In 99 Years (Kim Mosley)

Her gray hair was thin,
tired of many years
of endless
combing and brushing.

The silvered strands
were expertly cut—
they could not have been
better cared for,
considering her
age.

She smiled for the lens.
Her mouth formed
a polished camera
facial expression.

She had been
on that side
of the lens
many times before—
it was apparent

as she was able to combine
a wry suspicion
with a pseudo-authentic smile,
making it all seem pleasing in the end.

There was a hard,
Eastern-European texture
to her face.

She had not chosen mud
and other beauty facial treatments,
rather had lived an adventurous
yet privileged life.

Her smile said,
"I've seen much of life
in 99 years, and
now it is yours
to enjoy and tend."

She wore a black scarf
wrapped around her neck,
giving some dimension
to her very small body

that sat onto
a polka-dotted shawl,
which was inside
and partially covered by
another larger shawl,
laced with gold thread.

Her forearms and hands
emerged
from the third shawl.

The arms were larger
than one might expect
coming from
such a petite figure.

These (almost workman) arms,
as familiar
gardening
as editing books,
lay one upon
the other
in a warm gesture.

There was no tension,
but the weight of one arm
on the other
seemed a little more
than she could bear,

causing her smile
now to tighten and
not seem
quite as relaxed
as her face
first suggested.

Her skirt exhibited
a similar
but darker dot pattern
to the smaller of the two shawls.

Her legs
appeared to be tired,
at 99,
as they struggled to
hold up her arms,

with dignity,
as a pedestal holds
tirelessly
a death mask.

 

About Kim Mosley

The Fall (Vickie Schubert)

First heavy frost,
early in the frigid morning,
silence is punctuated,
by sounds on roof and screen.
Dawn has arrived and
the kiss of the sun
has nudged the pecan leaves,
persuaded them to free themselves
from the trees’ control.
Against the cerulean backdrop they fall.
Some drift and gently twirl,
others plunge in kamikaze dives,
yet others drop in clusters,
exquisite ballet troupes in group step
as they spiral to the ground.
One by one,
each leaf letting go and
descending gracefully
in its unique way,
accepting its destiny
at the perfect time.
Melting frost dusts
the lawn with cool wetness onto which
this waterfall of leaves spills,
creating a delicate mosaic
of citron, gold, and green,
a tribute to the magnificence of impermanence.

 

About Vickie Schubert

Tree Image (Amy Lindsay-Joynt)

 

About Amy Lindsay-Joynt

I Ask for Silence (Glen Snyder)

NOW just leave me be.
Now get used to being without me.

I am going to close my eyes

And I only want five things,
five preferred roots.

One is endless love.

The second is to see Autumn.
It cannot be without the leaves
flying about and returning to earth.

The third is the deep Winter,
the rain that I loved, the caress
of fire in the wild cold.

In fourth place is Summer
round like a watermelon.

The fifth thing is your eyes,
my Matilde, beloved,
I don't wish to sleep without your eyes,
I don't wish to be without your gaze:
I  trade in Spring
for you to keep on looking at me.

Friends, this is what I wish.
It is nearly nothing and nearly everything.

Now I want you all to go away.

I have lived so much that one day
you will have to forget me on purpose,
erasing me from the blackboard:
my interminable heart.

But just because I ask for silence
do not think that I am going to die:
for me it is just the opposite:
it so happens that I am going to live.

It so happens that I am and I continue.

It will not be, though, unless inside
of me there will grow cereals,
the grains that first break
the earth to see the light,
but mother earth is dark:
and inside me is dark:
I am like a well upon whose waters
the night leaves behind its stars
and continues alone in the countryside.

It is all about how much I have lived
that I want to live a bit more.

I have never felt so sonorous,
I have never had so many kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.
Light flies on by with its bees.

Leave me alone with the day.
I ask permission to be born.
—Pablo Neruda

(Glen Snyder, trans)

 

About Glen Snyder

Over Town Lake (Betty Gross)

Moonlight strikes water Ending, beginning entwine No harm to water

 

About Betty Gross

Along the San Gabriel (Sarah Webb)

Along the San Gabriel

on the river where my father died
water wavers over stone

 

About Sarah Webb

Enshrined (Brandon Lamson)

