#MEDITATION ON DISPLACEMENT

蓮始開 · hasu hajimete hiraku — the lotus begins to open

Can it be known

I sat in the hot tub,

if only briefly.

The heat does not sedate;

the failing heart finds it work —

and that, in part, was the rub.

Without destruction

it spreads my volume.

I can measure only the external —

how the water rises;

I feel the faintness

the hot water induces.

Without design

a bubble surrounds us.

The interior is not denied

but defends itself first;

the exterior is measured,

and, as a matter of convenience,

denied complicity.

I am not known.

Without the hot tub,

the self I defend, collapsing,

registers no strength of wisdom:

consciousness swoons,

mind calculates,

awareness fears submersion.

And the discrimination remains.

The hot tub measures the viewable —

the shift in the volume,

the rise against the lip.

And this thing I take for an agent

only registers its anxiety

by the bite at the lip.

Buddha Had No Consciousness

Buddha did not abide

in consciousness as a thing.

Sal-tree grove.

Lotuses rise.

Completeness neither entered

nor departed the grove.

Dharmatā shimmering as arising,

binding space

into a continuous field of relation.

Quaking aspen grove.

The tathāgata whispers,

“Emaho.”

A clonal retinue emerges —

one body,

indivisible in its members.

Magadha’s Bamboo Grove,

Rājagṛha teaching:

emptiness of the culm,

form of the culm.

Rhizomes recite

Prajñāpāramitā.

When I sit,

no sitter, no cushion.

When I rise,

not any ‘outer.’

The bodhi tree teaches

how to be a tree.

Māra exposes

how to be an agent.

Gautama listens to both.

Neither speaks

of consciousness.

Dharmatā, unborn,

neither conscious nor unconscious —

just this grove,

this culm, this aspen body.

You Do Not Know Me

I ask Morita —

not to cure, but to dance.

Never the demand to lead,

a fondness for Zen

but I am searching deeper,

more than smoothing this life.

I am not here to argue

the thought you have of me

or the insight you harvested

from my telling —

debriefed with the entangled other,

a loop that denies it is a loop.

It is not that you are smug

but you cannot listen

without arriving right.

Gun to my head,

knife at my chest,

Dakota snow and wind closing in —

My heart —

a surgeon’s plaything,

interventionists refining,

physiologists pacing,

cardiologists mixing.

My gut —

scopes searching,

hands resecting,

stains speaking.

And then —

the small embarrassments of youth,

the work that failed,

the quiet stacking of retirements,

each one a clean “enough.”

Others watch

and judge

and report I have given up.

You do not abandon

what has already fallen away.

They call it hiding —

but when the body will not rise

you learn which acts require witnesses.

They offer lists

of unfinished living.

I have had enough trauma,

not as disfigurement

but as what they see as unfinished.

I will not be reopened.

Unseen,

unremembered,

the high-wire thins with age.

It is not my step that falters;

the ground is bound to snap.

They have their arc:

survived,

overcame,

came out enriched —

karma worked off,

justice served,

so the story goes.

Neurons do not coddle.

I give it no face,

yet I do not deny

what I cannot locate,

you cannot name.

Lotus Begins to Open

蓮始開 — hasu hajimete hiraku, “lotus begins to open,” the second candle of Minor Heat

I have stretched at the shore of a lotus pond in bright sunlight. White

blossoms above the water do not conceal nor display the unarisen.

Warning enough — the risk is the metaphor — the pretense of both seen

and known. But watch the bees on nectar runs; they are surprised instead

by the blossom’s fixed closing. Bees encased in papery petals’

smothering closure. Lily and lotus attend only to night’s fall.

Lily and lotus arise from the same mud. But here do part, for lilies may

keep covenant with the night.

Dusk itself coaxes the Emily Grant Hutchings lily — horticulturist

Pring’s homage to his friend’s spiritual nature. Offering fragrance

where sight recedes. In her name that dazzling lily did display in

amaranth-red, but when adorning Jap Herron it was not so well received.

A paradise found

Amaranthus beauty shed

A paradise lost

Planchette nourished by her lotus eating, a satyr seduced with feigned

literary voice. ’Twas not Twain that did speak in Odyssean

forgetfulness, but her own voice that her writing should not have

indulged. Blake, though delight he may in all manner of love, I think

prefers the thornless day lily. Virgilio inspires with more than

epitaph.

I do not know them. I barely know of them. Yet they do foretell familiar

error. Strangers gathered under rising cloak of darkness. Like bees they

buzz, enclosed as they are within the dusk, mistaking garbled revelation

as unbidden truth. What really did she think abides in a private

exchange with that mud-encased — buried casket. It will never blossom in

any above. Nothing has been granted; nothing taken. It is more honest,

perhaps, to name it plainly — a small, elaborate parody of not knowing.

I do not know them. Those bees, in similitude wanderings, chasing

essence throughout the day, sitting and rising from the comfort cushion.

Without warning, held by the grip of that mud which must close at the

end of each day. Each life reverie freed at dusk, senseless work arrives

at dawn.

essenceless fragrance

never similitude

moonlight heatless glow

We Are Not Found

union of no union · 蓮始開

Not two who turn to face each other,

not the pair who keep each other’s back —

that is romp, that is propping,

the story two agents tell

to prove the wall between them kind.

And not the wall thrown down and named gone,

not there is no you, no me —

for that is only another cushion,

another place to sit and be right,

a self that has learned to say no self

and smuggled itself back in the saying.

Not self and other.

Not the denial of self and other.

Only this: the moving.

The slime mold has no captain.

Cell speaks to cell with no nerve to carry it,

and the whole body crosses the log

as one hunger, one direction —

no one deciding, no one obeyed.

Ask which cell is you and which is me

and the question falls through the floor of the question.

The aspen is one tree

wearing a thousand trunks across the ridge:

underground, a single body;

above, a retinue that never met.

Emaho — the field said to the field —

and the grove stood up.

So do not ask are we one or are we two.

Ask only whether the water moved toward the water,

whether the seven arose without a whip —

equality, respect, sincerity,

safety, trust, honesty, and the purity

that cannot be halved and handed across a line.

They come only when no one is made to bring them.

Compel any one of them

and it turns in the hand to its opposite,

and you are two again, guarding the wall.

This is not intimacy. It is safety.

I cannot know myself —

how then would I reach across and know you —

so I do not reach across. I am the reach:

the conduct, the tonglen that was never a trade,

one field, differently configured,

breathing where it was already breathing.

Entangled, yes —

but a loop that will not be named a loop,

that dissolves the instant you step outside it

to point and say there, that is us.

And every day it is new.

The memory of yesterday’s union

is only the discrimination this is what I call work.

So wash the bowl. Cross the log.

Let the pseudopod go out and gather what is there.

Consort is not a thing you know.

It is not a thing you know is not.

It is a conduct —

and it is happening, or it is not,

the way the water is moving, or is still.

Colophon

The work is personal. The material here is original arising directly from my sitting contemplation. It is protected under Any Note Press. It’s publication here permits no commercial use. All rights are reserved. It is offered for the benefit of one’s practice and nothing else.

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