This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I am going to stand. There are different forms in different realms, and I know that the form for a... proper tesho is to be sitting with crossed legs and the form for a poetry reading is to be standing and since I am absolutely seeming to be doing a poetry reading rather than a formal Dharma talk tonight I think I will stand which means I'll be popping up and down a lot because my books are all the way down there I would just like to say first of all how very grateful I always am to be able to return to Tassajara and teach a poetry retreat with the feeling and knowledge of practice underlying everything we do together here.

[01:15]

My group is spectacularly wonderful this year wherever you all are. Yes, there we are. Hello, group. And the feeling at Tassajara this year is very, very good. And the food is magnificent. So, you know, this was labeled Dharma Talk when it first went up on the office door. And I said, maybe you should warn people that it's poetry. And then it became Dharma and Poetry. And I am not sure how much explicit dharma you are going to hear. Some years I tell people what we've been talking about in our retreat. But when I tried to think of how I could summarize that for you all, it just didn't quite make sense. So I'm only going to say the theme of the retreat is poetry, practice, and plenitude.

[02:19]

And a lot of the feeling that we have been working with together these first days and for the next two to come has been the way a sense of generosity and remembering the abundance of the world supports both the generativity of writing, but also... the stability of practice even in the direst times. So, you know, even here with no internet and no newspapers and not keeping up in a way that I have been keeping up for months now, the question of what is the right way to be in this time is immediate and pressing and intimate.

[03:22]

And the image which has kept coming to me and which I've used a couple of times in our retreat is of how when you are sitting in traditional meditation posture, you have your two legs giving you a stable and freeing position. And neither leg is top, neither leg is bottom. And that is how I feel about the contemplative life and engaged action, that each needs the other for us to be able to respond to the world with precision and accuracy and a sense of ourselves as continuous with all being. So that's a little bit. of what we've been talking about. Now I'm just going to read you a lot of poems. And I will start with some poems that I almost always read some subset of when I'm here.

[04:28]

And then I am hoping to have timed it so that I can read some poems that probably almost none of you will know because they have only been published in periodicals and not yet. in a book. So a little bit of the newest work. So this first poem I almost always start my readings with You can think of it as a love poem, you can think of it as an end of love poem, or you can think of it as a poem of interconnection. It is all of those, has a little physics in it too. For what binds us.

[05:30]

There are names for what binds us. Strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them. the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight, the way things stay so solidly wherever they've been set down, and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple... untested surface before. There's a name for it on horses when it comes back darker and raised. Proud flesh. As all flesh is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest. And when two people have loved each other, see how it is like a scar between their bodies.

[06:40]

stronger, darker, and proud. How the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. This one was written here. So I first came down the road in my red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains 43 years ago and became a guest student for a week. And then every morning the wake-up bell would go and I would say to myself, what are you thinking? And every evening by the time I went to bed, I went, this is magnificent. And so... I thought I would stay around Zen Center for a few months and, you know, find out what this Zen business was all about and then go on with my life.

[07:44]

And of course, if you stay around Zen Center for a few months, what you find out is that you know absolutely nothing about Zen. And so I ended up spending a year in the city center. Then I came here for three years. Then I went to Green Gulch. So roughly eight years of full-time practice before I got back in my no longer red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains and seemed to have returned to the life of being a poet. But utterly... altered by having been here. I'm a great believer in lay practice, and something that my group and I are going to talk about tomorrow is the emotions in practice. But they'll have to wait, and you'll have to wonder. So anyhow, this poem was written here, but for any guests in the room, it's student housing.

[08:53]

The Envoy. One day in that room, a small rat. Two days later, a snake. Who, seeing me enter, whipped the long stripe of his body under the bed, then curled like a docile house pet. I don't know how either came or left. Later the flashlight found nothing. For a year I watched as something, terror, happiness, grief, entered and then left my body, not knowing how it came in, not knowing how it went out. It hung where words could not reach it. It slept where light could not go. Its scent was neither snake nor rat. neither sensualist nor ascetic. There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing. Through them the belled herds travel at will, long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

[10:00]

And I'm going to read... Anytime somebody who is a practicing person here comes up to me on the path and mentions a poem, I like to read those poems at the reading. So this is one that was mentioned to me. And that anybody who's been here in any capacity knows what it's talking about better than anyone anywhere else. But just remember, in the winter, the cold water faucets here in the cabins are a great deal colder. But this poem was written many, many years later. A Cedary Fragrance. Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted life.

