor, the keyboard, the words, and sweet inspiration

looking at the blank paper
looking at the blank screen

watching the words take shape
something comes out of nowhere

a moment to allow for effect
then immediately
on to the next

junkies know this

so do writers

so do you

  — Father Luke (b. 1959), American poet. Reprinted with permission.
  — For more, see FatherLuke.com

LIKE A STRAIGHT SHOT AFTER MIDNITE

The toughest
thing
a man may do

is have morals

without
the threat of G.O.D.

and in spite of
the treachery of
society

American
or otherwise

expand
your heart
Grinch-like
and let the
good stuff flow out of you
like a dandelion
gone to seed
getting kicked to pieces
by rough-fingered wind

there is hope . . .
hope for me
and hope for you,
If you are not yet a zombie

So go to it
there is rum and other things
an ocean to drink
If you need a force-field,
Plenty of good tunes to shuffle
Your feet to
and plenty of well-curved wenches
that deserve to have
their names
Screamed out in the dark

  — Bradley Mason Hamlin, copyright © 2003., reprinted without permission