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. So I thought I would give you just the slightest, sketchiest overview of what we've been doing down here all week before I read some poems. And the title of the workshop this year was Writing Poems with a Generous Heart Facing the Ten Directions. And one thing I realized when I chose this title for the talk was I suddenly had huge doubt. Did I understand the ten directions? What are the ten directions? You know, we chant it every morning. all Buddhas, ten directions, three times. And I had such doubt that I actually emailed one of my Dharma friends, and I said, is it just what I think it is, or is there something esoteric here?

[01:11]

And she assured me that, no, it's exactly what you think it is, north, south, east, west, northeast, southwest, and up and down. But... The interesting thing, of course, is when you put anything in a framework of practice, it steps forward in omnidirectional meanings. And so what we have been talking about during the talks I give at the beginning of each session is the generosity of the North, which is difficulty, and how we can be generous in... our welcoming of difficulty into our lives, the generosity of the East, which is, of course, the archetype of beginnings and talking about beginner's mind and immediacy, the generosity of the South, which in this hemisphere is abundance and wildness and ease, and the clement,

[02:21]

circumstances which allow you to open a window and let in whatever wants to come and knock at your door. Just as when we spoke about the north, we talked about the hospitality to the stranger that a difficult climate creates. So when you live in a difficult place, particularly desert cultures, but also the far north, if a stranger knocks at your door, you let them in, you feed them, you give them a bed, and only in the next morning do you say, who are you, who are your people, in case the answer isn't going to be so good. And then today, the fourth day, we talked about the generosity of the West, which is, of course, endings, the gloriousness of sunset, the way that The brilliance of red leaves is always there under the chlorophyll green.

[03:27]

You only need to step out of your hard-working mind, and the radiance of the world has a chance to step forward. And also non-attachment, even to endings, that even endings have endings. Time will take care of us, and we will face east again. We have noticed the practice of the tongue and how alert it is to every single bite and any alteration of salt or crust or burn or sweetness. And I have decided that Reb, in his talk last night, dedicated himself to the study of the... originations of suffering, and I think I'm going to apprentice myself to my tongue for the next year, so I will learn how to be an awake person, as awake as the tongue is. We have asked the deep koan in the southern hemisphere to compasses Point South.

[04:32]

Nobody knows. If anybody here does know, come up to me afterwards, yes? They point south. Fantastic. Thank you. And we have talked about how it doesn't matter what direction you are facing, you are always in the center of all 10 directions. And when you are inhabiting the face before your parents were born, every direction is open to you and will bring its generosity. And we talked about the first day, the first night, practicing in the spirit of Tassajara Creek, which gives itself unstintingly every moment without any holding back. So that's kind of what we've been up to. And I'm going to read you a few familiar older poems because I lacked the courage to read you only newer ones.

[05:40]

And then after these, the rest of the evening will be however many poems I get to, all from a new book, which is going to be published by Knopf two weeks from today. And I was hoping I could bring some bound copies with me, but I haven't seen one yet. So anyhow, this is a very early poem that those of you who have heard me before have heard before, for what binds us. 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.

[06:41]

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, stronger, darker, and proud. How the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. This next poem has seen many lives since I wrote it.

[07:49]

I wrote it both with the environmental crisis in my mind, but also a personal crisis. I often write poems to find my way through my own difficulties, and so what might seem a poem of advice is actually a poem of scrambling up a cliff by the fingernails to find it. But this poem has been used as a political poem. It has been used in hospices. And most surprising to me, it was used as the epigraph for a first book of short stories by a young woman fiction writer from Zimbabwe. And when I got the request, I was so baffled. How had she come? come by it, how had this come to be, that I actually asked for her email and I emailed her and said, how'd this happen? And she said, oh, somebody just sent me the poem and I thought it perfectly embodied the spirit of the people of Zimbabwe.

[08:52]

Optimism. More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, but whose phone 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, but out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs, all this resinous, unretractable earth. So, you know, evolution gives us all kinds of examples. It gives us examples of survival of the fittest, but it also gives us the tree's marvelous pacifist example of the diplomacy of graceful yielding. Crown shyness really does exist.

