Every Day

The world is a village.

Your village thrives near rivers and pine-mountains.

You plant it. You nurture it. You harvest it. You eat it. You carry it.

Every day starts at 4:00 a.m.

You put food into a wicker basket, heave it onto your back and either walk to town or ride with other villagers in the back of a small diesel belching tractor or truck. Perhaps a tuk-tuk overflowing with soil smells, green life talkers. Maybe on a motorcycle as chilly winds blast your face. It feels good to be alive.

Get there early. Spread your treasures out on a rice sack near the curb. Cold winds refresh the street. Say hello to friends. Broken dawn breaks over eastern mountains shrouded in fast clouds. Mothers and daughters arrange labors of love.

Women arrive to unload bags of corn, dead civet cats, onions, greens, bamboo shoots, apples, and language. They grow rice, ginger, beans, peanuts, peppers, bananas, squash, sugar cane, corn, papaya, cucumber, and sweet potato. They only leave villages to sell to townies.

A smiling old man crouched on the corner wearing a green army pith helmet from a forgotten war sells bells and musical iron instruments for oxen and water buffalo.

An ancient shaman woman with a deep lined face bundled against morning displays roots, herbs and small bundles of natural remedies. People trust her innate knowledge. Her dialect and wisdom is older than memory.  

moonlight dream

A letter to Su Tung-P'o

Almost a thousand years later
I am asking the same questions
you did the ones you kept finding
yourself returning to as though
nothing had changed except the tone
of their echo growing deeper
and what you knew of the coming
of age before you had grown old
I do not know any more now
than you did then about what you
were asking as I sit at night
above the hushed valley thinking
of you on your river that one
bright sheet of moonlight in the dream
of the waterbirds and I hear
the silence after your questions
how old are the questions tonight
 - W. S. Merwin
alive on all channels  Read more…

heart sutra

Everything changes, everything passes,
 
Things appearing, things disappearing,
 
But when all is over—everything having appeared and disappeared,
 
Being and extinction both transcended— 
 
Still the basic emptiness and silence abides,
 
And that is blissful Peace.

Nam Ou River

Moon reflection
River crackles
Mountain silent
*
Light of moon
Breaks mountain shadow
Dances on river
*
Crescent sends yellow 
Music dancing over river
Flickering into darkness
*
Bamboo baskets across her
Shoulders
Pacing strong
Steady across a long bridge
Toward mountain home

Bog Oak & The Pool

Bog Oak

The bole of it hummocked in the turf,
The knuckles of it deep like a tangled hand
Mummified, clasping the quag.
And the burl of it drowned there
Soaked to a fare-thee-well.
Impervious, hard as a cherry stone.
Death’s implacable fixedness
In the cold bog entombed.
Rock root to the world.

The Pool

Even at night,
When I am far away
From the pool in the Nephin Begs,
Even when I am not there stooped,
Peering through sedge at its silken stillness,
Or waiting in a blind of thorns
For some sudden wonder there to appear -
For which my life is the idiot quest -
The water ever sluices in, withal.

The surface shimmers
In the weird watery glow
Of a sickle moon drifting,
A bright star hung on its horn.

Sometimes, then, the water kelpie,
Become again a glimmering girl,
Rolls languidly to the still top
And slippery, shoulders it over Into slow concentric rings
That splinter the moon into wrinkled rippling winks
And rock the grasses browing the banks.

They rock me too while away I nod
Not asleep, nor yet awake,
But floating, cradled,
Above yawning water vaults.
Gently jostled in the soft twilight,
Lullabied by her water song
Whose beauty steals my breath,
Troubled by vague huge visions
Just beyond my sleepy sight.

The floating stars then fall
And with them, I with her,
Like sugar melting in lemon water
Tracing crystal trails weirdly down,
Fractured, prismed, and bending,
Like the paths to fading memories
Darkly to repose at the bottom of the pool,
Where all the secrets in sometimes slumber dwell.

From Achill Sounds, a collection of poems by Thomas J. Phalen, a friend.