Does your tongue dare
try to share
watery scenes from your dreams?
Details emerge, blunted,
soggy, half-blind beneath this morning’s
heavy traffic – thoughts stretching, streaming
out from wherever they sleep.
Dreams pay a heavy price when
words catch up – latch on – smudge
the elusive dream language.
Don’t dreams just taste better
safe in the solitude
of your heart’s cradle,
sleeping undisturbed?
Without warning the familiar pull
to speak and smile in perfect harmony
lends me the grace to dip my tongue
into the silvery pool of conversational talk.
It ends the same. Two voices deliver
the harvest of their minds, thoughts unraveling,
into a heap. The conspicuous
absence of beginning and end. I wish
to bend and twist with other branches,
but out I stick, taut, serious, too much my own.
Peace comes when that pull to combine with
the others passes – I am again centered
between ground and sky, calm and contained
inside these four quiet walls.
This was inspired by the poem reproduced below from Cold Mountain Poems, the Zen Poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-Chih. The bitter taste of an unfulfilling interaction is familiar.
XX
I’m used to living in some hidden, shaded,
mountain place,
but once in a while I walk straight into the
Kuo-Ch’ing Temple,
and sometimes I pay a call on old Feng Kan,
or go to see that honorable sir, Shih Te, the
foundling.
But then I come home, alone, to my cold cliff.
No one’s talk makes perfect harmony with mine.
I search a stream that has no source.
The spring dried up, but the stream water’s still
flowing.
Have you one person
knocking at your heart?
She has grown too big
for the space you cleared out
years ago.
You feel her nudge
on winter mornings;
across the mountains
her body rests
warm and safe in bed.
But her dreaming eyes
soak up secrets leaking
through her dreams –
she is being chased –
she is trapped at the very top –
she is lost – she is slipping –
Is that you chasing her?
You just wish her thoughts
spun soft,
light as the tapering snow.
Beneath the blanket
she grips hot sheets
with sweating hands.
The Well 