BY JAN HAAG
THE 2005 POEMS
33 poems written in the Boonstra Brain Function Form
Word
count: 11, 10, 9, 6, 4, 2, 1
BRAIN FUNCTION AND THE BODY
BRAIN FUNCTION
#01
01-10-05/01-01-06
Well here's the new year -- and I need a new body,
new brain, new
hope, courage to get on with it.
Without memory, the computer must
serve
as my retention facility
-- like Einstein,
who,
asked the speed of light, replied: "You can look it up
anywhere." As
the Hubble peers into the universe's history, but
remembers nothing,
I, too, can respond: My past can
be read in cyberspace. I remember
nothing. As my yoga
teacher iterates,
I,
like every other particle, have been here, brain, flesh, memory, since
the beginning, since before the Bang, the Big one, growing,
evolving, ever recreated, but never destroyed, eternally chaining into
molecules, long, short, complex, concave, immortal,
a delight
for those
who want
to
live forever. But the body, wretchedly aching, does not. I do
not
mind my molecules being immortal, but I, the I
of I, has discerned
that I am here solely
to amuse the gods, say witty
things, act
in adorable
ways, entertain
the
invented witness, add to the accumulation of thoughts, things,
transmute, transform
molecularities from point to line and back
again, locate things,
trace trajectories through time and the
temporariness of knowledge.
We are here today with only
vague
ideas of what
will be
here
tomorrow, and needn't trouble ourselves to care about past, future, or...
Written in the Boonstra Brain Function Form,
word count: 11, 10, 9, 6, 4, 2, 1
with an 11 word coda
THE BODY
#02
01-18-05
The story of a nomad trapped in an eyrie with a
miniature lion is
hard to tell. Nothing happens. The weather
comes and goes and
nothing changes. It gets hot
and cold. Everything remains the same.
Some days the mountain
drops her
veil.
Leaves appear on the poplars outside the window, go through their
multi-catkin phases, turn gold in late autumn and denude themselves
to bark in winter. One can see the mottled
Cascades. Rain falls
like a river,
wind blows like a
vacuum, ice
forms.
The body of the earth tells few tales to an eyrie
high in the sky
where nuns used to fly. Blessings
crowd the air, moist, dense,
strangulating, like the
burning incense of piety, of contentment,
incarceration -- like the last
pips of
hope.
11, 10, 9, 6, 4, 2, 1
THE BEHISTUN INSCRIPTION
#03
01-19-05/01-05/03-11-06
At the foot of Persia’s Zagros Mountains, a single text in three
scripts, in three languages is inscribed on sheer rock 350 feet above
the sand. This Rosetta Stone of Cuneiform, stretching 50 feet high and
80 feet wide, also pictures King Darius, his God and his conquered
peoples. No women, of course. (No doubt there were many immaculate
conceptions.) Men manifested and leaked their seed. From the ground sprang
up warriors ready to make war not love. Old Persian
and Elamite (like Sumerians, an isolate) and Akkadian or Babylonian
(which had Semitic roots), were carved in large letters on
the cliffside. Darius' stone beard, using
iron pins and lead, was added
later. Fortunately, Old Persian lasted long
enough to furnish the key
to deciphering the Behistun Inscription.
To make it more visible,
to make it inaccessible,
Great King Darius had
the mountainside and ledge
on which
the scribes
had stood
knocked
down
in
515 B.C.
Variation on the Boonstra Brain Function Form
12,12,12,11,11,11,10,10,10,
6,6,6,5,5,5,4,4,4,
2,2,2,1,1,1
2
WAI
#04
January 26, 2005
01-26/10-29-05/01-02-06
"256 people trampled to death in a Hindu Temple near Wai..."*
The moon was full and huge last night, hiding, partially,
behind high blowing fog. Before the sun appeared yesterday
morning,
the sky was an incandescent
crimson rose from horizon
to
burning
horizon.
Later, speaking about the sunrise, I
gestured toward the sky, saw
a "sun-dog," rainbow hued, brilliant,
bursting through wispy clouds,
its colors more dazzling than the
blue sky's luminosity.
Such celestial phenomena reminded me of
my walks in India
twenty-two years
ago.
Through
Wai, under a full moon, I wandered beside the Krishna
River as it
ran dark, swirling around eroded pillars, through
ancient temple
arches. Foam sparkled, singing rose, drumming penetrated
the night.
Laughter. Worship. Dancing could
be guessed. After my
walk by
Wai's
river, I sat high in a window watching flour being ground
beneath a dim globe for one last dust covered woman.
