Golden Frame

My Lord tips His head down toward a porcelain teacup, 

held gently in even gentler hands. 

The water not yet rippling with breath. 

Eyes fixed over the rim on what remains. 

Swaddled in a green sari, His youngest child 

peers backward—left over her left shoulder. 

She smiles at a face outside the frame,

a secret known only to herself. 

My heart is a questioning thing. 

If all six hands stretch forward, I wonder 

if they’d touch. My brother kneels

before them both, eyes fastened on a wood slat floor,

one hand over his ribs, as if to shield 

the air from leaping flames. 

These three— my frozen family— live behind glass

between two bay windows in a room where I ponder death, 

pinned every morning like a moth— not much struggle left. 

My eyes linger on their faces each sunrise, 

as if to partake in innocence,

in a pleasure they’ve somehow captured there:

mute— oblivious —

even to the possibility of an elsewhere.

Late Confession

I bow before the Mahasiddha,

The Source of All Names,

who hears these frail words

cast out to the storm for His discernment.

I bow before my Sovereign Lord,

The Principle of Understanding,

who shook off all garments of crude religion

long before we ever thought to ourselves.

I bow before my Holy Guru,                                                             

Man of still-water eyes ,

always first to forgive,

then, sudden as a ripple, to demand.

I bow before my Chosen Prince,

Master of Wildness,

who taught us in the way of women: 

skin over thought, love over will, feeling over plan.

I bow before my Gracious Master,

Curer of the Loveless Heart,

who trains my pride into balance,

as a dog can learn a single human word, exactly. 

I bow before my Illustrious Host,

Tireless Servant of His Devotee,

who made a solemn oath to me through mother's ear

before I left the womb.

I bow before my Silent Witness,

Whose Bare Feet Leave No Tracks,

in whose Presence I now kneel—

a riddle for the iris: why He can’t be seen.

I bow before my Only King,

The Steadfast Inner Ruler,

whose walking staff inks black my spine,

in a law that binds past death. 

I bow before my Laughing Man,

Maker and Breaker of All Rules,

at whose feet I set the splintered bones

of all my love and lover-killing births. 

I bow before my God of Mercy,

Who Drowns The Heart In Forgetfulness,

who crippled me with His coldest eye

to make this root move softer in the soil.

I bow before my Outcast Savior,

Whose Body Eclipses the Brightness of Suns,

who has no power to turn away

from those who turn from Him.

I bow before my Humble Servant,

Whose Body Is Constant Prasad, 

whose single hair lies curled in my locket,

hung on a tarnished silver chain.

I bow before the Human-Bodied Mystery,

Whose Loving Glance Unbinds the Self,

who adores our fresh cut tulips in the morning,

knowing they’ll only last a day.

I bow before the Howling Gale,

Great-Bellied Messenger of Truth,

who severs men’s heads at first meeting

to order all future exchange .

I bow before the Open-Handed Yogi,

Who Gives The Siddhi Of Gratitude ,

with a well-timed whip

that’s stopped this donkey’s hoof at the tip of many cliffs. 

I bow before the Source of Paradox,

The Obvious,

who weaves our bodies in a veil

through which all light may run.

I bow before the Love of Lovers,

Whose Name is Known by Devotion,

who nodded His head to my drumbeat once

sitting close in the summer sun.

I bow before the Conscious Light,

Rainbow-Hued, Devoid of All Color,

who holds a mirror before the face

so it can be more easily lost.

I bow before the Diamond-Bladed Warrior,

Still Eye In The Hurricane of Form,

who eats and eats the coming dark

that will nearly blind the earth.

I bow before the All-Consuming Fire,

Lone Companion of the Heart,

who carries me through hells I thought were fables

about which I will never speak.  

I bow before the Turner of the Wheel,

Unfading Friend of the Earth,

buried in repose, cross-legged,

facing West in the blood of all our lands.

I bow before the Master Dancer,

The Perfect Devotee,

who taught me that to bend my head before a sage

is to wake up from below .

I bow before the One Who Has No Equal,

Restorer of the Secret Way,

who pours His heart through every chest

like paper lamps along a chasm's wall.

I bow before the Knee of Listening,

Amrita Nadi,

the curving river of nectar— you

who read these lines in time.

I bow before the One In Whom There Is No Difference, 

Sacred Mirror Who Reflects All Things,

I've told you what I know of Him.

I am a lover who murdered his King.  

Dr. Wu

In a halting Mandarin, Dr. Wu spoke:   

You will live another 29 years.

It is a hurdle, not a ditch. 

He made this welcomed assessment on visit one—

casting his I-Ching in the face of what appeared 

to him a dire confluence in the forces of my life,

the navel line to my mother cut by a pre-birth trauma, 

if you believe that bodies are one for a time.    

He said: see me every day for 30 days. 

Then 60.

And because I did this, because I took his word 

as the law of my natural life, because I gave myself 

to his will, to his chi-prodding hands, his caustic herbs, 

his hairline needles, and barely uttered wisdom, 

I am alive today. 