[11:07]

wanted. So this next poem was written at a time when I needed what it is talking about personally, but I was also, and it's written quite a while ago now, it was also a poem that had the environmental crisis in So it was thinking about both levels. It's called Optimism. More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree. Finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

[12:08]

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs. All this resinous, unretractable earth. So, you know, I think skillful means is not only for human beings. All creatures understand skillful means and respond. to what they need to respond to. This one I don't think I've ever read here, but somebody mentioned it to me, and so here it is. Irreversible Heart. Take away the bird, its hidden singing. Take away the love. One branch of maple flares against the cedar darkness. grief that was always present, disguised beneath the green.

[13:10]

Take away the small blue table, the wild apples, the journey's long perfections. Bow to the ground. Walk into the lion day. I write a number of very short poems, and I'm not reading you many of those tonight, but this is one of them. And it's rather like the optimism poem. I write many poems about how do we navigate the dark, what feeling allows us to keep going. Opening the hands between here and here.

[14:15]

On the dark road, only the weight of the rope, yet the horse is there. So you know the abandoned bathhouse was because the hill appeared to be, it was going to come down, they said immediately. And I sometimes think that the hill behind the original bathhouse will be the last thing standing at the last kalpa at the end of the world. But once the engineers say, you know, once it's tossed a couple of rocks, no, that's it, you have to leave. Anyhow, Mountain and Mouse. This is also very short. Mountain and mouse, both move, one only, more slowly. So in the most recent book, there are a number of poems whose title is My This, My That.

[15:30]

And... When one is thinking about self and non-self and interconnection, pronouns are a great problem. But they are also a very rich problem because, in fact, you know, here we each are. We have our ten fingers, we have our ten toes, and we lead our infinite lives in between them. So this is... One of this series, each of them is about just what it seems to be about, and each of them is also exploring what exactly is this provisional thing? You know, my life, my skin, my karma. This one is my skeleton. My skeleton, who once ached with your own growing larger, are now, each year, imperceptibly smaller,

[16:31]

lighter, absorbed by your own concentration. When I danced, you danced. When you broke, I. And so it was, lying down, walking, climbing the tiring stairs. Your jaws, my bread. Someday you, what is left of you, will be flensed of this marriage. Angular wrist bones, arthritis, cracked harp of ribcage, blunt of heel, opened bowl of the skull, twin platters of pelvis. Each of you will leave me behind, at last serene. What did I know of your days, your nights? I who held you all my life inside my hands and thought they were empty. You who held me all your life in your hands. as a new mother holds her own unblanketed child, not thinking at all.

[17:34]

The title of this poem will make no sense to you. That's because it used to be a longer poem with a kitchen towel in it. The kitchen towel left and the title didn't. a cottony fate. Long ago someone told me, avoid or. It troubles the mind as a held out piece of meat disturbs a dog. Now I too am 60. There was no other life. This is another pretty short one. And you can think of it here as a poem about the difference intention makes. That the exact same thing is utterly changed depending on our intention. I sat in the sun.

[18:48]

I moved my chair into sun. I sat in the sun. The way hunger is moved when called fasting. So I'm going to go to the new poems now. For this one, I will dedicate it to the Tassajara cooks, because it's a kitchen poem. But I will also say that the idea behind it was the traditional Buddhist monk's practice of the begging bowl. And what it says is true, that we are... Well, I'll just leave it at that. The bowl. If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten. If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.