I did not know
of a temple on a
hill where, a quarter century later,
256
people would be
trampled, suffocated,
burned.
*"India stampede kills hundreds, by Jeeja Purohit (AP), Seattle Times,
01-26-05, p. 1
"Relatives blame police for India stampede" by Jeeja Purohit (AP), Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, 01-26-05 online
NEW COMPUTER
#05
01-27-05
Life is problematic. Spend your money. Life as we know it
is going to
be gone by 2007, end of oil
end of America. I wonder if it will be
the end of greed. Not likely.
I live like the
Second
Law
of
Thermodynamics -- or is it the Law of the Conservation of Energy?
Whichever. Nothing is ever lost, nothing is ever to be
gained
(except body fat). Like a Ferris wheel, we
ride into the sky and
crash
down, explosively, deep into
the ground.
Mother
earth becomes -- not bored -- but ticked off. Who can blame her?
Wouldn't you? She doesn't mind chastising us with a Tsunami
or
two, but you can bet she's miffed when
we split her atoms and
quarks.
Why do it, humanity?
The spinning,
splitting.
We're intently bent on saving deformed babies, the mad from execution
and the sane from suicide. We set aside our humanity
for war, our
good sense for fear of death.
The world spins around its axis,
a
concatenation of changes:
Tomorrow becomes
today.
NEW ORLEANS
#06
09-05-05/01-02/07-06
It's time to incarcerate myself (again) in a form. I haven't
been
writing lately. Life has been too beautiful and too
bad. I have been
going over my history, my
own and the world's. But now
New
Orleans is obliterated,
sunk, drowned.
Thousands
upon thousands are homeless. Who knows how many dead? -- a president,
vice president, secretary of state all on vacation, having too
much fun to pay attention to, to care about
the suffering, dying,
drowning. Day 1)
Slow response. Maybe they
will all
die
and the problem will be gone. Day 2) Wait a little
longer. Then --
here we are! -- at Day 6) The survivors,
the refugees, the victims
are now eating and drinking,
many -- most? -- in some kind of
shelter all over the
U.S.A. The
diaspora.
In the future, one may ask: When did America turn black?
When the
poor, the black were washed out, rinsed from
New Orleans -- to spread
the gospel of survival, hope,
goodness and helpfulness across the
other
49. Tuning out the
incapacitating bureaucracy
of
capitalists, returning their humanity to Americans everywhere, giving the
cut off
world a chance to pity, to aid the Americans. Thank
you
Australia and Britian, thanks UN and Venezuela. Bush
may be too
arrogant to accept
your help, but the
rest of
us
are grateful.
AS IF THERE WERE SOMEONE TO ASK
#07
09-18-05/01-07-06
As if there were someone to ask as the darkness falls...
The mind
grows blank and one gropes around, kicking, swimming.
The water rises, the wind howls, there're only three
stories. The
attic's full of ghosts.
I have never touched
the rafters
before.
Chop at the ceiling. Let in the sky. Let God's breath
loosen my grip
on fear. Shut my mouth, lest I
drink the toxins. Shout! Shout now.
There must be
someone to hear. Marooned alone in
life and the
hurricane,
is anybody
listening?
ADDICTED TO THE RADIO
#08
09-19-05/01-08-06
What if the world came to an end and I -- sitting
here in my
paradise singing -- didn't
know anything about it.
The main talent our present dictator has is to
get everyone involved, get everyone so
mad that they jump
up and
down
at his stupidities, his cupidities, malice, machinations, willingness to
murder ten
thousand. It's a great talent that tantrum-throwing children have,
cultivate.
Nobody gets to do a thing but watch and
bewail the ugly, ornery child, the
dismantling of his life
and one's
own.
Like old movies of the OSS in France, in attics, clicking
the keys, tuning the radio, waiting for a signal that
the invasion has begun, the boats are landing, the
Brown-shirts are downstairs -- the high old
adrenaline excitement, that keeps
me radio
addicted.
As if there were something to do as the darkness falls.
The mind grows blank and I grope around, kicking, swimming.
The water rises, the wind howls, there’re only three
stories. The attic's full of ghosts.
I have never touched
the rafters
before.
Chop at the ceiling, let in the sky. Let God’s breath
loosen my grip on fear, shut my mouth, lest I
drink the toxins. Shout! Shout now. There must be
someone to hear me marooned alone
in the hurricane. I
listen, hear
nothing.
