2.

Thirty years ago, in N. California, the concrete lid of my cabin's cesspool was cracking. I bought a 90 lb. bag of premixed in town, drove it to the trailhead—I was living three-quarters up a mountain—and worked it into my backpack. Balancing on a ledge, arms secure in straps, each of the affinities depends on all others. Together they form one kind of bundle here, and another kind of bundle there. Now a child, now a fish, now a stone or cloud I began to rise, only to have the weight drive me back to lay on the ground like a bug with its legs in the air.

Even after the brain dies,
                     the body twitches.
"He was always physically active,"
                     his widow said.

Lately I've been dreaming of an unfamiliar section of the city. There I am looking for the way home. But the directions I'm given lead me even further away. Although I'm beginning to realize this technique isn't going to get me home, I still keep asking directions.

These dreams are like wiffs of salt sniffed when the wind blows east. There is a journey in which I meet familiar people whom can't place. It is as if Odysseus were plying the streets like leys of the sea. But, unlike him, a young person doesn't know how to leave home, to move and become an adult psychologically speaking, apart from the socialized roles that we have waiting for that person. Therefore, we have, psychologically speaking, uninitiated adults, people who've never made a decisive break from the family of origin.

The playing out of adult roles does not an adult make. What we all face somewhere down the line is the recognition that I will never return home. This bitter truth I've known since weighing anchor in New York forty years ago. While his friends raised families, bought homes, tended their gardens and gods, Odysseus sailed the passages of a maze of mythology. After the last of his crew had evaporated, along with the illusion of home, he died and became a epic poem.

A few days after the most recent of these dreams, I read: "Odysseus's canto (is) concerned with the composition of human blood which contains in itself the salt of the ocean. The beginning of the voyage is located in the system of blood vessels. The blood is planetary, solar, salty...With all the convolutions of his brain Dante's Odysseus despises sclerosis just as Farinata despised Hell."

I cannot think of Osip Mandelstam without Nadezhda and her two amazing books. More so, her prodigious feat of memorizing her husband's poems, in case Stalin, the tyrant who had him exiled to the Gulag, would also destroy his manuscripts. Thus Osip's poems gestated in his wife's head. "Without suspecting it," Mandelstam had prophetically written, "'we are all carriers of an enormous embryological experiment.'"

Can we still love each other's poems in the clatter of mass communication? Can we still feel the undertow?—

The sea, or Homer – all moves by love’s glow.
Which should I hear? Now Homer is silent,
and the Black Sea thundering its oratory, turbulent,
and, surging, roars against my pillow.

In the Japanese Garden, people chatter beneath dark clouds scudding northeast. I expect their voices to leap like frogs into the pond. I expect the trees to laugh, as they shake fat raindrops onto my head. I expect bamboo to bow while I silently chant the Heart Sutra. I expect a dry bench to materialize and invite me to sit. I expect too much—

Shaking me off,
                rain
       continues to fall.

Jules Michelet visits the mud baths at Aqui, hoping to restore his health. There he receives "the curious news" from Dr. Heinz Graupner that "mud baths contain hormones from antediluvian pollen! To be healed by the flowers of another epoch, reanimated by springtimes past—insofar as dreams are concerned, this represents a great reality." The reality of the past swelling sinuses.

Scan the dumpers of any city and you'll find automobile license plates from elsewhere. Breathe and you breathe particulates blown in from a continent away. Ladle water weary from traveling for weeks and diverted for agricultural and industrial use all along the way. Texas mates with Oklahoma. Southern Georgia is northern Florida. Mexico is hemorrhaging toward the Arctic Circle. Is Pakistan not still India? Are the Balkans still balkanized? In which direction does Turkey face after the sun goes down? From New Mexico driving west two days, then another day north, before leaving the desert behind.

"In the fourth century A. D. the desert of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Persia were peopled by a race of men who have left behind them a strange reputation. They were the first Christian hermits, who abandoned the cities of the pagan world to live in solitude. Why did they do this? The reasons were many and various, but they can all be summed up in one word as the quest for 'salvation.' And what was salvation? Certainly it was not something they sought in mere exterior conformity to the customs and dictates of any social group."

I don't know when my fondness for Thomas Merton began. To this day, when I read passages from his journals, his relentless questioning of himself, the depth of his humaneness, of his faith in the Unknown, each word a dedication....leaves me in awe.

A row of gray buddhas sit facing the street, we can recover the beauty if we learn and admit what we have all done wrong, if we dream on into the future, a whole dream with a place for dissent but room for discovery. A dream of the earth, with past and future dissolved into the moment. Taking all as equally so real, only then, with eyes half-closed, they bear witness to a world streaming through their minds this drizzly afternoon.

