I look out and ask

why this deep feeling as sleet

turns to snow and back.

My page remains blank.

Sometimes snow, sometimes sleet, sad

but true, sad but true.

Wherever the relative exists, the absolute is there as its correlative. Tanabe Haijime

The Sabbath. The pub

bursts with wild conversation.

It’s so cold outside.

Still, the Absolute

insists it’s Nothing, others

everything. Grounded

in contradiction

the day passes, I give up,

put my book away.

The Great Compassion

of the Absolute: Empty

and also happy.

It’s no tragedy.

I harden my face, go out,

sleet becoming snow.

A dusting of snow

on paths, gardens, and mountains.

Breathe out, in, out, in.

An egret rising

from the flat bay wakes me up

I did not know I

was asleep under

the pine. A white smudge

appears in the air

to disappear. I

am an old man astonished

that I am at all.

Such an eros to be beyond eros by denial of eros must fail. Desmond

New Year’s Eve. I stop

by the pond out of habit

only to be stopped

by transparency.

Cold daylight calmly addressed

my absolute self

and broke it open.

Winter cannot contain de-

sire. The restlessness

of naked sunlight

is divine. Surprise, surprise:

Loneliness wheels o-

verhead, a gull lost

in the deep horizon of

our bright finitude.

SONG

Each year I forget

how the cold saps energy

from the body used

to soft winds, shoulders

and arms kissed by the hot sun.

The flesh remembers.

Sleep, long and deep and

as one grows old deathly

sweet calls me to life.

21 November 22

VIII

I’ll wait. She’ll come back.

Beauty happens, disappears.

I revise, revise.

First snow flakes drift at sundown,

thickening towards nightfall.