AHIMSA
#09
09-19-05
One of the differences between the '60s, '70s and the aughts
is, back
then, the kids attacked the schools, refused to
be educated in the
way that had brought their
world to its splintered, bony knees.
They fled academia, wrote
their own
world,
sang their own songs, new songs, blew the bright flames of
idealism,
wove flowers through their hair, walked barefooted, joined the
poor,
got the no-bid contracts on compassion, spread hope.
Now we retreat
in horror. Our
world has become so
skewed that
we
daren't loosen our grip on school, job, clawing our way to
the top,
lest we lose, not only the prize, but
water and food as well, a
place on the
boat, a seat in the foul
smelling Astrodome, feet
mired
in human
feces.
In five short years, king george has created a world of
scarcity for
everyone but his buddies, who get richer, richer
and richer and the
poor get poorer and poorer
until they die. Everything's just fine,
he says, everything's going
according to
plan.
You betcha. It may be time for another tea party.
Follow Gandhi all
the way -- until it comes time to
butcher the butcher.
The United States' Constitution, it seems,
made no provision regarding the deposing
of a ruthless fanatic,
an unelected
madman.
DURGA'S BIRTH
#10
10-03-05
At first she was almost not there, a seedling, perhaps, a
sperm, a
zygote. And almost throughout her life, whenever she
met another
human, another person, she all but disappeared.
She froze, she got
very tiny,
she had nothing, absolutely
nothing to
say,
not even peaceful silence. Her body remained, but it was empty.
An
empty body sat before the stranger, even the friend,
the newly
acquired friend. And she never found out
what happened between then
and the
loquacious creature she could
become once
she
knew someone, felt safe, secure, uninhibited. Sometimes, when she had
lept
the initial barrier and could speak, she became a nervous
babbler. A whole Tower of Babble, because she was,
indeed,
stuffed with knowledge. Tiers of
it, layers and layers
of
esoterica,
mind
boggling amounts of information. But the presence of another person was
almost always stifling, she felt quashed, intimidated, fell mute or
spoke a few inanities in a strangled voice. Every
encounter
was painful. A failure. Somehow,
one was supposed to
like
ones
fellow
man, but she never did. She burned with fear and nerves,
unable to
speak, afraid if she spoke she would say
the wrong thing. They all
gossiped about each other.
Durga had no gossip, almost no
awareness of others, and
only very
late --
almost doomsday in any friendship -- did she feel free to talk
about
herself, her disappearing, insignificant, silent self. After seventy, she
began to wonder where this muteness, this mutation into
fearful silence had come from. By
then, of course, she
was
often
able
to speak, indeed, had began to get over the terror of
uttering
clichés. Everyone else uttered the same clichés over and
over
and
over again. There seemed to be no
war crimes status attached to
uttering
clichés. So she timidly
tried a
few.
Sure enough, she survived. But how idiotically! If this was what
human communication was about, she could easily do that. But
by
then she was more nauseated by clichés than
she was by silence.
Silence was
not so bad. Maybe
in her
next
life
she would speak.
THE FALL
#11
10-29-05
How do we get so behind schedule -- me and the body,
out of sync,
bedeviled by a shrinking feeling of going
nowhere. There is nothing
to do but watch leaves
individually, opinionatedly turn dried blood
red,
one after the other.
The trees
have
given
up the concept of a season, the unity of autumn,
the likeness of a
carpet, the splendor of a forest.
The orange and red, yellow and
blue-hued liquid amber
turn separately. Inside out, the new
color spreads, seeps along
the veins
slowly,
tauntingly, knowing, like me, their next imperative is nudity. Falling,
falling,
striping the colorless, finger crooked branches to their
black bones,
they lie moldering to soil. Soon they will be
seen nowhere on winter's neutral landscape.
Their molecules,
scheduling for
spring, rest
Dormant
RAGA
#12
10-31-05
November stands on the edge of the crisp wind. The rain's
pattering rush in the night steals my sleep. The poplars
sway and
howl. Thoughts of death, sickness and desire
override the music, the
whining dance
of melody, the rhythm.
I long
for
India, the bare earth, the possibility of sitting on the river
bank, listening to the silence of the water, the moon's
flickering
light revealing another time, a century of other
ways reflected on
the slick surface
of sliding time, slow
moving detritus.
Memory.
DIWALI
#13
10-31-05
ignited my life, shoved the darkness aside for the light, lighted
one vista and then another, illuminated the moon's reflection, moved
into darkness, scorched the fingertips of dawn -- bright red.
Like
wounds from a cat's claw
it opened, gushed blood,
revitalized
the
music.
