this morning you try to meditate
on your porch. who can meditate
when they have a porch! and who
can meditate, sitting in the quiet
still of the mind, when your mind
is a forest and an ocean?
the porch you try to sit upon is
in a reflective bay. today’s bay
is blue beneath a sky unrepentant
in its billowing blue. sure, there are some
clouds drifting, and you
remind yourself of the nature
of mind, the thoughts and emotions that drift
across it. like clouds. a mountain peak
on the other side of the bay. now it knows
how to meditate. look at it, its peak crowned
in the jeweled sunlight of early Fall!
and it does not move
a bouldered muscle. the trees move,
though, and the waves in the bay, too.
who can mediate when they have
a porch in a bay, when the wind suggests
the trees roar and the waves swell?
the kale in the tiny raised bed below
the porch, constructed with a brief woman
months ago, it whips in the wind. you do not
much harvest this kale, mostly instead purging
the soil of the slugs that habituate it.
the kale grows strong in these coastal winds.
the mountain meditates with its thousand years practice.
the trees are so strong and resolute, yet still sinuous
in the breath of the planet. i sat briefly on
the morning porch, the wind swollen
waves dressed in their moments of blue. my mind
would not quiet and my heart would not still
and the rejoicing i feel to be alive
in this moment is one way i lay quiet
the fear of my own temporary existence.
we are of this wind and wave, our edges quickly
blur, just as the water blurs that which it rides upon.
and as we dig in our gardens, or rid them of slug, we prepare
our dancing minds for their eventual return.
how can i meditate on the emptiness of this
swirling sphere, when my heart explodes and my mind howls
with delight? an intellectual infant, sophomoric
in my philosophy, i sit back down on morning’s blue
bay white capped tree tossed wind washed porch, to once
again attempt a blurring into the breeze, to emerge
as that which i already am.
zakschafer.com 