[09:56]

If a tree begins to come into the perimeter of another tree's leaf light, it can tell the green shade that has come to the light and its... branches will move another direction. This poem I read because it came up in the workshop today. Poem with two endings. Say death and the whole room freezes. Even the couches stop moving, even the lamps. Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at. Say the word continuously and things begin to go forward. Your life takes on the jerky texture of an old film strip. Continue saying it. Hold it moment after moment inside the mouth. It becomes another syllable. A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle. Death is voracious.

[10:59]

It swallows all the living. Life is is voracious. It swallows all the dead. Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled. Each swallows and swallows the world. The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death. But the vanished, the vanished beloved, oh, where? And this poem I almost always read here because it goes back to my time here. Anywhere else I read it, I have to explain to people that I once lived somewhere where there was no hot water in the sinks. A Cedary Fragrance Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water.

[12:02]

not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. And it's quite true. I still wash my face with cold water every morning, and it's still often unwanted. But I'm working on it. So the last of the... Somewhat earlier poems I'm going to read. I'm going to read you a poem called Vilnius. I wrote this in 2003 when I thought I was going to go to Lithuania, which Vilnius, sometimes called Wilno or Vilno, is the capital of, but I didn't get to. And in May, I read this poem in Krakow at a memorial for the great Polish Nobel poet Czov Miłosz. who died not that many years ago and would have been, this would have been his 100th birthday.

[13:04]

So I read the poem in Krakow and I talked about how I had not gone to Vilnius and the director of the Lithuanian Literary Institute came dashing up to me and said, you must come to the celebration in Lithuania, we will pay everything. So now I have been to Vilnius. For a long time, I keep the guidebooks out on the table. In the morning, drinking coffee, I see the spines. St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Vienna. Choices pondered, but not finally taken. Behind them, sometimes behind thick fog, the mountain. If you lived higher up on the mountain, I find myself thinking, What you would see is more of everything else, but not the mountain. So now, newer poems.

[14:09]

And don't worry, I'm not going to read them all. I will pick and choose. I sympathized with... Reb said yesterday, the students are very tired. Even though you're getting an hour more sleep than we used to. Well, I'm getting the extra hour sleep too, and I'm very tired. So anyhow, I will start with a small... Buddhist epiphany, except the ending isn't too Buddhist, that I had with a cottage cheese container. You know how they date stamp things? So that was what set this off, and I was looking for my own. Perishable, it said. Perishable, it said on the plastic container, and below, in different ink, the date to be used by the last teaspoon consumed. I found myself looking, now at the back of each hand, now inside the knees, now turning over each foot to look at the soul.

[15:20]

Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants, then at the arguing jays. Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking. Coffee cups, olives, cheeses, hunger, sorrow, fears. these two would certainly vanish without knowing when. How suddenly then the strange happiness took me like a man with strong hands and strong mouth inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings. It's just a terrifically happy thought. Oh, I'm going to die. Wow. Wow. This poem came after those of you who saw me this morning and admired my lovely long gray dress, which didn't get too hot until around 1030, and then did.

[16:23]

That was, in 2007, I traveled with a very small group of American writers through the Middle East, and the first country we went to was Syria, so the dress came from Aleppo. And one thing that I discovered first doing that trip and then in 2009 making my first trip to China was between those two I had been on both ends of the Silk Road. And you can tell because you can see if you go to the Islamic night market in the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an, you see the same picture shadow puppets that you see in Istanbul. It's really amazing. So this poem is a little bit about setting of intention, which of course is a huge amount of the practice of poetry and the practice of Zen.

[17:31]

The decision. There is a moment before a shape hardens, a color sets. before the fixative or heat of kiln. The letter might still be taken from the mailbox, the hand held back by the elbow, the word kept between the larynx pulse and the amplifying drum skin of the room's air. The thorax of an ant is not as narrow. The green coat on old copper weighs more. Yet something slips through it, looks around, sets out in the new direction for other lands. Not into exile, not into hope, simply changed. As a sandy track rut changes when called a silk road, it cannot be after turned back from. In 2008, I discovered a new answer to the old question, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?