I cannot climb the narrow path
to Suzuki’s shrine, above the creek
that floods during thunderstorms,
turning spring gardens to mud.
Legend says that Koi strong enough
to swim upstream against the current
become dragons once they reach the source.
Students spread his ashes beside
his favorite tree, an oak
whose limbs sculpted by light
and wind reach over the valley.
Sunrise, fog burns from the peaks
of the Santa Lucia mountains,
my friends’ laughter carrying
as they find Lupine, Humming Bird
Sage and Indian Paintbrush.
I don’t need to see it, the tree
or the wildflowers or the makeshift altar;
I can bow right here in the dirt
and surrender, burrow like a mole
underground into mulch and loam,
a compost turning the center
of my fear: shavings of red
orange bark, bear berries, wolf scat.
We practice this way, in the dark,
opening to our blindness
like the barn owl I often visited
that was rescued and taken
to a wetlands sanctuary near my house,
placed in a small aviary with a sign:
Blind owl struck by drunk driver.
Very sensitive to noise.
Please do not disturb.
Those eyes, luminous inkwells
in a white clock face
that followed me as I stood outside
its wire cage, feeling my lungs expand
with fetid air from the marsh below,
an understory where spirits hissed
curled in the roots of cypress trees,

rising in clouds of mosquitoes
that furred my arms and drank,
the owl a stillness inside them,
a ghost monk drenched in his robes.

 

About Brandon Lamson

Death Row at the Dentist (Kim Mosley)

 

About Kim Mosley

No and Yes (Kim and Jasper Mosley)

A letter to my four year-old grandson:

Jasper,

The other day I refused to read the book that told me about the rest of my life. Good thing, too, since the book does not exist. I like the fact that each day brings us something new.

This morning I received your video, where you so beautifully discuss the meaning of yes and no. That is such a quandary in Chinese, since they don't have words for yes or no. If you ask, "is the soup ready?" they simply answer, "it is ready" or "it is." So you see, we can function without those words "yes" and "no" that we use so often. It is a lot faster to say "yes" in answer to "are you ready for dessert" than to say "I am ready for dessert." But the Chinese were not in a hurry. At least, that is what we were told. Now they are in a hurry, rushing around like there is no tomorrow (that's an expression that you can figure out yourself).

I received another email today, this one from my Austin teacher asking me to consider a poem for the Zen journal I edit. It was a fine poem, but it was about now (the present moment) rather than about birth and death, which is the subject of the next issue. So I wrote him that it wasn't about birth and death, but maybe we could make the issue after birth and death to be an issue about "now," since now is between birth and death. He wrote back that there is no in between birth and death, and that, anyway, birth and death are ideas.

I wrote back that death being an idea would be an interesting defense in a murder trial. Suppose one of the mouse traps went off that we set in your house and "caught" the mouse. And suppose it was against the law to end of lives of mice, as it is to end the lives of dogs. So then whoever set the trap would be arrested and they would stand trial for ending the life of a mouse. And the lawyer for the accused (I think I set the trap, so I'd have to come back to Philadelphia to stand trial as the accused)... the lawyer for the accused would argue that I can't be accused of breaking a crime because ending the life of a mouse is just an idea, and we don't have laws, at least criminal laws, about ideas. I'm sure you follow this, and if you don't, that's ok too.

So I took a nap (because your grandma told me I needed to do that if I wanted to go out...which I do) and when I woke up I thought about there being nothing in between birth and death. So if you think about it then I think you'll see that it makes sense. Since you are growing you are being born. It is a gradual process. When you started your life you were smaller than the head of a pin. When you were about as heavy as brick, you came out into the world from your mom. Now you are as heavy as 5 or 6 bricks. Your dad is as heavy as almost 25 bricks. At some point, we stop growing and we start dying. Nothing to worry about though, because, like "birthing," that takes a very long time. Except for the mouse who is hungry for peanut butter.

But don't worry about the mice in your house, because any good Philadelphia mouse prefers peanut butter with sugar to your better-for-you Trader Joe's peanut butter. So the mouse, you, me, and everyone else who are around are still birthing to deathing. And so birth and death are really one, and they really are just ideas in our minds, and now... what is now? Maybe that's for another letter. OK?

Grandpa Kim

P.S. I sent this to my teacher. He replied, "Kim Oy! The rest of the idea reads thus: There is no absolute birth and no absolute death, and what is born is born and what dies dies. Smiles,..."

 

About Kim Mosley

Balance (Dwayne Bohuslav/Joanne Brigham)

The Vernal Equinox, which was on March 20, 2010 this past year, is an important day in the Buddhist calendar because it is a day of harmony. Midway between the solstices, light and dark balance one another. It is, therefore, an opportunity to reflect upon BALANCE in life.

