Category: Poems & art

(painting from www.atlasoftheuniverse.com_milkyway2.jpg)

Guarantees

Four a.m. my son awakens, stricken with a grief
he cannot explain. His hands search
like starfish for my mouth and eyes,
his head burrows into my chest as if
he wishes to be unborn again. What can I do
for him except tell him I am here?
All Will Be Well. ShhhShhhShhh.
The any-mother threadbare guarantee patched
together with borrowed blankets, unpaid bills,
a gelid radiator, and tarnished pennies in a bowl.
I sing what I know: Swing low, sweet chariot,
coming for to carry me home, I once was lost,
but now I’m found, was blind, but now
I see, kum by yah, my Lord, kum by yah,
O, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall
overcome someday, we are not afraid,
O, deep in my heart, I do believe.
My son pats my back to the same
rhythm I pat his, and we head hand-in-hand
to the mountain top where a band of angels
fly. Our mother is there in the center
of the spiraling galaxy, weaving with her bony
fingers blue and yellow stars into the twigs of a nest.
She hums what she knows until morning comes.

(photo by me)

(photo by me)

I AM LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET

I am lost in the supermarket somewhere
between the brussel sprouts and the tangerines, lost
in the age-old parent-child debate over
brand-name vs. generic, wavering between
100% organic and 100% genetically-modified,
I am lost in a maze of an imagined life without you.
You’ve already settled in the earth and sprouted back as a bee.

I am lost and you stay at home inside the cocoon
of Luther crooning and dressed in sweaters stitched
with reverberations and keys, raspberry jelly on your lips,
sparrow down and unconditional love in your being.

I am floating near the orange paint on the ceiling
and brushing against the sign for the missing cat.

Help bring my precious baby home.

I am lost in the flickering haze above the cabbage, breathing in the mist,
back to the source of life, where we end to begin.

(painting by me)

Miroku (Buddha of the Future)

Unformed air and cut ginger root voice
of the in-between inhale and exhale, Miroku, a curious god
to walk with toward distance drawn nearer step by step
and every and any direction is Divine. The simple way to live tucked inside
the pocket of her brown shabby coat.

Most run past her screaming inside, as we strive toward the next meal, pill,
best-laid plan, junk mail, jackpot, war, deal, steal, fix, fight, election, erection,
and everything we seek coated with sugar, sprayed with vitamins, soaked
in preservatives, plastic severed flesh and fruit wrapped for instant gratification.

Miroku, the true future, she moves the silent bodies of animals, human,
and insect, toward the unknown blindly, like fish swimming downstream, following
her we never lose the way to hesitation or complicate life with the muddied multiplication
of prediction. Miroku, never looking over her shoulder in fear,
never lighting up night with artificial light, never listening to the orchestra
of incessant buzzing above our office chairs, not entertaining cold dissections
of regret, no destruction, interruption of the natural rhythmic dance
of breath and dream.

Miroku waits. She exists in the woman who struggles with bloodying hands
to secure the rope to the tree in a raging wind because she wants to live.
She lives in that child who like an unshelled seed opens its eyes
to the nocturnal churning earth. She is always unprepared and traveling light.
If we wake up and open our eyes to see ourselves in the mirror, she stares back
a bit harder and longer each day, with undying and unconditional love.

Painting by my beautiful son (age 3 years and 4 months)

Drawing by my beautiful son (age 3 years and 4 months)

Painting by my beautiful son (age 3 years and 4 months)

Painting by my beautiful son (age 3 years and 4 months)

Scanned postcard: photo by Donna Terek

The Dottie Wottie House: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said,
“We are all the same color on the inside.”

On the east-side of Detroit there is a street unlike any other you’ll probably ever see, called Heidelberg, and its array of polka dots, riots of blue, purple, pink, red, and yellow, all shapes and sizes of shoes, high heels to summer flip-flops to tuxedo spats line the walkways and the tree branches. Baby dolls painted black with colorful crosses and broken limbs lie next to old suitcases and vacuum cleaners, and then numerous boards and car hoods painted with bold faces called the ‘Faces of God.’ This neighborhood is a living, continuous artspace called the Heidelberg Project started by the artist Tyree Guyton. It’s famous and infamous, depending on your attitude toward public and spontaneous art, yet personally as a lover of both rebellious spirits and of outsider art, I am a believer in this magical place.

I worked for a few times with the Heidelberg Project’s sponsored local elementary school, Bunche, teaching Japanese calligraphy and painting rocks for their art garden–very sweet and talented group of kids. They had no art education at the school due to funding cuts, which is such a sad thing. I am not sure if that is still the case, but my guess is, yes….

