Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

there is suddenness
to all surfaces—
in the fields
forwardness is

ensnared, & all
stops. The lawn
is a god. A door in the trees
opens. Corridors appear everywhere

as light & the light says
you want to live &
nothing
happens. The lowering light

gathers in the waist of
the day, it glows
on bark on chips of
rock & right there in the upcurl

of the dried leaf on that blue
chair & also there
on the live leaf at the branch-tip of
that young oak

which had just moments ago
sashayed in bits of wind & is now
brutal in its
stillness.

A towhee flies off & leaves behind

this.

We do not exhale.

It is possible consciousness dis-

appears from the atmosphere
taking with it the crazed
minutes
running towards the end

only because they were
let loose
once—& you cannot strip away
this skin which holds u

in, you cannot hide
from the rush
which will start up again
as soon as u ex-

hale, but for now
pain awakens to find itself
not pain, whatever is
hatching us is

done & falls
away & we are
dropped
down. The incubation is

suddenly over.
That anything occurred before is
erased. Do not
forget this

when u return

to that world

where the casting about of the soul
which lives in the shadows
begins again,
where the leaves swirl up

into the twisting torso
of the wind
which wants once again to peer
in all the other

directions—
where the cicadas
which had stopped unexpectedly,
as the promiscuity of

glancing had
stopped—as
wanting & knowing
had—begin again—but for now, for the

impossible eternity of this
second,
whatever there is
which is all there is

stands unbroken before us.