[19:53]

If a shoe is put into the bowl... The leather is chewed and chewed over, a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten. A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl. Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness, it eats them. Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry. The bowl cannot be thrown away. It cannot be broken. It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless, and big though it seems fits exactly in two human hands. Hands with ten fingers, 54 bones, capacities strange to us almost past measure, scented as the curve of the bowl is, with cardamom, star anise, long pepper,

[20:55]

cinnamon, hyssop. So in 2007, I traveled with a very small group of U.S. writers through the Middle East. And the first country we went to was Syria. And even though the Iraq War was raging... next door. And at that point, Syria was the country taking in refugees. 750,000 Iraqis were living in Syria in 2007. And at that time, it was, I say this with some sense of irony, a perfectly well-functioning police state, which means it was so safe that, as I was told, a woman could walk down the street alone at three in the morning wearing all of her gold and would be fine. What happened in the houses or what happened to political prisoners was another matter.

[21:57]

But I made friends with a woman physician who was helping our group translating for us. And also, I have been haunted by the students I spoke with. We met with hundreds and hundreds of students at various universities. And as we traveled between... Aleppo, now a destroyed city, and Damascus, now a partly destroyed city. We passed a road sign that looked exactly as if you were on I-5, going between San Francisco and Los Angeles. And there was a sign for Fresno, but it was a sign for Baghdad. And you just knew that if we had turned and gone down that road, what we would have been in. But I'm haunted by these students because they're of the age where I know that some of them are probably well settled into new lives somewhere.

[23:07]

Some of them are probably dead. Some of them are probably fighting for one side. Some of them are probably fighting for the other side. Some of them are in refugee camps. and I don't know which. So this one, the woman doctor got out early. She breathes in the scent. As the front of a box would miss the sides, the back, the grief of the living misses the grief of the dead. Words. Words.

[24:16]

Words are loyal. Whatever they name, they take the side of. As the word courage will afterward grip just as well the frightened girl soldier who stands on one side of barbed wire, the frightened boy soldier who stands on the other. Death's clay. They look at each other with wide open eyes. And words that love peace, love gossip, refuse to condemn them. This poem sort of jumps a little bit, covers a lot of ground. Don't worry about it if you fall off. You go to sleep in one room and wake in another. You go to sleep in one room and wake in another. You go to sleep in one time and wake in another.

[25:21]

Men land on the moon, viewed in blurred black and white in static, on a big screen in Central Park, standing in darkness with others. Your grandfather did not see this. Your grandchildren will not see this. Soon now, 50 years back. Unemphatic, the wheel-barrowed stars Many days, like a nephew, resemble the one beforehand, but they are not the one beforehand. Each was singular, spendable, eaten with pepper and salt. You go to sleep in one person's bed and wake in another's. Your face after toweling changed from the face that was washed. You go to sleep in one world. and wake in another. You who were not your life, nor were stranger to it, you who were not your name, your ribs, your skin, will go as a suitcase that takes inside it the room.

[26:33]

Only after you know this can you know this. As a knocked glass that loses what has been spilled, you will know this. So the next few poems come from a series I wrote which have been turned into a very beautiful letterpress book with mezzotints done by an artist that none of you will see because it sells for $2,500. But the San Francisco Public Library bought a copy. Berkeley's Library bought a copy. Yale bought a copy. Somewhere in Canada. So there are copies around. And my favorite is some friends got together, pitched in, and bought one. And after they've passed it around for a while, they're going to give it to the David Brower Center in Berkeley. And these poems all have a theme.

[27:35]

I have subtitled it 12 Environmental Elegiacs. So they are all... poems looking at the state of the biosphere and its peril. I'm not going to read you all of them. I'll read you a few of them. As if hearing heavy furniture moved on the floor above us. As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting. Remain this many Siberian tigers, that many African elephants. 300 red egrets. We scrape from the world its tilt and meander of wonder as if eating the last burned onions and carrots from a cast iron pan. Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness. I saw one of those red egrets.