No child left behind ? Yeah, right. Go to any school in a poor neighborhood and try to say that with a straight face.

You can find out a lot more about Guyton’s Heidelberg Project and vision here.

“We are all the faces of God.
He said he made us in his image and likeness…and that says to me that God has a lot of faces.”

–Tyree Guyton

His artwork can be seen on his website here:

The Heidelberg Project is now trying to create a House That Makes Sense, an artist’s residence and children’s art workshop, and covering a house with something like 875,000 pennies. Send them your pennies, people!

My son said, What you think as a problem,
think as a skill. To speak a language no one knows –
but for me – crushes dandelion dust under my chin
and love’s butter seeps into my marrow as deep as those
who utter moo, meow, and ba-ba
black sheep have you any wool.

No arf, no peep, no neigh, a rare choo-choo.
Those sounds carry no impact
on the current state of planet earth
or guarantee happy thoughts when old.

To be in the realm of non-language may be a gift
from me to you. A reminder that words fly
and never land; they spill and dissipate.
Toward emptiness all speech crawls.
When I look at you with all my love
limitations of the tongue shall melt away
like ice painted to the branches of trees.

Faith doesn’t materialize in human breath,
in an utterance of Sanskrit or ancient Hebrew or
in the foam at the top of a tall glass of milk
directly brought from the udder to your lips.

Faith has more to do with silence than speech,
more with the open spaces among the notes and words.
I have never seen it, unless it might be those floating
colored specks a child sees, eyes closed, when facing the sun.

Grass turns to velvet. And ants, beads of lapis lazuli.

There’s another kind of faith people like to talk about,
while chasing azures with nets, but it never fills the soul
with triumphant towering clouds or human wings.
At best, it stuffs the mouth with cotton and sedulously
sets copper coins on man’s closed eyes.

Let go of the notions of acquiring hope via the holes
of the body and re-frame the journey by hoisting
an ax to the five gilded frames of your world. Chop away!

My advice, at surface, appears noisy, violent, extreme.
But if you took my initial advice to heart
then it’s in the pause before and after where belief
cradles your head and whispers your wordless name.

Lean into the silence
of a cut lemon and dance to the symphony
of an orange tree in bloom. Faith roams freely
the earth, the body, the mind. No shadow slows it down.

Painting by me, 2002.

I wish to devote this entry to a poet I consider my soulmate (of another time, plane and place), the free-style haiku poet, Taneda Santoka (1882-1940). The ‘o’ in his name is a long ‘o’, like how Minnesotans say ‘o.’

I first found out about him over 10 years ago when I was living in the student quarters of a Buddhist nunnery in Kyoto. His poems were why I extended my stay in Japan and the reason why I try to learn Japanese. I felt he had a lot to teach me about seeing the simple truth, beyond the suffering and pain in the world.

‘Santoka’ (his pen name) means Mountain + Head or Top+ Fire, so something like Head of Mountain Fire or Fiery Mountain Peak might work as a rough translation. I love his name.

Santoka had a hard life: he saw his mother pulled from the family well after she had committed suicide. He dropped out of Waseda University’s Literature Department (as many great Japanese writers did), started and failed a sake brewery with his father, married and failed at that, too, became an alcoholic…and after a suicide attempt at the train tracks, he was taken to a Zen temple, where he eventually was ordained as a Zen monk at age 44. Rather than stay in the comfort & safety of any particular school of the Buddhist religion, he traveled alone as a beggar-monk across Japan, composing haiku and travel notes along the way.

He walked over 28,000 miles in 14 years. His poems follow the jiyuuritsu(free)-style of haiku, not the strict and socially-acceptable 5-7-5 syllable patterns, but rather he used as few or as many syllables needed to express the ‘moment.’ The only rule was to express it within the space of one breath.

Samples of some of his haiku (as translated by John Stevens in his book, Mountain Tasting):

I sit in the withered beauty of the wild grasses.
kareyuku kusa no utsukushisa ni suwaru

Within life and death snow falls ceaselessly.
shouji no naka no yuki furishikiru

If it shines, it bleats; If it is cloudy, it bleats–The single goat
tereba naite kumoreba naite yagi ippiki

The moonlight pierces my empty stomach
tsuki no hikari no sukihara fukaku shimitoru nari

I cling to death; the pepper is bright red
shi wo hishito tougarashi makka na

More of his works translated into English and French can be found online here.

I am trying to find a path toward the essence of being alive that Santoka well understood. I believe I can make it, step by step.