Summer in Houston is wearing me out. I’m so sorry Houston. I try very hard to love you in your most difficult times no matter what people say about you. In the beginning of the summer I rode my bike everywhere. I loved the magnolias, the haunted sounds of music coming from Herman Park not far away, the black grackles at Empire café with their blue sheen and their evil dinosaur eyes.
But now it’s August. There’s not much rain. It’s dusty all around Montrose and smells like car exhaust and dried cat poo. It’s okay. It’s also the time of nothing to break the light of the sun. If you go to the rose garden it’s copper needles drying in the heat, little flames of roses, cicada’s sad tambourines, blonde grass, and sunsets so heavy with color they are pressing honey and melted butter through the black trees at dusk.
At this time one year ago I was in such a different place and as they days get hotter, drier, and longer and longer and longer, I like to remember that time. I stayed two weeks at Plum Village, the monastery of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, in the countryside outside Bordeaux, France. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, there was “nowhere to go and nothing to do,” so I spent a lot of time wandering through tall grasses, watching sheep bleat to each other, watching a nun throw back her head and sing the moon up. I wrote so many moon poems there and I wasn’t the only one! Lots of people were into the moon… it’s so different when you can really see it. I so miss the moon and I miss the insect sounds in the field and I miss Plum Village, so I will share some of my journal from that time.
Plum Village Moon Poem
Half moon:
parts itself
pushing out
like the breasts on a young girl growing
giving birth
or the sky is giving birth to her pale form.
You are growing, like me
you’re giving birth to yourself,
like me.
The moon was a sharp half piece
like the chip off a diamond.
Yellow was soaked all around it.
Fresh as a shot of sun
inside the water, this moon.
If you see a stone under flowing water flashing
It seems to be waving.
That’s the way the stars tremble.
Waxing moon:
a rose kiss
a rose eye
an opening eye.
pink moon playing
bobbing in a rainbow
rolling in the trees.
Full moon:
now you turn towards us your full face.
Now you show up, you open your eyes wide.
You are awake.
I and the corn and the flute insects wait for your voice.
A mother is come home.
Full Moon Festival
Down by the lotus pond the children
are holding rushing sparklers.
What’s that immense silent firework
showering sparks behind the trees?
Plum Village Insect Poem
The insects are earth’s singers.
I hear tambourines. The night is full of a thousand tiny bells.
And reedy flutes, rattling grass.
But a bird’s song is sweet as a baby laughing,
a brook in the forest,
a surprise of bright flower.
If I find you, smaller creature,
in the shower or the hallway,
you are green and glazed with gold.
Your legs are blue. Your eyes are soft.
Your legs catch at my finger like the bow catches a violin string.
I have to carry you out into the soft blue night
And lay you on the first leaf I can reach
A leaf in a darkening linden tree
So you won’t die.
Spiders in the shower
you ride so high
you weigh nothing on your eight airy stilts.
Even a drop of water
will crush you high world
but I’m careful
***
The point of Plum Village Buddhist teachings though, is to live in the present moment, which right now means H-town. So I will try to have some nice poems about shiny, trembling, plenteous roaches and fluffy feral cats as soon as possible.
Learn more about Plum Village here:
http://www.plumvillage.org/
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