[18:49]

Apparently, the answer is write poetry. I had a poem commissioned for a piece of music which was performed at Carnegie Hall, and I got to be on stage and say the poem because it wasn't sung. And then... because anytime there's a new piece of music in such a setting, they always put a really well-known old piece of music so that anybody will come to hear it. The second piece that day was, that night, was Mahler's Fifth, and this came a few days after I came home from that. French horn. For a few days only, The plum tree outside the window shoulders perfection. No matter, the plums will be small, eaten only by squirrels and jays. I feast on the one thing, they on another, the shoaling bees on a third.

[19:50]

What in this unpleated world isn't someone's seduction? The boy... playing his intricate horn in Mahler's fifth, in the gaps between playing, turns it and turns it, dismantles a section, shakes from it the condensation of human passage. He is perhaps twenty. Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red, while a girl holds a viola's spruce wood and maple in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard Let others clap. These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing. Not the shouts of bravo, bravo, nor not the tympanic clamor inside their bodies. As the plums blossoms do not hear the bee, nor taste themselves turned into storable honey by that sumptuous disturbance.

[20:57]

So the realization that began this poem, I was working somewhere in the Northeast and outside my window, I kept seeing a very solitary, very shy woodchuck. And if he saw me move even well inside the room behind the glass, he would immediately dart away. And I was thinking about the loneliness of the woodchuck. And then I realized something, which is every mammal was conceived in a small swoon of sexual ecstasy. So that's what created the start of this poem, thinking about the sexual ecstasy of the woodchuck. Of yield and abandon. A muscular, thick-pelted woodchuck, created in yield, in abandon, lifts onto his haunches. Behind him, abundance of ferns, a rock wall's coldness never in sun, a few noisy grackles.

[22:14]

Our eyes find shining beautiful because it reminds us of water. To say this does not make fewer the rooms of the house or lessen its zinc-ceilinged hallways. There is something that waits inside us a nearness that fissures, that fishes. Leaf shine and stone shine, edging the tail of the woodchuck's silver, splashing the legs of chickens and clouds. In Russian, the translator told me, there is no word for thirsty. A sentence, as always, impossible to translate. But what is the point of preserving the bell if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax? A body prepared for travel, but not for singing. So it's very wicked of me to put in that sentence, in Russian there's no word for thirsty, because it means the poem can't be translated into Russian.

[23:24]

And it's a very surprising... thought, but I probed her, and she said, yes, we can say, for the particular poem that she was trying to translate, she said, we can say, their side's drawn in with thirst. Would that be okay? And I said, yes, it would, if it sounded good in Russian. So many of us, either ourselves or someone we know, have an intimate experience of following a person into Alzheimer's. Many people are caretakers or have been. And I wrote two poems, I think I will just read you the shorter one of them, when a poet friend of mine had Alzheimer's. And he knew well in advance, and he called me up, you know, years before I could have told anything, he called me up one day and he said, I've got early Alzheimer's. And quite a while later,

[24:30]

First he and his wife moved into an easier house, and then finally he moved into a care place in my county. And his wife told me that he still enjoyed visitors, but you should go in the morning when things are better. And so I went to visit him, and he had always been the most eloquent, marvelous poet. And I didn't know what to expect, and I didn't want to trouble his wife, so I called up the director of the place before going and just said, you know, prepare me, please. I haven't actually ever seen anybody when they've reached the point that they needed to be in a place like this. And she said, well, he probably won't know who you are. He certainly won't know he was a poet. You might find him, you know... noticeably in diapers. You might find him on the floor of his room. So I was really prepared for anything, and he was much better than that.

[25:34]

You know, I was lucky. I found him in a good moment. So this is the story that came out of that visit. Alzheimer's. When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, The colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change. As bedrock tilted stays bedrock, its purple and red striations unbroken. Unstrippable birthright grandeur. How are you? I asked, not knowing what to expect. Contrary to Keatsian joy, he replied. So many people asked me when I came back here after being here for the very beginning of the 2008 fire, after having been here throughout the time of the 1977 fire, people immediately said, have you written a poem about the fire yet?

