Bare With Me:

Bare With Me:

I

There is a place in the ocean where vast waves

ceaselessly rise.  Without fail, all fish which pass

this place become dragons.  For that reason, the place

is called the Dragon Gate.  The vast waves

there are no different from the waves anywhere

else and the water is ordinary salt water

as well.  Yet mysteriously, all fish crossing

here become dragons.  Their scales do not change,

their bodies do not change, and still

they become

dragons.

                                                Dogen

                                                Shobogenzo-Zuimonki

II

Freshly poured (though they start popping almost right

off) the coffee looks like a small pond of spiders’ eyes.

Different sizes, they keep close to the warm walled- off-

from- breezes sides of the mug.  I’ve given them

a fair start in the morning: while everything brews

an old favorite cup of mine sits in the sink with hot

water starting her off.  Because who wants, being cold,

a sudden rush of something near toward boiling,

if even a lifeless and faded to almost white through

the years through the lips and teeth and an occasional

(tricky, this, having been burned once and once more)

tongue.  Because how do you drink something hot

or have you ever noticed?  With caution?  With rush

right in?  Does your tongue hover over the rim, bottom

lip kissing the outside (we can call it that) because what else

is it the beginning of, other than a swallow, an acceptance

or rejection, and that comes after, much later sometimes,

if there’s something of a cooling down to do and that

lower lip’s the first to know if the approach first time coming,

should be called off, clumsy in the morning just

getting out of the dream and dark of all of night’s

suggestions (the window fan’s a wind itself, the wind’s

a rain, the rain’s a wave that makes and makes and makes

and never seems to bread, only increase or decrease depending

on the tide).  It’s how the dead come back to tempt us,

because it’s only awake that we know how lonely

we (we?) they are, and those dreams never bleed us

out and we come back among the alive unhurt, unscarred,

except maybe the clenched knot of the jaw, the break

in the lip, drawn, now dried, blood on the pillow 

so it does, it behooves us to come with caution to the hot

coffee we offer ourselves and let it settle, every eye

bubble in the light pulled up or back down into the drink,

the passage like a ride in a lake-boat on a calm day,

all those small wakes left behind while we sit and watch all

those lives float by, anchored as they are among

the pines and beeches, the evergreens, their needles

that sometimes bead in the heat in August and drop

the sticky pitch of their liquid selves onto whatever happens

to be beneath them, dropping as a bubble, falling

as a bubble, making it to the skin before it opens, so small

an explosion its almost unnoticed, its carried

all the way home, it’s kissed, if it’s allowed, and noticed,

but fleetingly, like a memory, like a barn

spider I watched climbing higher and higher into

the rafters, into and then out of the swiftly charging air,

temperature dropping, rising, dropping, rising, as I breathed

on it, out and then in, out, and then in.