Clutter has built up
around the edges of the room.
Facing the altar,
I can not see it,
but the gravity
of its accumulation
pulls me backward
toward the west window.
It isn’t much –
an iron, a board,
and hangers from the morning;
my daughter’s cloth cuttings
spilling from a box she has
decorated in tissue paper;
a small book of poems
without a shelf;
remnants awaiting
places to fit
just so.
The lineage scroll from Jukai rests,
tucked in the flickering shadow,
behind the incense bowl
and grandmother’s Buddha —
cold rattles the window and hardens the floor.
in the midst of sitting
at the temple,
my mind began
to compose a poem
about how across the hall
in the dokusan room,
which i could see from my seat
in the zendo,
the chairs are all mismatched.
i don’t know what happened to it.
sitting
with a mind that
won’t come to ease,
dragged about by
the insistence of the mundane.
the old steam radiator whistles
and
i am in the room.
bussokuseki 