are only slightly less
threatening than my
mother's vagina:
Sunless
days anticipate
rain that doesn't fall;
the wounded womb
of the Earth
waits to
swallow
us all:
days anticipate
rain that doesn't fall;
the wounded womb
of the Earth
waits to
swallow
us all:
There
are precisely
twenty-six days
in two baker's dozen,
but not more than two
hundred T-cells in my cousin;
are precisely
twenty-six days
in two baker's dozen,
but not more than two
hundred T-cells in my cousin;
These are the visions and arithmetics that haunt me in the night.
[lapse, to the sound of]
[and return]
Last night I fell asleep reading Eknath Easwaran's introduction to the Dhammapada. In it, he tells the story of some wiseacre (perhaps not so dissimilar from myself) who went to the Buddha and asked him why he didn't talk about this, that, or the other. The Buddha clutched a handful of leaves and then pointed at the tree above him.
"Which has more leaves?" he asked.
The wiseacre confidently responded, "The tree."
"Undoubtedly," said the Buddha. "But what I have to offer, I offer freely."
[lapse, to the sound of]
[and return]
I woke at 3:30am, just like every other night this week. I heard the sound of the train; the image of its engineer came to mind. The Buddha was nowhere in sight.
I thought to myself:
People still drive freight trains in the middle of the night?
No comments:
Post a Comment