For the Dance
for
Canadian Poet anne mckay
and after the Butoh of Sankai Juku*
The sound of bells, gongs: water ripples
beneath the sky past dusk; a column
of dust falls, a funnel of water—
between birth and death if only
there were wings that could carry us.
Candles flicker in a sway of smoke
against a winter-blue sky of stars: the air
shimmers and brightens again; the colors
flare in the water the horizon fills.
Blue turns to green, all of the water
fringes red, then blues again in silhouette;
a song that echoes the deep bass
of the night—then the new birth,
a hymn, a bright mist, the music igniting
another dawn. We
begin again.
*Translated as: in the studio of mountain and sea.
Practicing
Mindfulness
1.
All day the rain
blows in gusts; mist moves in
to swirl above the
crackling of fallen leaves,
to fill the
branches of the trees where their foliage
had been, then
disappears, reappears; the wind
driving browned
pine needles through the air.
I cartwheel the rotted
skids I cleared
a hundred feet down
the slope behind the cabin,
then lay out the
new pine skids I acquired
from the lumber
yard for free.
2.
I practice
mindfulness in moving
the split wood onto
the skids: at first one piece
in either hand,
then I develop carting
an armload, the
grit from the wood
muddying my work
gloves, and the rain
falling hard enough
that I change hats
from my beret to Provincetown
ball cap.
I stack the wood on
the three skids
farthest from the
cabin four feet high;
the skid I place
closest to the front door,
I stack
higher. Sometimes a knot in a piece
of split wood looks
back at me like an eye,
and I move through
the mist and pelting rain
all afternoon to
finish just before darkness—
only the slash of
the pile remaining.
Spring
Letter to a Friend
It appears that
winter has wound down to a lamb-like bleat,
as we slosh our way
through to the end of March.
My plans, as firm
as any plans can be, are to ascend Toby
for the first time
this year. Most probably,
I will take a run
up tomorrow. My hermit-in-a-hut
existence
needs a deserved
respite, and I can truly use the aerobic
exercise of a
ramble. So, I will roll up the bamboo
screens
and allow the
swallows to use the exposed windows
for their acrobatic
drills, while I trek up our small mountain
to enjoy the luxury
of the still-open views.
Wally Swist's new
book, Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as a
co-winner in the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition, and will be
published by Southern Illinois University Press in the spring of 2012. His
previous book, Luminous Dream, was chosen as a finalist in the 2010 FutureCycle
Poetry Book Award, and his scholarly monograph, The Friendship of Two New
England Poets, Robert Frost and Robert Francis, was published by The Edwin
Mellen Press in 2009. He has been invited to record an audio book of his nature
poetry with Berkshire Media Arts.
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