[28:39]

She's called Ding Darling Too. Um... This one is a more local, small catastrophe. My next-door neighbors, I live in Mill Valley, and my next-door neighbors had an enormous pine tree which was weakened by everything, and the people below them insisted it be taken out, so small, local catastrophe. Today, another universe. The arborist has determined... senescence, beetles, canker, quickened by drought, but in any case not prunable, not treatable, not to be propped. And so, the branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate cries, the trunk where the ant, the red squirrel's 80-foot playground, the bark, cambium, pine sap,

[29:45]

cluster of needles, the Japanese patterns, the ink net, the dapple on certain fish. Today for some, a universe will vanish, first noisily, then just another silence, the silence of after once the theater has emptied, of bewilderment after the glacier, the species, the star. Something else in the scale of quickening things will replace it. This hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it. So the numbers in this poem refer to, you all know, Bill McKibben's 350.org, and you know we are above 400 now.

[30:46]

carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And the title is a Latin word. I'll pronounce it church Latin rather than Roman Latin, fecit. And fecit appears on old master paintings with the initials of the painter and fecit. So, you know, Dürer made this is basically what they mean. Fecit. For a person in love... the air looks no different for a person in grief. In this my one lifetime, while reading, arguing, cherishing, washing, watching a video, sleeping, the numbers unseeably rise. 305 parts per million, 317 parts per million, 390, 400. Shin of high granite ticks snowless, the compound fracture.

[31:48]

I, who wrote this, like the old painters, signed this. J. H. Fechet. Every time I get in an airplane, every time at home as opposed to here, I turn on a light switch. I am part of it. I am making it. So some of these poems were written on... Captiva Island in Florida. This is where the painter Robert Rauschenberg had his painting studio and estate. And he first moved there when it was a very unclassy place to live and you could buy land cheap and that's how he ended up there. And then as he became a painter whose work sold for more money, often when he would sell a major painting, he would take the money, go to some neighbor on the island and say, sell me your house. You can live with it until you die. I want to buy the middle of the island so that that resort on the south end won't expand and take the whole island.

[32:54]

And after he died, the Rauschenberg Foundation has turned it into an artist colony. And so two Januaries ago, I was working there for a month. Two Januaries ago was the wettest January in Florida history. It was gold, it rained. I swam anyhow because I believe in immersion. Nobody else is swimming, but if I can swim, I immerse. And one day I was swimming on the bay side and I sort of looked at the water and I went, I have no idea what's going on, but I should not be in this water. And the next day the news said that, so Florida has a central lake in the middle of sugar. country and it is completely polluted. Fertilizers, runoff, sewage, toxics. And because it was sort of like our Oroville Dam this winter here, it was going to breach its boundaries.

[33:56]

So instead they dumped it with a river to each coast and one of those rivers came out right where I was. And two days after I was getting out of the water, dead fish began washing up and continued to So this poem has that, I mean, Captiva is five feet above sea level. And with that rain on the paths, the high paths, we were waiting. So it's going to be one of the first places to disappear. So that was in my mind while I was there and working. And the refugee crisis was in my mind, and terrorism was in my mind, and all of them... come into this poem. It goes through the people in the Mediterranean trying to find refuge. Day beginning with seeing the International Space Station and a full moon over the Gulf of Mexico and all its invisible fishes.

[34:57]

None of this had to happen. Not Florida, not the Ibis' beak, not water. not the horseshoe crab's empty body and not the living starfish. Evolution might have turned left at the corner and gone down another street entirely. The asteroid might have missed. The seams of limestone need not have been susceptible to sand and mangroves. The radio might have found a different music. The hips of one man and the hips of another might have stood beside each other on a bus in Aleppo and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers. The key could have broken off in the lock, and the nail can refused its lid. I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed. You might have been the way the moon kept not setting long after we thought it would, long after the sun was catching inside the low wave curls coming in at a certain angle.

[36:07]

The light might not have been eaten again by its moving. If the unbearable were not weightless, we might yet buckle under the grief of what hasn't changed yet. Across the world, A man pulls a woman from the water from which the leapt from overfilled boat has entirely vanished. From the water pulls one child, another. Both are living and both will continue to live. This did not have to happen. No part of this had to happen. This one sounds kind of different. It doesn't quite rhyme, but it has a lot of rhyming sounds to it.

