Jittoku Laughing at the Moon (Geiami)

#31

The night is without sound.
I slowly push my broom
This way, that, around.
The world is just a room,
Impossible to clean.
I lay my broom down.
Hands behind me, I lean
Toward the moon, frown.
I do not understand.
"Why do you grin?" I ask.
No answer. "Answer and
I'll return to my task!"
His silence thereafter
Silenced by my laughter.

Hui-k'o Cutting Off His Arm (Sesshu)

#30

Just idle anthropomorphizing,
To see a blind monster about to swallow
These two men, or empty philosophizing?
It's only a water-carved cave, after all.
The master stares holes in the cave wall,
As Hui-k'o offers up his severed limb
In angry frustration at being ignored.
A Zen tradition, the teacher's whim,
A simple gesture of emptiness restored
Through which a thousand monsters roar.
Bodhidharma does not blink an eye to see
The wall is both, suffering and ecstasy.
Nothing left for Hui-k'o to know or to teach,
Everything is now beyond his arm's reach.

Shrike (Niten)

#29

The shrike is called a butcher bird.
He impales insect prey on thorns,
Pinned wriggling, eaten at leisure
(Behavior both practical and lurid),
And a pantry to which he returns
When more toxic morsels have cured.
Niten makes us see him from below.
(Is that an upturned face in the leaves?)
He is lord and maker of the universe,
And a hunched and distracted fellow.
He neither exults at death, nor grieves.
He is what is, for better or for worse.
In that face (see it?), such blindness.
A worm prefers the shrike's kindness.

The Rapidity of Sleep (Tanguy)

#28

The sadness of these images is cold,
Mere form and rigid meaninglessness.
A mistake to think of them as a mold
Into which we are invited to press
Anxieties we can't otherwise express.
In dreams, there are clouds and sky
Even when all else is unfamiliar clay
Pressed by idiot fingers. Don't ask why.
Rapidity in sleep is all about delay
And loneliness the abstraction of our day.
What is left of us bows to the obelisk,
A monument to endeavor without risk.
Is there nothing, nothing worth being?
Our only hope is if nothing is fleeting.

Perseus and Andromeda (Joachim Wtewael)

#27

No man has ever ridden a flying horse,
No woman chained as bait for a spiteful
God's sea monster's appeasement.
In modern terms, any man, of course,
Can fight in desperation the rightful
Cause of his woman's safe easement
From hunger, destitution or even death,
At the hands of evil or cowardly men.
No painting of such would take our breath
Away, or make us think god a demon.
No, it is the look on Andromeda's face,
Not hopeful or happy or exhilarated
Or in love, that we believe. Alone of her race,
She accepts what must be, what is fated.

The Whiteblood Vine

#26

By this cinder track, a whiteblood vine
Entangles a towering sycamore
In mockery of human error.
The parasite winds the tree’s spine,
Cleaving to rigidity it lacks,
Like a mind, faithful to facts.
From rooted stem, slim tendrils twine
Up and around every limb,
Grip a higher twig and climb—
Twig to limb, then twig, in stair-step line.
The creeper spreads its mesh;
Greenery sags, desiccated flesh.
The vine and sycamore combine
To create what they undermine.

The Tree of Crows (Caspar David Friedrich)

#25

Only one is firmly perched on its branches.
The others appear to have been scared off,
Or are they all arriving for the night?
We can't be sure which leaves or advances.
No murder of, but a chaos -- none paired off
Like swans or cardinals -- scattered in flight,
Lines in the sky like these thinning limbs,
A picture of someone's desperate screams.
The trajectories of crows are mere whims,
The tree will draw in in orderly streams.
Don't you believe it. The explosion of lines,
Both bird and twig, are devoid of symmetry,
Like thought we can speak, but not define.
Is it a tree of crows or a crow of a tree?