MIND THE CAT
#14
11-01-05/01-22-06
The human hand was made to scratch the cat's high cheek;
the human
heart was made to part from what it
loves. I never believed love
that left to live
in other cities, yet I have
known nothing
else.
As a child I clung to others, as a girl I
did as
well. As a woman I began to discover
that my heart sang its high
pitched melody above
man's range, soaring sharply in solitude.
Sweet, poignant, piercing, its
jewel became
air.
And man? He, too, flourished alone among his books, with blood
on
this hands and in his heart, conning nether end adventures.
Returning only to assure canon fodder, he follows his
annihilating
path forked always toward self
destruction. The cat comes
to
the
mind's
call, accepts its petting, its brushing, its food, expresses its
gratitude
with a swipe of its scimitar claws trailing bright
blood.
Then, soft-pawed, he pads across earth, trailing silent
instruction,
grins with his lopsided two-colored grin,
purrs with ensorceling affection,
sleeps comfortably
alone.
SISU*
#15
11-05/07-05
Sitting close to death now, inside my mind, Googling the names,
plus
"obits" of my silent friends, here and world wide,
to ascertain if
they have gone off before me,
it seems it is time for
a
liberating infusion of
life altering
sisu.
My guts, my heart tell me I was sent here to
do something. But
what? Each thing done, little, big or
extravagant appears as
nothing. Nothing yet requires the sisu
-- that I long for. No
accelerated
emotion explodes loud enough
to become
sisu.
Will there be a time before death when the
energy will
return, when the desire (one has worked a Buddhist lifetime
to
be rid of) will return to fuel the
eruption heard round the world
I
cry for? -- the eruption
to be
free.
What unimaginable project will require one to pull that something
forth?
*Finnish, "sisu -- the desire for something extra that you pull out
of yourself."
Unfinished Business, Jorn Utzon returns to the Sydney
Opera House, Geraldine Brooks,
The New Yorker, October 17, 2005, p.
111.
Another meaning of sisû,
in ancient Akkadian, is/was "the horse."
RAIN
#16
11-07-05
Rain pummels the heart leaving lava tubes where the sun shone
yesterday at sunset through spangled aspen in the mountain meadow.
The patter awakens the keen smell of fresh, fresh
air, fresh
water, fresh wild wind,
and the clairvoyant shimmer
of evening's
light.
Light
awakens you,
asks you to
dance,
drinks up the energy of purity.
Nothing sits over the lip
of the mountain's crevasse.
Nothing winds a shear trail up the
mountain's scree slope.
Nothing, lightness nor darkness, ever seeks me out in my seeking.
RAIN II
#17
11-08-05
I keep a stack of old newspapers to read. I simply
never get
through the lot. It makes little difference if
I ever do. Their
contents are pretty much the same,
day after day after day after
-- the murders, the rapes,
the warmongering
rulers
doing their lying, nasty, secretive, racist, fear-mongering thing day
after
day after... But one thing was new this morning
from
The Daily,* just four days old. It was titled:
"Mushroom-eater talks
to trees." But, even
more enchanting than the
tree talk
was:
"...the man was looking up at the sky and screaming at
raindrops as they landed on him." Oh those all-forgiving rain
drops, I bet they continued to fall, day after
day after day --
after all this
is Seattle, day after
day after
day.
I can hardly blame the papers, of course, I too, have
said
about all I have to say, day after day
after day. It wears me out to
talk human
to human, so we all talk
about events, foisted on
us by
a
culture divorced from the trees, the
raindrops, the mushrooms and life,
by making and shopping and
whirling around, powered by internal
combustion engines. Would we
could all slow down enough
to hold a decent conversation with
the falling, lightening-like raindrops
coming down
hard.
*From the Police beat, The Daily, University of Washington, Friday,
November 4, 2005, p 7.
NORTH INDIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC
#18
11-19-05
Each individual note so separate, each singing its own raging beauty,
plucked as if from the wind's soughing sound, drifting, silent,
splashing, the cascade of the music rings, slips, flashes,
spirals, disappears from the black stones
the water’s fall, leaves
the world
soundless
haunted by the beat of the drum, the kriya*
captured, translating
sound from your ancient language to mine, the infinite sweetness,
the longing, the high notes disappearing like the thin
white whiskers of the purring cat
against white fur in
the morning
light.
Kriya*“...the pattern of claps and waves that delineates a
tal...”