Emerging from winter, the Vernal Equinox marks the beginning of spring. Out of death, life re-emerges in an endless iteration. It is exactly the time when dark and light/death and life/moon and sun are in balance with one another, and so it is seen as a time when our lives are in balance – or can be. It is an important time in Buddhism for that reason, since Buddhism is about the Middle Way.

Hell, evil, pain, old age and death. Heaven, good, pleasure and birth. On the days of spring and autumnal equinox, accordingly, there is no predominance either way. This has been described as, “The Buddha delights in the Middle Way.” But the Equinox is fleeting…

This “Middle Way” is not achieved after death, it is not separable from life. It is not another place; it is a way of being in this time and place. You are in Hell and you are in Heaven depending on how you see the world and by the manner in which you are in the world. However ephemeral, the Equinox is a reminder of where we want to be internally. It is a reminder that the Buddhist view of the
world is that everything is one.

HCG Gallery

Suspended from the structure and in response to the space, an inclined plane became our “floating world”.

The nature of the ephemeral object leads to investigations of Tibetan Thangka painting and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the oldest surviving Japanese work of fiction, and haunting images of its heroine, Kuguya-hime’s, “Return to the Moon”. Steel, metal fabric, mechanisms…

Field and objects are set in motion from the rhythms of the moon and gravitational pulls, “Spring tides/Neap tides”; bellows/ breathing; male/female. A “physical response” to the physics of the space, here maintaining equilibrium in a place where polarities exist. Sticks, strings, beads and bottles…

All of this process arrives at the Vernal Equinox, the date of the opening performance.

What divine source or cosmic source or human source brings us to places of harmony?

BALANCE.
The Comfort of Gravity.

After the opening performing installation, BALANCE remained in place for one month and then was disassembled back down to its individual components. No thing lasts. This helps us live. Impermanence.

 

About Dwayne Bohuslav

Atacama Desert photos (Glen Snyder)

Journeying through the Atacama desert, a land where wars had been fought to secure the world's only saltpeter deposits just over a century ago. Now there are only ghost towns, abandoned since the 1920s. We stopped by the cemeteries where the wooden crosses are the only remains of a cruel life in the desert. Of the flowered wreaths that once adorned the cemetery, only wire hoops remain.

 

About Glen Snyder

Tragedies (Kim Mosley)

 

Friday morning: My cousin wrote yesterday about Treme, an HBO dramatization of Katrina's impact on the Treme neighborhood. I watched the trailer (below) and requested it on Netflix, so someday I'll see it.

 

 

Not only was Katrina a terrible tragedy, but the recent oil spill has added "insult onto injury."

That said (and felt), I started to think about the elephant in the room. We are all on death row. (You probably didn't want to hear that.) Today our circumstances maybe be a lot better than Treme. But we are essentially in the same boat (some may crucify me for saying that). We are prone to sickness, heartbreak, and death. Prone is a euphemism. All our attachments will depart someday. Even the Earth, as we know it, will go away. And yet we smile. And yet we feel compassion for those less fortunate.

In the 80s, I met a few who were struck with AIDS. They knew they were on death row, and they could predict when their execution would occur. Yet they had an air of contentment that I had never seen before. In spite of (or because of) their certain demise (medicine is prolonging that now), they were able to have a certain strength to enjoy each moment for what it was. No more pretending about the elephant.

Later Friday: All was going well in my life, though my cough comes and goes (mostly comes, or at least, so it seems right now). In any case, a terrible tragedy occurred today to a different cousin and we all mourn for him. The elephant sometimes appears at the least predictable times or places. I dedicate this drawing to my cousin.

My son and I visited him last fall, and shared with him a bottle of wine watching the Oregon sunset. He loved the ocean as he did telling a good story. We shall miss him.

 

About Kim Mosley

Not Enough (Rick Wadsworth)

When I left you (there in the hospice bed) I knew it would be the last time I’d see you.
The next time I’d see you, you would be dead, not there, a corpse.
And I knew this.
It was not, I may never see you again
(well Rick you may never see him again)
No it was not that.
It was certain
I was certain I’d never see you again.

So I threw my face onto yours
My arms over you withering
And
Trying for molecular fusion
Squeezed hard
And pled
I love you Dad,
I’ve always loved you ,
You were a good father,
I knew you loved me.

And no matter how hard I squeezed
No matter how long I squeezed
No matter how often I said these words…

IT WAS NOT ENOUGH

Maybe to stay would have been enough.
Maybe to stay until the last moment of our life
Would have been enough?
Enough for what?

So no , no, no
Nothing, no time, no words, no touch, no smell, no taste, no sight, no thoughts, no words
Nothing
NOTHING will ever BE Enough.

 

About Rick Wadsworth