Morning Practice
Posted: June 28, 2014 Filed under: buddhism, poetry, writing Leave a commentMorning Practice
When my eyes open at dawn’s light
the question naturally arises,
whose arms are these – flaccid pink
skin draping off brittle bones?
On the pillow there’s some long hairs – mine
or the two dogs, Roxy and Daisy, sleeping on
the bed? Before, the long hairs were always
a woman’s, her body pressed close
in the morning chill.
Now part of my lung is gone, infiltrated
by swarming molecules hungry to
devour my breath. It’s rationed now.
My heart beats harder to help
its neighbor. My heart’s comforting
sound fills my chest, but my morning
cough sounds like a sick man.
One beat, one breath….
Good practice for a lazy man.
As Su Tung p’o said,
“I’m a tired horse unharnessed at last.”
Minding My Time
Posted: June 27, 2014 Filed under: buddhism, poetry, states of mind, writing Leave a commentMinding My Time
Awash in mind time. Mind’s always mattering,
mothering: words, sensations, feelings always
forming stuff. Words always mattering
in Universe of Matter. That’s all (not really for
Roy & Laddawan and the Thai band playing Eric Clapton).
Mind called self is just the go-between
for no-body. Big Self mothers every thing
– knows like a bone every thing’s just co-
existing meaning-matter like mothering sky.
Right now in Chiang Mai at 1:18 a.m.
as a tiny candle lantern rises golden
in the night like a star.
Clive James’ Poetry in Full Bloom
Posted: June 3, 2014 Filed under: articles, books, people, poetry Leave a commentOne of my writer-heroes, Clive James, has been ill for the past several years yet his poetry burns anew even though it’s shadowed in sadness for a life fully lived and now in decline. Here are the last two stanzas to his recent poem, Event Horizon:
“Into the singularity we fly
After a stretch of time in which we leave
Our lives behind yet know that we will die
At any moment now. A pause to grieve,
Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,
And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.
What is it worth, then, this insane last phase
When everything about you goes downhill?
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze
And feel its grandeur, even against your will,
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live or else nowhere.”
See his glorious website here.
TLS, May 10, 2013
Read Stonehouse In Troubled Times
Posted: May 30, 2014 Filed under: buddhism, people, poetry 1 Comment
IPhone photograph
Scorpion tails and wolf hearts overrun the world everyone has a trick to get ahead but how many smiles in a lifetime how many moments of peace in a day who knows a toppled cart means try another track when trouble strikes there is no time for shame this old monk isn’t just talking he’s trying to remove your obstacles and chains
– From The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Talks of a 14th Century Chinese Hermit, translated by Red Pine (Counterpoint 1999).
The Past is Always Right Here, James Newton
Posted: April 29, 2014 Filed under: people, photography, places, poetry 2 Comments
Marcy Newton, left, me, top, James, bottom, LeAnn, right.
James Newton is a giant in my life. He kept me alive in the 80s & 90s. I saw his Facebook page for the first time this week, and he had posted two pictures of me. What does it bring back? Hot late nights, cooking steaks on an outside makeshift grill, poems, songs, spinning vinyl records, constant calibration of young, raw, natural energy. A knowledge it could never be repeated. I think of you always and forever, James, my brother.
Maybe the mid-80s in my study in Arlington.
On James’ Birthday
(Mid-80s)
Unwrap this, it’s for you
to take along on your search
for the perfect back beat
and still sea.
On this still-light morning
breaths draw slowly.
Sleeping bodies throughout
the house, too much drink
last night. The still cat
sits in the window sill
staring outside.
Beyond is the Great Outdoors
but what is it?
In last night’s dream
there was a man with
three hooks piercing his
chest, bound and hanging
on a swaying rope.
Is he you and me?
Now comes the first morning sound.
A bird feeling the Sun
on its tongue on another
moment of birth.
Frank X. Tolbert 2: His Art
Posted: April 21, 2014 Filed under: people, poetry, sight seeing 1 CommentMy friend Frank X. Tolbert has always been one of my heroes, and I’ve missed him a lot in recent years. He lives in Houston. His father was a famous journalist with the Dallas Morning News. Frank is one of those people who nourishes your soul when you’re around him, and he doesn’t have any clue what he’s giving to you. Frank and I shared a friendship with a man who was a hero to both of us: Roxy Gordon, a writer, poet, and another one of those people who give you things without knowing it.
Here’s a few samples of Frank’s work. See his Facebook website here for a taste of X’s style. See more of his art here.
Frank X. Tolbert, standing on the left, with one of his large paintings in the background.
Frank, on the right, with an artist friend
A painting of Roxy Gordon by Georgia Stafford.
Go here to see a sample of some of Roxy Gordon’s poems and writing and check him out on Amazon for some CDs of his poetry-songs. Note the death mask in the right corner.
Red Pine Has Two New Books Coming Out
Posted: April 2, 2014 Filed under: books, buddhism, people, poetry Leave a comment
Red Pine has two new books coming out in the next couple of years, in addition to Yellow River Odyssey which will be released sometime this summer. The first is based on the poems of Stonehouse, and the second, Finding Them Gone, is the story of his pilgrimage to the graves of Chinese poets. Both will be published by Copper Canyon Press.
William Empson: Let it Go
Posted: March 30, 2014 Filed under: people, poetry, states of mind Leave a comment
Let It Go
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can’t
Tell or remember even what they were.
The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.
– William Empson
Emerson’s scandalous ideas
Posted: March 14, 2014 Filed under: people, photography, poetry, states of mind, writing Leave a comment
In The Woods; a photograph by Robert Crosby
Whoso walketh in solitude,
And inhabiteth the wood,
Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass
From these companions power and grace.
Emerson– Woodnotes II
Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address to the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. – William James, The Variety of Religious Experience
A Poem for Red Pine
Posted: January 26, 2014 Filed under: people, poetry, writing Leave a commentA Poem for Red Pine
Bill Porter went West, took a new name
and came back from the East to spread the word.
A master of the shadow art,
he trails behind
recasting Chinese ideograms into new lines
for English minds.
He works from a second floor study in Port Townsend,
deciphering black strokes from faraway days with sharp eyes,
diamond mind – a time of flaming hearts:
writers of the Silent Word.
On the wall of his study, a Tibetan tanka.
A small painting of bamboo with a poem by Wang Wei.
Through a window, the Cascade Mountains.
Through another window, the ocean.
Through another window, the branch of a plum tree.
Pine trees and bamboo sway in the morning wind.
Light brightens a new day
as the pine tree’s shadow disappears,
leaving no trace.
the roy hamric journal 