North Indian Classical Music Handbook, Haag
manuscript,
second draft, 04-22-94, p. 11
TRAVEL
#19
11-26-05/01-29-06
Ann is going to New York. “Staten Island,” she says smugly,
“Next to the water. Right on the water. Looking across
to Manhattan -- the lights of the city.” She doesn’t
travel often, but usually the same
distance: across the continent
to visit
Daniel,
her son, her one son not in Seattle. Perhaps the most
affectionate son among the four -- three thousand miles away across
the continent. “Everyone I hear about lately,” she says,
“is dying at 78.” “Funny,” Jan
replies. “Everyone I hear
about is
dying
at 73 -- or 4.” They both howl with laughter, wondering if
the 3,000 mile wide continent might smother both before Ann
returns two weeks or a month or a month
and two weeks -- “I’m not making
any plans” -- hence. Their
eyes meet,
they
laugh again. “I’m going by train. In a little room. My
fare includes meals.” “In your little room?” “If I
want.
But occasionally I might go to the diner. Company,
you know.” They laugh again. Who
needs company while traveling
across a
continent?
FIRST (OR LAST) SNOW
#20
12-01-05/01-29-06
Up here with the wrap around mountains, snow to the south,
snow to the west, snow along the low-lying eastern Cascades,
and Rainier -- hiding. Odd how capable she is of
hiding her face with the valley
fog or the valley
brightness between
here
and Paradise. Waiting at the bus stop: up walks Omar Sharif-
lite -- golden skin, but short, blond, young, with huge, luminous,
green eyes -- snow flakes coming down catching in his
new-grown, sparse mustache, restless, pacing
the slush, gray, wet,
icy cold
snow.
I never knew there were so many angles to reality. With
the snow gone the angles reappear. Everything catches on the
acute angles or the obtuse angles, everything catches and
snatches one back to reality, hard-
core-cannot-be-ignored
reality flaunting
itself.
Ignored, of course, by Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims -- and Gods
as well -- who call it paradise or maya or hell
or heaven or earth or dirt, or law or
inevitability -- all marching to the fall
of never-the-same snowflakes. Unique,
non-replicable ice
bits
TODAY II
#21
12-02/04-05
Lake Union is as deep as Seattle’s tallest towers. The hidden
sun’s luminosity sends black, topless reflections into grey waters.
The unfinished buildings are transparent. Rectangular contrails of smoke
flow upward. Glass, maybe melted snow,
on flat-roofed, faceless,
low, dark
buildings
gleams,
momentarily, here,
then there. The cat’s
tall white boots shine satin against
the white damask duvet. His black velvet ears, like
reflections, stick high above the soft cotton folds. Snow has
nearly halted the diamond/ruby flow across the flying freeway arches.
Not even the single cry of a seagull breaks the silence
of commerce’s hum. A prop plane approaches, passes, disappears beyond
Queen Anne hill, the Sound. The cat spreads his
claws wide, gently kneads the bed
thinking of two new
friends arriving
tomorrow.
SHIVA-PURNA, THE CAT WITH TWO FRIENDS
#22
12-04-05/01-29-06
Shiva lies in the hall to the west, Mr. Fred Red,
quite old, stands against the east wall, Tiger Woods strolls,
tail high, kittenish, here and there. He’s black, small,
sports one torn ear, pertly knows
he is allowed to
do
whatever
he pleases. Shiva-purna, since leaving his mom, brother, and sister as
a kitten has never seen another cat. He’s been forced
to live among humans -- an alien, alone. Once he
had Jimmy, the dog, to talk
to, to love, unrequited.
But Jimmy
died.
Now, Shiva-purna, has two new friends, a broad hall to meet
in, a feline curiosity to fulfill. His three years of
life suddenly seem long, and nothing but a preface
to soft, cautious-pawed, sniff-sniff-
wonder, a meuw, a
growl. Sudden
delight.
72
#23
12-06-05/01-29-06
I was lying today. I’ve been saying for so long that
“I’m almost 72,” that when the day, my birthday, came,
I thought I was 73. Lying. Yet, 73 sounds
better, rounder, fuller, with the happiness
of 3. So maybe
I’ll be
73
until I yet get 73 again. In a year’s time,
who knows what hay in the sun or delight in
the night I might glean and feel grander about
switching the clock, switching the time,
the age. 73 might
be my
prime.
I’ll do it twice and not despair. In skipping a year,
one might skip the attendant strain, the aches, the fear,
the disparity of the age within and the age
without, the girl who hums, the
woman who hobbles, lying,
passing, ignoring
72.
