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Kuan Yin


Of the many buddhas
I love best the girl
who will not leave the cycle of pain before anyone else.
It is not the captain declining to be saved on the sinking ship,
who may just want to ride shame out of sight.
She is at the brink of never being hurt again
but pauses to say, All of us. Every blade of grass.
She chooses to live in the tumble of souls through time.
Perhaps she sees spring in every country,
talks quietly with farm women while helping to lay seed.
Our hearts are a storm she trembles at.
I picture her leaning on a tree or humming or
joining a volleyball game on Santa Monica beach.
Her skin shines with sweat.
The others may not know how to notice what she does to them.
She is not a fish or a bee;
it is not pity or thirst;
she could go, but here she is.




---Laura Fargas

These guardians were placed at the entrance

to a tomb in China, around 700 AD,

to terrify any

undesirable visitors.

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The Promise

Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,
only a stepping back from the petty.
I gazed at the range of blue mountains,
I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank,
whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.
Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.
There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.
The dog’s tail wagged a little in his dream.


Jane Hirschfield

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My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted tree,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.




R.Frost

a small part of a Tibetan painting from 1700:
to an angry deity, I offer my skull, fill with my senses,
represented by
eyes, ears, tongue, nose.

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