The Teacher

I'm posting two more prose poems from the new sequence. I'm not sure what to call it, but I'll probably come up with something.

A month ago I ran into an old teacher at a bookstore. I hadn't seen him in years. He reminded me of Blake's Jehovah. The second poem is about him.


THE FRIEND

Our Friend has been waiting for thousands of years.
He was the shy girl standing at the edge of the
playground, the woman in her twenties that you
never quite saw. He was the wind rising in the
nest, the light in the East that suddenly woke the
jays and crows. When we look at the earth we
remember his face.

Each time we wake we have this new chance in the
world. Swallows land on the grave of the old holy
man. Hands that open in forgiveness grow young
and supple again.



THE TEACHER

Yesterday I felt a sudden love for an old teacher
I hadn’t seen in many years. He stood with two
canes, his white hair and beard as wild as Blake’s
Jehovah. We talked--he wife gone 10 years, his
father one-hundred years old--and the years
unraveled in the wind.

How many old fathers do we carry inside us?
Surely, given the chance I would carry this man
down to the River Styx, place two coins, grieve
again for what the world has lost and forgotten.
I would tell Charon “No matter what, take care
of this man,” as the boat slides silently across the
unknown waters.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

The Invisible Book

Lat summer, I wrote a series of small poems called The Invisible Book. The idea was that behind every book of poems, there's an invisible or shadow book--like the long shadow a pebble leaves on a dirt road at dusk. I selected and revised 16 of the 40 poems I'd written, choosing them on the basis of whether I could feel 'the shadow', or subconscious inside them. The poems are printed below.

THE INVISIBLE BOOK


The invisible book
writes itself
whether we know it or not.
It's in love with the small things we abandon.

*

I like sentences that begin with rain
and end in silence.
The stones love it too,
and the white rabbit feeding at the edge of the field.

*

Heaven can wait.
But I seem to find it
in the fox sparrows
kicking up bugs from the leaves.

*

No one knows when the last word will come.
That's why I talk so much.
Let's spend the rest of the day with a stone Buddha,
who is always silent, always aware.

*

I can deal with silence, and age,
two or three books on my shelf.
I want to wander with Rilke near the dark roses.
I want to tell Hesse our homesickness will never end.

*

I'd like to take a little walk
that ends at water.
All the roads inside me
are turning to sand.

*

The earth breathes evenly,
takes everything inside: the bones
of a vole, the blue shadow hiding
inside an empty shell.

*

The brook sound reminds me
of the earth's hands,
holding everything steady.
What catches the earth when it falls?

*

I want to be playful with the light,
show it my shadow in late afternoon.
At night I am the lone presence
moving from room to room.

*

Night comes. The whole field
is soaked through with dew.
Lovers don't mind: they spend
the night wrapped in a cocoon of light.

*

3 am. I step outside to take in
the moon, the clouds, a little wind.
Someone keeps changing my name,
and the small things I fall in love with.

*

Don't worry,
someone looks over us.
It would be a shame if the world
were a garden where nothing ever grew.

*

I am the voice that never leaves you.
I am the hand that never sleeps.
I am the voice of the wild grass ripening,
the light inside the light.

*

It's a good thing that the earth
shakes itself now and then, like a giant
waking from sleep. In the earth's cells,
whole pastures of light are waiting to be born.

*

Let's be playful, then.
It may be the only way to mend the soul.
A woman stitched it by moonlight
from the sorrows of passion and dew.

*

Let's call down the black and white angels of the air.
It may be the only hope we have.
Wings keep turning the pages of the invisible book
that we write but never know.


(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2007)

Zen Master Seung Sahn

I've been reading some of the stories and anecdotes about the Zen Master Seung Sahn. He died a few years ago, but his zany wisdom (and that's a compliment) lives on. I've been writing a few off-the-wall things myself lately, and am including two here. The second is based on one of Seung Sahn's teaching stories.

THE AXE HANDLE

Let’s leave the night to itself. The leaves rising on the
wind in wildest speech have settled down beneath
the fallen snow. The new moon reflects itself in the
icicles hanging from the eaves.

The cave inside the body grows. This is the place
where our tenderness can go, our grief, the holiest
gestures we have made. What we are is inside
the cup stained with years of use, and in the hand-
carved axe handle leaning by the door that no
one has touched.


THE BROOM

--for Seung Sahn

A king went to a Zen temple to collect taxes. “There
are men here,” the Master said, “who can fly around
the world on brooms.” The king didn’t believe him,
so he put the broom between his legs and flew
around the room, one, two, three times. “Now
you try it.” The king put the broom between his legs
and jumped. Nothing happened. Two times;
nothing happened. And a third.

The Master said “There are monks in the next room
who could kill you with a single glance” (You could say
the Master was bringing the axe down on the king’s
neck). The king, in his wisdom, left.

It’s good to think that there are places in the world
where men still fly around on brooms, places that
the rich will never understand. Snow builds outside
the temple door, and the wise old voice of the frost.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)