[37:09]

It also comes from being on Captiva, and it refers to LiDAR, a word that more people are learning now because it's the technology they use for self-driving cars. But where I learned about it was pilots would fly planes using LIDAR over land, and you get a very, very good sense of the altitude of different things. And you'll remember Captiva doesn't have much altitude. I think that's all you have to know. Ledger. Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin is 3,592 measures. A voice kept far from feeling is heard as measured. What's wanted in desperate times are desperate measures. Pushkin's unfinished Onegin, 5,446 lines. No visible tears measure the pilot's grief as she lidars the height of an island, five feet, 50 its highest leaf.

[38:23]

She logs the years, the weathers the tree has left. A million fired clay bones, animal, human, set down in a field as protest, measure 400 yards long, 60 yards wide, weigh 112 tons. The length and weight and silence of the bereft. Bees do not question the sweetness of what lies below them. One measure of distance is meters, another is lee. 10,000 li can be translated far. For the exiled, home can be translated then, translated scar. One liter of Polish vodka holds 12 pounds of potatoes. What we care about most we call beyond measure. What matters most we say counts.

[39:25]

Height now is treasure. On this scale of one to ten, where is eleven? Ask all you wish, no twenty-fifth hour will be given. Measuring mounts, like some western bar's mounted elk head, our catalogued, vanishing, unfinished heaven. So on January 24th, the fifth day of this administration, that was the day that the scientists were silenced, that the White House website took down all the climate information. The National Park researchers were told to shut up. Scientists were told not to discuss their research with the public.

[40:29]

As you can tell from my work, I have a lot of connection with scientists. My closest friends are, many of them, working scientists. And that just was a knife in my heart, that news. And so I wrote this poem, and I sent it to three of them, and they started sending it to their friends, and it began traveling far away. And I ended up, it ended up being published quite large in the Washington Post. And I ended up saying it to something like, I don't know, 40 or 60,000 people, however many of the 100,000 people in Washington, D.C. went to the March for Science who were at the rally beforehand. All I knew was there seemed to be a lot of them out there. They had the podium so that the speakers were pointed right at the White House, you know, so it was in the distance visible.

[41:35]

And I was very glad to be some support to the scientists. And I will never have this experience again of reading a poem, and because it had already been circulating and it had already been in the Washington Post, they cheered. Some of the lines, they knew it. It's like, anyhow. On the fifth day. On the fifth day, the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers. The scientists who studied the air were told not to speak of the air, and the ones who worked for the farmers were silenced, and the ones who worked for the bees. someone from deep in the badlands began posting facts. The facts were told not to speak and were taken away. The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent. Now it was only the rivers that spoke of the rivers and only the wind that spoke of its bees, while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees continued to move toward their fruit.

[42:49]

The silence spoke loudly of silence, and the rivers kept speaking of rivers, of boulders and air. In gravity, earless and tongueless, the untested rivers kept speaking. Bus drivers, shelf stockers, code writers, machinists, accountants, lab techs, cellists kept speaking. They spoke the fifth day of silence. This poem was written long before the election, and it was written very much thinking, again, of climate catastrophe. But it was published the day of the inauguration, and it also traveled rather far. You know, it took on a second meaning on that day.

[43:53]

And it... Even though we're here now and they're selling a bit of Tassajara history, the kerosene lamps can be bought in the office, but at least everybody here remembers the kerosene lamps. So this poem would never have been written had I not lived for years with kerosene lamps. Let them not say. Let them not say we did not see it. We saw. Let them not say we did not hear it. We heard. Let them not say they did not taste it. We ate. We trembled. Let them not say it was not spoken, not written. We spoke. We witnessed with voices and hands. Let them not say they did nothing. We did not enough.

[44:58]

Let them say, as they must say something, a kerosene beauty, it burned. Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, read by its light, praised, and it burned. Thank you very much. For more information visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[45:48]

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