Endless Practice

I walk through a poem

Inside my soul, rehearsing myself.

Footsteps of my thoughts pausing over unwritten pages

That lead toward a gate that opens into an incomplete  work,

Toward works which I have not yet written-

A gate leading to a field of inchoate thoughts, 

To broken reflections of lines 

I attempt to assemble like echoes into new language

In which I can't find any words, 

The moment like an unfinished poem

Shifting in the light of gathering silence 

That becomes more complete

As it turns inside the shadows of speech that can’t say

How the magnolias there blossom with poems

And bask in the whiteness of the page

The impress of my unspoken voice

Like footprints trailing behind me 

A long script of verse of where I have still not yet reached

My footsteps naturally finding a path into what is hard to say

And in an act of endless practice I enter the lacuna of this poem

Coming to rest in a rock garden beneath a magnolia,

A huge stone brought in from a distant mountain 

There at its center- the epitome of silence and stillness-

Becoming my focus beneath the gaze of a daytime moon

As exclamations of birds in flowering branches turn to air

And the hard stone harbors deep inside my thoughts 

Cementing my tongue on which moss grows.

Engaged with this stone in trying dialogue

I give way to what it says and simply listen,

Sitting with it inside the open gate of the poem

Meditating in the afternoon.

By a sudden breeze I am called

To receive Shoken from a vague, reticent Moon

Who gazes at me for a long hush, saying nothing, 

Sitting agura in a light blue sky 

Where no thoughts come. 

I have no questions. She has no answers.

For meditation this is superb

For endless practice this is excellent.

Shoken:a private audience with a Zen preceptor

Agura: sitting in loose, cross-legged meditation