When I see a waterfall, I imagine the 2000 ft. high wall of water that plowed through what is now Idaho and Oregon, leveling mountains, clawing out valleys, gorging out a path for the Columbia River. The Missoula Floods, they were called. Physicists conjure a world with equations; perhaps we can also learn to think like an earthquake, a hurricane, a cascade of water shaping mountains and valleys, environmental art on a monumental scale.

In the corner of my eye, a bird sits                     dreaming.

While belonging to an organized religion is a way of participating in community, it is not a door to the mystery of Being. It may exhume the aroma of the sacred, but the legend of the Thunderbolt deity was already hoary with age thirty-four centuries ago, an ancient legend when the Aryan invaders of India had composed their Vedic hymns to Indra, the god of the clear sky, who shook heaven and earth with his ‘hundred-edged’ darts. Indra, Zeus, Jove, Thor, Vajrapni or Yahweh---call him by whatever name you will, when you leave the building you still smell like your old soddy self. This is why Siddhartha left the palace for the forest. Why Jesus left the synagogue for the desert. Why Naropa left the academy to find a teacher. To approach the door of interdependency, where all spirituality begins, one must first undress the dogma of tradition.

What are these thoughts?
                           They are trees.
Clear-cut the mind,
                           not the forest.

To say something is "beyond my control," mirrors its consequences. Here I am addressing "beyond" as oracular, an echo without which there are no thoughts.

Tonight, Death's silken robes slide across my skin in a whisper, opening its pubic mound. This is no mundane erotica: Death is not born of flesh. Is life? To say Yes creates an opposition where none exists.

Outside the hospital a young doctor sits at a table making one phone call after another beneath a sky of mixed signs. Another man is taking close-up pictures of flowers. He leans toward them. They pose, smiling. We slip out of the womb to conquer the world, only to find that the world will eventually wear us down to its level.

Landscapes are modeled on what's going on inside their observer. Although they are "never entirely synchronous or continuous" in their commentary on Herodotus. How and Wells tell us that ‘to speak like a bird’ was a Greek expression for talking unintelligibly,’ and when the Trojan Cassandra, in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, is accused of twittering ‘like a swallow’, the reference is to the speech of barbarians as Greeks heard it…the bird sounds would be hard to interpret if there were any, but as it happens, they are referential. Someday I will disappear and become the hermit in a painting of steep mountains and winding streams. It's not the mountain's steepness I long for anymore, but its scent, which make my lungs hoard the air. I have no childhood home to return to, no friends that need tracking down. When someone approaches me on the path, I hide my pen and pad.

In the shadow of the freeway,
  weeds and wildflowers grow
                   without distinction.

I make the same trek several times a week: walking to several libraries, a few art galleries, bookstores to browse. On these journeys, I try to defamiliarize the streets. Today I walked past a tree and felt its system of roots searching beneath the pavement for water. And potted plants: how we circle and square the world!

Reading Basho's famous journal, I note that his quest through Japan was at a time when justice was whatever favored the ruling class. (Has it changed?) Basho himself sometimes had to pass himself off as a priest in order to assure his safety. To be a poet a team of astronomers announced yesterday that it had found what it called the cosmic renaissance, the epoch in which starlight first began streaming freely through the universe. The announcement was made a few days after another team reported that it had discovered the cosmic dark ages, a time before stars and galaxies began shining. The new finding appears to strengthen the scientific case that one needs some creatively inspired courage.

I live among the aged. Every day I see people, no longer strangers, in wheelchairs. I think: "What if I could not longer walk? No, not if, but when will I lose "the moments of the happy glide"? I think: as both my parents walked into their 90s, maybe...

What we call reality is the flowering of earth's optimal conditions for life as we know it. Even if the initial conditions on another planet were slightly different, life would sprout and evolve in unrecognizable forms. What we call life is not as special as specialized. Taking to heart Sapir's theory that in creation and in ritual, the Hebrew language was considered by Jewish mystics as playing a role much more important than the common communicative one that language regularly plays. It was the main instrument of the creation of the world, and it is the vessel that is prepared by man to contain the divine light that is attracted therein in order to experience an act of union or communication. In both cases, the letters do not serve, in any way, as a channel of transmitting meaning; too powerful an instrument, if we don't have a word for it we do not see it, our search for extraterrestrial beings may be using the wrong syntax. On a planet where most people believe in a singular God, are we ready to see the Other? Science Fiction prepares us, you might say. But prepares us for what? The Muppets?

After I had lived ten years in California, I decided it was "time to go home." I drove my VW Bug across the country, visiting friends along the way. Finally entering New York City, I remember thinking: "What have I done? I don't belong here anymore! This is where I came from."

a man whose entire life seemed wrong,
and seeing it all, feeling mind settle
into a place that could nurture old age,
I knew at once that I would never leave.