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

Small Atmospheres

Light lifts water
Off a parking lot.

Clouds on slick concrete.
Air apparent.

Left to right
Whips white speed.

Then still.
Then not.

Stratus swell.
Cirrus gust.

This chest, wet lot.
You, yellow heat.

2013

72 Degrees

Unlikely snow patch
Hunched in grasses’ slim shadows,
Slip off your white coat.

2013

Guest poet: Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen

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

2013

Two Women, Confluence

Two women, confluence
Of unplanned red, hungry,
Eat the same veggie wrap,

Laugh garlic in pedicabs
Along ribbons of sidewalk
Where night has eaten

Half the moon and
Skyscrapers break the rest
Into four shining cloves.

Red whirling women remind
Whole rooms of their feet.
Dancing men confess

In practiced accents, stolen
Beat, they even taste
The garlic in the air.

2013

Aequorea Victoria

Our memory—
Skin water skin

—Translating me:
Wind throat sea hips

Suspended bloom
Of jelly fish.

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

The Fourth

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
~T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

Today I am the morning man
Who shovels through my snowy walk.
That night, the woman shadow-shoveled
In the warm-crushed rowing dark:

Two hunched thinkers, lovers, clutched
At light’s raked progress over flesh
While two shame-shades slipped from
The scene, dry hands in cold pockets.

Myriad distant darkstars, earthshine
Scratched up by the waxing moon
Begged to be that dim streetlight,
Watching what bright shadows do.

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

Thoroughfare

First her face presses through.
A gentle thump, warm chest punch.
Next the exit wound.

Head born, she begins.
No longer seeing what is packed dark,
what is organ within him.

Her shoulders force the hole.
Hands bore through his back
like a flock of geese.

It is when her heart
beats inside his
that he loses footing.

Down on his knee
she drops him, swiffs
through like arrow wind.

Hands clutch at the invisible
egg of her, but there is no shape
to gather in passing.

Her waist, thighs, small toes—
all sharp lines—depart his spine.
The final cuts let no blood.

Perhaps the lines are Ls
starting to say leave or love,
but no sounds follow.

Her word is incomplete,
vagrant, vague. Who can sustain
the sound of endless L?

It makes a warm cave
of the mouth
we can’t live in, but brave.

His breath is meant—
her breath is meant—
to run out.

2013