[26:43]

And I never have written a direct poem about this fire, but two pieces of came out of that summer when all of California was burning. And this one probably, although I'm sure I wrote it because of that more recent event, in 1977 we set backfires. And so I learned about backfiring technique back then. And this poem has the story of the invention of that technique from the tragic fire at Man Gulch. Heat and Desperation. Preparation, she thought, as if a pianist, limbering, stretching. But fingers are tendon, not spirit, are bone and muscle and skin. Increase of reach extends reach, but not what comes then to fill it.

[27:50]

What comes to fill it is something that has no name, a hunger from outside the wolf-colored edges. Thirteen smoke jumpers died at man gulch. Two ran faster. One stopped, set a match ahead of himself, ahead of the fire, then stepped up slope, lay down inside still-burning ashes, and lived. Let me see if I can find you the other one. So I'm leaping ahead for this one. It's one of a series of very short poems that I call Pebbles. And I live in Marin, and Marin didn't actually have any fires that summer, but Sonoma, the next county over, did.

[28:52]

Thus, this poem, Sonoma Fire. Large moon, the deep orange of embers, also the scent. The griefs of others, beautiful at a distance. People don't realize how gorgeous these fires are. One of the most beautiful and awesome in the most literal sense of that word, things that I've ever seen. So this one strikes a kind of different note. It is as, you're not hearing many of my science-related poems tonight, but they are all fact-checked, so it's true. Left-handed sugar. In nature, molecules are chiral. They turn in one direction or the other. Naturally, then, someone wondered, might sugar built to mirror itself be sweet but pass through the body unnoticed?

[29:59]

A dieter's goldmine. I don't know why the experiment failed or how. I think of the loneliness of that man-made substance like a ghost in a 50s movie you could pass your hand through or some suitor always rejected despite the sparkle of his cubic zirconia ring. Yet this sugar is real and somewhere exists. It looks for a left-handed tongue. So this is a poem that came out of both this past spring and in 2009, I did separate trips for poetry events in both Japan and China, and 2009 was the first time I had ever been in either of those countries. So this one mentions Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, and it also

[31:02]

which in the old books was always called Chang'an, but is now Xi'an, the ancient capital of China. And I wrote it. I continue to do a traditional Japanese and probably, although I never asked, Chinese custom of a great New Year's Eve cleaning to the point of absolute fanaticism. Every surface in the house gets cleaned. So, for example, if this was my house, I would get a ladder and clean the top of the fan blades. And I've lived in my house a long time, since 1984. I still find things I never noticed before to clean. It's sort of an interesting challenge. What can I see that I never thought to clean before? But these I've been doing a long time. The poem is called Washing Doorknobs. The glass doorknobs turn no differently, but every December I polish them with vinegar water and cotton.

[32:08]

Another year ends. This one I ate Kyoto pickles and touched in Shion a stone turtle's face, cold as stone as turtle. I could not read the fortune carved into its shell or hear what it had raised its head to listen for such a long time. Around it, the madness of empires continued, an unbitted horse that runs for a thousand miles between grazing. Around us, the madness of empires continues. How happy we are How unhappy we are doesn't matter. The stone turtle listens. The famished horse runs. Washing doorknobs. One year enters another. And that is, of course, at some deeply subliminal level, a poem of absolute impotence at the fact that we have been at war for so long, this country, our empire.

[33:21]

Continuing. The Dark Hour. The dark hour came in the night and purred by my ear. Outside, in rain, the plush of the mosses stood higher. Hour without end, without measure. It opens the window and calls its own name in. Everything has two endings. Everything has two endings. A horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life air and after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing. The present.

[34:24]

I wanted to give you something. No stone, clay, bracelet, no edible leaf could pass through. Even a molecule's fragrance by then too large. Giving had been taken, as you soon would be. Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning. They remained air. I offered Memory on memory, but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks? I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger. How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it. I stood on one side of the present. You stood on the other. green-striped melons.

[35:29]

They lie under stars in a field, they lie under rain in a field, under sun. Some people are like this as well, like a painting hidden beneath another painting, an unexpected weight, the sign of their ripeness. China Whales follow the whale roads, geese roads of magnetized air. To go great distance, exactitudes matter. Yet how often the heart that set out for Peru arrives in China, steering hard, consulting the charts the whole journey. Amen. So I'll read you just a few other of these very short poems, these pebbles.