AGNI
#24
12-07-05/01-30-06
...or is he rejecting my, the feminist, equivalent of a drinking,
wenching, wild, exuberant ride through the what and the who
of life’s offerings. Some big, some small, but not
so different from Gilgamesh,
Beowulf, Odysseus,
who’d be
shocked
to learn that life went on at home on the hearth
and in the breast of each woman, wife, human, passionate
soul. We have Penelope’s story, Clytemnestra’s loneliness,
Helen’s grief
and murder that festered in abandonment,
neglect, the self actualization
of each,
every
human doomed, blessed to walk alone on earth finding fulfillment only
in the reach of one’s own soul -- if there is
such a thing -- and the dailiness of one’s singular
dramas and delights. If history weren’t
written by men, it
would be
different.
But for now, it is not rejectable. Every human’s story is
the truth. It may not be art or artifice, but
it is, by the telling, the truth -- irreducible fact
even if fiction or formed poetry.
What a shock to
know that
truth
is unacceptable to those one might have thought were one’s friends.
The women abide, but the men drop slowly like drugged
flies, they drop inevitably for they cannot imagine life,
different than their own, woman centered
on the brilliance of
her own
soul.
GIFT
#25
12-08-05/01-30/02-18-06
"No no no no no!" called the little old lady from
down the
hall to the Fed Ex man as he dropped
a big green and
green-white-floral box at her door.
She was expecting nothing. She
was
talking to Jere, laughing
about her
birthday.
Nonetheless, it turned out to be for her, the big green
and white,
monogramed Calyx & Corolla, subtitled Luxury Bouquets box.
Stargazer Lilies -- for her -- no one else -- a
bouquet
from her law school buddy, her
mentor in mysticism, her
always extravagant,
faithful
friend A-M. The story is worth telling: Paul Ronder, a favorite
filmmaker-friend had a girl
friend/colleague Kazuko. And he
died very young. No one knew why.
Kazuko remained
my friend, in touch. She in
New York, I in
Los Angeles.
Then,
one year when I visited New York, she couldn’t be reached,
didn’t answer the phone, didn’t return calls. Sometime later,
she --
and a new husband: thin, tall, with wispy black
hair, pale as a ghost (he
had almost died on
their honeymoon)
-- came
to visit me at my office in Doheny’s manison -- built
with
the ill-gotten gains of the Teapot Dome scandal. The young
husband wore a khaki trench coat, packed a WW I
shoulder, kit bag heavy with colored
pencils. Remaining almost mute,
he flourished
his
pencils across the thick, white sheets of a drawing pad.
Ceremoniously,
he signed, ©-ed each created thing, then gave them,
with
a deep Zen bow, to me. There’s a
large
envelope of these drawings archived at
TWU under Haag. [As
she began
to
make exquisitely expensive jewelry to sell at Barneys, Kazuko
told
me
he, the silent husband, was the best artist she had
ever known.] They came to dinner, but said almost
nothing. Nervously, I chattered. Later, several
small envelopes, with delicately
embellished
notes
of thanks arrived, followed by other silent, calmer, dinners. They
moved
to Los Angeles and, some time later, parted. A-M, as
he was known, rented vast spaces with empty surfaces
on/off Bay Street.
Behind screens, in
drawers he kept a
large collection
of
plucking, tapping, blowing instruments for guests to play. By then
he, and others, had given me Muktananda’s Play Of
Consciousness.
We frequently met at the 4:45, afternoon Arati. We
clapped and chanted in Hindi and
Sanskrit, ate fragrant, home
(ashram) baked
bread,
crisp salads and, occasionally, dahl. Tears fell from my eyes like
the rains of Seattle, poignant, everlasting. Thus began a friendship --
the first among many which, gathered together as in
a bouquet, took me to India,
to sitting in Zen
for kyol
che’s
three months at Su Dok Sah [I’m not Buddhist. Buddha was
too Christ-like for me.] A-M wrote, declaring a plan to
start law school. Horrified, Buddhist-like, I chastised. But, when
I got home from Korea via
Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand,
Nepal, India,
I,
too, went to law school. Now, after eighteen years and endless
adventures the Stargazer lilies arrived from the Angel’s City for
my Seattle birthday. The twenty blossoms bloomed, one after
the other, for twenty days in
a stone-heavy, green glass
vase that
Jere
lent me. The pollen stained my hands and my food from
time to time, calling up other memories of days gone
by and inbetween. The scent so strong that even
I could smell it; the long
lasting rucus leaves remaining
velvety, dark
green.