[Note to long-time readers of RAMH: To the extent that I follow anything like a schedule here, I have a tradition of posts appearing on or around April 20 each year (e.g., here and here and here, and of course here (hence the traditional date)). For various reasons, my “April 20” post this year will appear tomorrow, appears here, i.e., on April 21.]
[Image: “As if he grew there, house and all — Together,” by Carol Jacobs-Carre. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) After quoting the poem by Thomas Cowper from which she drew the image’s title, the photographer explains: “These snails grab a bit of needles and so forth when they retreat into their shells, making the shell appear ‘dead’. If you look above the snail you can see where it was lying as well as a very small snail shell in the litter.”]
From whiskey river (italicized lines — from the July, 1999, issue of Poetry):
Tomorrow
I
Tomorrow I will start to be happy.
The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar.
Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set
dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne.
Today will end the worst phase of my life.I will put my shapeless days behind me,
fencing off the past, as a golden rind
of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land.
It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today.
Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.II
Australia, how wise you are to get the day
over and done with first, out of the way.
You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while
we are dithering about which main course to choose.
How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt:the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices
are revealed to you before our bidding has begun.
Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics
like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill.
When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light.III
Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018.
A date without character or tone. 2018.
A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature.
Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year
babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed.Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards
a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely,
vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual
end-of-season sales; everything slashed:
your last chance to salvage something of its style.
(Dennis O’Driscoll [source])
…and (italicized portion of last paragraph):
Zen was known for its cavalier, if not dismissive, attitude toward words. “To talk about it is to go right by it,” those old Zenmen were fond of saying. And yet no school of Buddhism has generated as much literature. Thousands of books have been written, in the East as well as in the West, about what cannot be expressed by language. I wanted to circle around from behind and maybe catch it unawares…
Whenever I say Zen, people are always correcting me: “It’s Ch’an/Chan (the Wade-Giles and Pin-yin romanizations of the word).” They say, “Zen is the Japanese form of Ch’an. Chinese Ch’an is different from Japanese Zen.” That’s one way of looking at Zen, as a cultural phenomenon. But Chinese Ch’an, Japanese Zen, and Korean Son all point to the same moon of the mind. And there aren’t two kinds of mind.
The reason I like to point with Zen, as opposed to Ch’an, is that I love a good Z… Besides, Zen isn’t Chinese or Japanese anymore. It belongs to anyone willing to see their nature and become a Buddha, anyone who lives the life of no-mind and laughs in these outrageous times.
(Bill Porter [source])
