Self-Immolation

Having lit the match,
Wind crawls up my fast wick back.
Liquid butter burns.

2013

Chöd

Every day I offer the mandala of my body twice.
I wipe the grains of rice from the mound of my head.
I gesture signs for every element, thinking someone
Could stretch out in me, breathe, swim, be warmed, fed.
I offer myself as a great wheel, make of my hands
Eight mountain peaks of every met need reaching out
Infinitely. When I snap my fingers, I disappear.

I may not mean it.

I also dream of consuming you, of offering up the trumpet
Of my old thighbone to blow. I’m not 16. I didn’t die
By accident as is required by such a morbid instrument.
Still, I’d make that awful drone if it meant your lips,
Your breath through me. And while I’d offer my own skull
For half a damaru, I’d want mine joined crown to crown
With that summit of you, skins stretched over cavities

Where rhyme once lived with assonance.

We could ring bass emptiness, echo space where foreheads
Slow-merged, tongues full of words, dumb for long hours
In each other’s mouths. Surely, fine buddhas and khandros
Have lent us the endless white and red feasts of their bodies.
Last night, wild wind blew through my bony dream. All my dead
And every dog swooped in. I’m scrapped, spread out in countless
Bellies, every me-filet hungry. I eat someone new every day.

You swallow my tail; this is how I pray.

2013

Skype’s First Double Jalus

Someday I will be sitting
And you will be sitting
Inside our respective screens

After years watching sound
Move each other’s mouths,
Two mirrors in infant mimicry,

With nothing more to say.

I will laugh when your yellow belt
Finally drops an empty knot
Where your waist used to be

And let my hair fall
A loose headless pile
On lettered keys.

for Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen, my English student and Dharma teacher

Guest poet: Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen

Flowers prostrate sky.
Clouds pride in it all hiding.
Cried then leaves were fresh.

2013

Where Does It Come From, Stay and Go?

Go find your mind,
the men tell the boys.

The boys search for days, weeks, months—
return with a fist-sized stone, the tale
of a bird, point to the heart.

With kind eyes, the men say,
Go look again. The boys do.

One has to earn the losing
of one’s own mind.

It is not like here where we read it first
in books and lie with certainty:
The mind is nowhere.

Here, it takes years
to lose these words.

2013

Throwing Desire

Knead it.
Put your body behind it.
Spiral wedging makes a flower.
Keep the air out or it will blow when the heat
comes. Smooth out the petals. Make a cone. Throw it down.
You must center it on the wheel or it will wobble.
Don’t fight it with your hands alone. Brace
your arms on your legs. Apply pressure
until it centers. Learning centering
takes weeks,
months.
Keep it slick. Water
reduces friction. Don’t add too much
or it’ll be weak later. Push it, spinning fast,
and it rises. Your hands tell it what shape to be.
Begin coning. Bring it up. Bring it down. A hill becomes
a mountain, then a hill, then a mountain. Find the center.
Press down to where the bottom of the inner vessel
should be. How wide do you want
your base? Centrifugal force
is your friend
in these first steps. Let
the wheel spin fast in the early
stages. As it gets taller and thinner, reduce
the speed or it will fly. A lot of throwing is being
able to hold still. Hold it where you want it to be, let the spin
do the work. Cupping the form, push the sides up into
a cylinder shape. The further the top lip opens
and spreads, the harder it is to rein it in.
Sometimes you have a shape in mind
before you even start. This
is not necessary. First
thing you learn is
the cylinder.
It is easy to stretch it out
but hard to bring it back in. Avoid
thin spots. How far something can stretch
is called its plasticity. Again, don’t let your mouth
get too wide and thin. Shaping from the outside is a lot
less effective than shaping from within. Reach in.
Your fingers rise inside. The pot grows taller.
The spirals mesmerize. It’s more about
how you apply pressure than being
really strong. You can clean
rough edges with tools.
Some people
like the coarse lines
made by fingers. It looks human.
First it becomes leather hard. Then bone
dry. Depending on where you live, it can happen
overnight. Tool what is leather dry to smooth the surface.
If it’s bone dry, you’re done. You can only fire
or recycle it. When it’s ready to come off
its back, it comes off on its own.
When the water evaporates,
it unsticks. Light the kiln.
Once fired, it’ll last
1000 years, hold
anything.

2013
with thanks to Joe Marler, potter

Geshe-la Speaks of Sky Burial

[T]here are six realms of existence in which all deluded beings exist…. Although the realms appear to be distinct and solid, as our world seems to us, they are actually dreamy and insubstantial. They interpenetrate one another and we are connected to each.”
~Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

To find a human corpse while walking is good luck,
he smiled. I laughed, recalling morbid photos of
a tundra where a shriveled face and arms were sucked
quite clean and red by vultures’ final act of love.

I didn’t ask him, Why good luck? It just made sense,
despite the fact that here such luck would make a man
grow pale and cry, or call the law. We don’t dispense
our bones this way. We box them for the promised land.

One friend surmised the luck is in the end of life’s
great suffering. But I say luck is witnessing
that body as myself. No longer someone’s wife
or child or love—a dissipating fleshy dream.

With any luck what’s left of me will be this eye.
Bequeath me to the buzzards. Bury me in sky.

2013
With thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen,
Padma Thornlyre and Julie Cummings

Photosynthesis

However scintillant,
One grows tired
Of suffering.

Trees grow tired
Of the fuss of leaves.

Even in the dead of winter,
We cling to final rattles.

Stark, just drop
What no longer
Gathers light.

Light already gathers us.

2012

Red Bead

It is never safe to assume
karma is through with you,

that all you have done
and do has been released

like a necklace spilling
beads across a floor.

You gather the beads,
re-string them while you sleep,

always a familiar,
pleasing pattern.

Oh, to sleep! This sleeping
storm that blows games through.

One game, you let it go.
You let it go. One name.

It rolls just within reach,
the red bead.

Again and again,
you have slipped

it in your mouth
between cheek and teeth,

your foray tongue
a muscled dream.

Try to spit it out,
the dead seed.

Wishing is not the same
as living or reprieve.

2012

Venus in Taurus at 3 a.m.

I, too, am a red light
lonely toreador caught dead center
in the horns of the bull

bucked about until my stories drop
until the shapes of beasts tossing gods
are only self-consuming suns

dazzling distant spheres
or better yet, quantum benders
rolled out across a dark bed.

Everything shines.
I’m done picking fights
with the sky.

2012