[36:34]

Like moonlight seen in a well. Like moonlight seen in a well, the one who sees it blocks it. Mountain and mouse, both move, one only more slowly. the familiar stairs. How confidently the blind descend familiar stairs. Only those with something to lose grow timid at darkfall. Memorial. When hearing went, you spoke more. A kindness. Now I must. Night and day. Who am I?

[37:36]

Is the question of owls. Crow says, get up. Let's see. So this is a very strange one. I was living somewhere where I was helping take care of some chickens. and also where the little refrigerator I had was running very, very cold. The egg had frozen, an accident. I thought of my life. That's good. Thank you. I so rarely make people laugh. The egg had frozen, an accident. I thought of my life. I heated the butter anyhow. The shell peeled easily. Inside it looked both translucent and boiled. I moved it around in the pan. It melted, the white first clearing to transparent liquid, then turning solid and bright again like good laundry.

[38:43]

The yolk kept its yolk shape. Not fried, not scrambled, in the end it was cooked. With pepper and salt, I ate it. My life that resembled it ate it. It tasted like any other wrecked thing, eggish and tender, a banquet. A small-sized mystery. Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay. Soon on cold nights you'll be saying, excuse me if you want to get out of your chair. But one thing you'll never hear from a cat is excuse me. Nor Einstein's famous theorem, nor the quality of mercy is not strained.

[39:45]

In the dictionary of cat, mercy is missing. In this world where much is missing, a cat fills only a cat-sized hole. yet your whole body turns toward it again and again because it is there. So, Sandra, wherever you are, if you're here, one of my students studies with Paul Hoover, and that was Paul Hoover's cat until it moved in with me. Can somebody me the name of the lovely skinny striped cat that's living outside of 1D, Tassajara cat? Otis. I've really enjoyed Otis. So one of the things that we notice is the malleability of time and how it expands and shrinks and doesn't work by the clock at all.

[40:50]

A day is fast. A day is vast until noon. Then it's over. Yesterday's pond water braided still wet in my hair. I don't know what time is. You can't ever find it. But you can lose it. A thought. Some thoughts throw off a backward heat as walls might at night. In summer. It could happen this moment. Some movement. One word's almost imperceptible shiver. And what was long cold in your left palm, long cold in your right palm, might find itself malleable, warmer. An apricot could be planted in such a corner. skipping the poem about going deaf to the last two poems, When Your Life Looks Back.

[42:08]

This one's a little longer and the next one's normal length. When your life looks back, as it will, at itself, at you, what will it say? Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool, flame curl, blue consuming the log it flares from, bay leaf, oak leaf, cricket, one among many. Your life will carry you, as it did always, with ten fingers and both palms, with horizontal ribs and upright spine, with its filling and emptying heart that wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled. in return. You gave it. What else could you do? Immersed in air or in water, immersed in hunger or anger, curious even when bored, longing even when running away.

[43:16]

What will happen next? The question hinged in your knees, your ankles, in the in-breaths even of weeping. Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in. Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face. No back of the world existed. No unseen corner, no test. No other birth to prepare for. This, your life had said, its only pronoun. Here, your life had said, it's only house. Let, your life had said, it's only order. And did you have a choice in this? You did. Sleeping and waking, the horses around you, the mountains around you, the buildings with their tall hydraulic shafts, those of your own kind around you.

[44:24]

A few times you stood on your head. A few times you chose not to be frightened. A few times you held another beyond any measure. A few times you found yourself held beyond any measure. Mortal, your life will say, as if tasting something delicious, as if in envy. your immortal life will say this as it is leaving. And the last poem, any of you who have a garden will understand, The Supple Deer. The quiet opening between fence strands, perhaps eighteen inches. Antlers to hind hooves, Four feet off the ground, the deer poured through.

[45:28]

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind. I don't know how a stag turns into a stream, an arc of water. I have never felt such accurate envy, not of the deer, to be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me. Thank you very much for having me here. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[46:25]

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