29 years to the day have passed since his first words to me. 

These seasons flew by quickly, and as orange blossoms

litter the wet streets under roving Cap Ferrat clouds, 

there is, overall, a feeling of completion. 

I did what I came to do. 

I loved and struggled and, not knowing how, surrendered.

I knew who there was to know. 

I felt the end and was not diminished. 

But made by light above to see darling light in the eyes 

of every armed and fractured passenger 

riding in this while of life. 

And every face I see here—in scarf, beret or taqiyah— 

looks to me a perfect human face. 

Each grin, like the grin of Dr. Wu,

slices my fear of endings like a scalpel. 

Flying in robes now over café and boardwalk 

in the cold night, like a dancer escaped gravity,

alone and near to the stars,  

it never occurs to me how much time 

has really passed, or why. 

Midway

In from the murderous heat, I'm safe.  

A white temple entry room with peeling paint

like all the rooms of the hemispheric poor

where I can finally take my sandals off and rest.  

Where I may dip three fingers in a porcelain bowl of water, 

then wood ash, drawing prints across my chest

like one readying for sleep without a dream.

I’ve never been one for religious rites. 

And I hope whoever cares won’t care 

that I forego obligatory lines along the forehead, 

for a brand more private. 

No one stands for long in this middle passage.  

It is cool and still here, and I linger for no reason, 

twirling the stem of a scarlet-yellw hibiscus

sealed up for the morning, 

sucked tight to its own center

with skin like a surgeon’s rubber glove. 

At the foot of His chair, in light and warmth, 

at a later time, when things are licit,

that’s when I expect my flower may speak.   

Time's Humor

Then came a tall and stately woman on the famous boulevard—

 a Junoesque. 

Since childhood I've been trying to match that word

with its owner and now I have. An irony maybe—  

she was veiled. A black silk scarf 

encircling her head that also only served 

more perfectly to frame her high cheek bones, 

her Parisian model’s curvature, and her royal, ebony eyes.

What I’m saying is she was far too much for me

at any age, of course. But still, 

we passed in streams of good fortune, 

and it was she who stared me down—

much to my surprise. And yes, 

it was in that wholly non-Islamic way. 

And I said only what I always say these days 

to such long-wanted invitations: 

Darling, I’ve got nothing to give you 

but a corpse, a handshake, and a hard time. 

And I said this, through my now-kinder pauper’s eyes. 

And we fused in mind for a moment, 

like people of the same lost tribe

with difference falling away from us 

in a kind of understanding, below the great shadow 

of the all-diminishing Arc de Triomphe. 

And she smiled gingerly. 

And took it all in stride. 

And strode on. 

Waka

Tugging up the frozen edge of a black robe, he squats low at the stream to read it

one last time. No doubt, these three steep lines mark the end. 

He’ll offer nothing greater here. The white stubble on his scalp doesn’t stop 

even a single snowflake’s insult. But this.       

He’ll take his own time now. Creasing rice paper against itself into the shape of a crow. 

Crow tumbles in the water like a phrase,  

stalls on a moss-covered log, then down. Out of sight. 

A glow in the trees, a murmuring chant lure him back.

He leaves behind rope sandals at the iron gate—

ordered neat, in a row with the others.

Ten centuries later, he leans over these same waters. 

Elbows planted on the rail of an arched cedar bridge. 

His freckled hands write home in a foreign alphabet. 

He will mention a nearby shrine, open to all until dusk. 

For a moment— right here— he’s lifted out of himself.   

A pebble drops from his fingers. 

He makes no effort to grasp this thing, 

drifting like a panic beneath him. 

A woman brushes snow off his blue pea coat. 

Wailua Banks

Where the holy river ebbs enough to drive on it,

priests dip a mason jar to fill for temple guardians 

whose thirst is renown.  

Crouching low this morning with a half-full jug, 

I almost catch a whirring wooden raft. 

The skipper is busy mounting his girlfriend—  

a green mantis resting on two of her elbows, not praying  

but bumping down the rapids on a chunk of albesia bark

hurtling toward the deadly falls at Strong Knees. 

Inside a parked minivan a child films me 

as I shake my head at the river, shocked.   

"What kind of a man mates on a slippery oarless raft?

What kind of a woman can’t sense the downfall in ecstasis?" 

I ponder this, then rise up on my own bare toes,

not two feet from the mirroring surface. 

Smug as a pope.  

What I Do

Five drops of chestnut flower

into half a beaker of water. 

A remedy for grief if I swirl it once

and throw it back like vodka. 

Light a stick of agarwood. 

Stand it up in a Japanese bowl

and flop back on the futon. 

Serve the word, spread the word.

Try to ignore the harpoon in my back. 

Try to ignore the insects in my blood. 

Stare at the ceiling a while. 

A million things to do today. 

I clap a mosquito off my knee. 

Snap the fingers in the center of my forehead.

Then turn to the photo  

of a man who graces every wall here. 

I said every wall. 

What I do? 

More or less, it is this.