Today I swam, silent, behind my daughter
through cool water, the wind a touch,
riding low waves, green and silver,
following the signs she is teaching me
in my new deafness: H.e.r.o.n. D.o.c.k. Come.
Her head bobbed, a dark seal, past Jean's dock
and submerged rocks, out onto the open lake
and the rougher waters of the drowned river channel,
Tim's pier then and the neighbors' past, and there, See.
A gray shape under the silver Xs of the pipes,
stilt-legged, slow. The heron.
And my daughter tracking him.
She turned to point and I bobbed my fist to say, Yes.
Yes, I see him. Yes, I see you. You have led me to a good place.
She raised her camera in its pouch,
head and camera blending in the bright of the water.
He stepped along the shore, and she followed.
Brown against brown, I saw her take her shot,
shadow stepping into light, the jab for fish,
then, tall against blue and cloud, head lifted,
iconic bird of water and rock and sky.
Heron and girl fixed in my gaze.
I saw her glide to the bird through the silver, close,
so close she looked up to see him and I marveled he did not take flight.
And I took my own picture, having no instrument but my heart
to say, Look and remember: here is the one I have loved in this life
learning to see, learning to live.
—Sarah Webb
—Heron by Amanda Webb
Stretching myself, scapula peeled back like the sky:
Knowing and not knowing, so not writing down
the nascent, subsoil milky specks at night
(and more twinkle out if you look longer).
To calm the rods in the eyes of the dandelions,
this I have learned by eating all the UV rays
and casting skin of my poems,
hiding convex in
curled-toe honeydews,
whether parasamgate pairs
of aphids
are to be spoken, their
velvet skin, the most unnatural neons, seeming like
garbhas of seaweed
and barnacled pupils lapping
without dimension…
Is this what is to be learned?
Is this all that I have learned
in the past murky warp of a year?
that I am too surrealistically snotty
and too wildly naturalistic to enjoy Hart Crane and T.S. Eliot anymore?
too obsessed with Taoist and Zen hermits to enjoy Shakespeare anymore?
or is the real lesson the unwhispered waters of wonder,
that the sweetgum glow hazel
in August on earth pure lands
with or without ontology,
their seeds home to unimaginable Buddha lands,
capillaries pressed out
in unpunctured volcanic dicots
returned to the unchanging inner monocot—
I’ve learned I’m too skiddish to be a contemplative for now,
my last name is Jennings, not Merton,
and maybe that’s a ton better for me,
nothingness being flowers, la mer, and nothingness—
inside the dead ladybug on my windowsill,
clouds beckon unswept revelations…
—Tom Jennings
The day I learned what “Sow” meant
After “Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell
Sow sat, ‘neath ferny vernal waterfall,
sewing seeds of dispassioned
compassionate awakening,
the True Sow of No Title—
hooves rooting and melting
into stationary sewn soil,
its own clover solar flare,
chanting the nameless
sewn threads of the
thatchy tails of trees
above,
with milken dreamy love—
In the modal darkness of dusky
tree bark, Sow sees the
millipedal centipedes
nesting in unimpeded emptiness,
sewing their own selfless blessings,--
kissing the
violet waters of age—
Sow sees loamy mud, each divot
a pew for mildew’s salvation,
tails of time tracked and milled by other
peregrine-sows,
pebbles in the mud
blebbing stupas and surging granulites
rounding to starbathed coil
of the sun’s ray-seeds
and the egg-seeds of beached
saintly horseshoe crabs on
the innate shore of Sow,
bleached in Sow’s
resoundingly silent stillness—
Sow, whose stomach acid
is sulfurously placidly absolving,
wouldn’t even dissolve bone, fanning own
borne molecules in liquid cremation
but nurture them into needlepoint-glowing
firefly bacterioles and
throw them back out, to love
into neatly monasteries of pig-pillow algae,
hooved with the stardust
of countless galaxies of
Franciscan birds, opening their membranes to all,
crying
and
wanting nothing.
—Tom Jennings
Bodhisattvas in empty earth
but never really—up past wormy holy
underworld—to mind without walls
innate in
empty eggshell
already hatched
and having nothing,
solar cumulus columnar, wordlessness,
immanence
of speechless symphonic grasses,
their aquaporins precisely
minute:
voidfabric, whole waterfall canyons
of watery veins
ambivalent of apical self-natures
or idea outside of valent electrons
pulsing the stillness of
froggy hollow waters, sky delicately wrapped
in the gaps of cells
and so vesicles veritably gloved suchly,
a voyagerless return—
the drunken idiotboat
with harpsichord of splinters
lapping tongues underneath the
other shore—
and salamander sidles up to frog
in the hills of unchanging
untreaded tadpole evolutions and asks:
“why did the dinosaurs come from
the pangea west?” and frog says:
“I will tell you”
and before frog can say a word
frog is eaten by swallowbird
and the eye of unfathomed essence
is consummated and
frog reappears—
and bodhisattva’s flowers are resplendored
and get stepped on by accident,
the sky still pervading everything,
clouds pointing at your own head
and the head of the knobby rhythmic
knees of herons with tapestries
of lulling pine-smell forest history
within them, forgotten and unrealized,
taped with words and
extinguished by extant is-ness
and its soft
unblown
breath
—Tom Jennings
