While we've still got feet: new poems

Gama Sennin

Thirty-five years

Drink a cup of loneliness

Thirty-five miles to a traffic light

In the tradition

Up here

Directions

Irrelevant and useless

Weather report

Smoke and ash

Inward

Judevine Mountain built a house

Perched in these Green Mountains

I've got my father's ashes on my desk

The first, the greatest, the best

All this striving to succeed will make you a failure for sure

What is ambition compared to death?

Kim Ku-yong says

All this ego

A dream

Gandhi said once

November again again

Just now

End of November

Winter is the best time

The mind no-mind brought to mind

Yang Wan-li says

Same old thing

Straight like iron

The emperor

Easy as pie

The warrior's question

If a Bodhisattva

February 13, 2003

It's different now

Reading Olav Hauge in the dead of winter

Two views of the same place

Leaving home

The woodcutter

What would I do without her? or, the hypocrite tells the truth for once

Another winter night

Thirty-five years alone

Well, most of the time anyway

Wild monk or?

What is going on here?

Do something with your body

Dialogue

The mountain recluse asks himself a question

The beautiful people

Again just now

He grieves

The world left behind

The other

Ugly Americans

The rich are never satisfied

Here and there: a sunny day, April 2003

Sympathy for the poor

April 3, 2003

Love song

Another spring

Birth and death in the dooryard

In the year in which I was fifty-seven

Written while riding the Q Train across Manhattan Bridge into Chinatown in a city I once called home; or, self-pity in the city

Look at her now

Now look at me

Going home

Judevine Mountain's siren song: upon returning home from the city

What it takes

Summer's here

Don't speak in the abstract

Praise for ambition and lust

After a painting by Tu Chin called The scholar Fu Sheng in a garden

With Hui-neng

The old tree

The way is like language

No escape

Litany for the emperor

Where I went to school

The evolution of soph

When Han Shan was twenty-nine

Questions

My father is with me

The circle is unbroken

Ryōkan says

Lies

Walking meditation

Glad to be who they are

My father

Like smoke from our campfire

Too busy

The busy man speaks

Poem with a quotation from Mr. Lin

Of two minds

Green Mountain woodchuck landscape haiku

Right now

Often I think i'd rather

The end of August

After looking at an anonymous Sung-Dynasty painting called Lake retreat among willow trees

A little story about an ancient Chinese emperor

Yellow leaves-red leaves

October day-October night

The lazy bees

No poems

This shining moment in the now

My old and well-known lover

A nameless ghost

All ye who are doubtful and confused

Carnal vision

A question

That rebellious streak always did him in

A cave on Judevine Mountain

Learning patience

The woodcutter changes his mind

What good is this?

It's now or never

Unnamed in the records of the immortals

My house

Making a poem by quoting Issa

What we need

What have I got to complain about?

Different names, the same person

Winter: tonight: sunset

South China tiger, Green Mountain catamount

Tomorrow.