“The harmony of this tune requires you to be a connoisseur before you can appreciate it.”

Now it is 2013, not 2011. This could be no other. It could not be written in 2011.

Meeting all of the dead: Living with each other: A ghost of a chance to break free.

Still we lift everyone. Ever reaching, this moment raised stands alone, a collaboration, but really, do I know what you are saying or am I integrating you into my own fabric as in the imagined one, the one who would cut off his arm to meet himself.

Meeting the dead who are everywhere walking, standing, or talking.

Saying goodbye to our own wished for beings that have never materialized – even if we believe and act as though they have.

You are my teacher. Maybe so. Only in the story, the imagined and named.

But the sweater unravels. No knots at either end ~ the yarn not only comes from emptiness it returns to emptiness ~ is emptiness already without making and even as making. It is gone.

The tautology of the attempted explanation of our being here…just keeps spiraling, but this is before the spiral or even the fugue.

I am grateful to Nina Simone… without whom, this particular book of poems would never exist.

I write for people, to people, particular people; generators and recipients of words.

Some vague audience does not exist. That’s not to say people who read these words who are not the generators instigator recipients will not benefit from reading.  It is just to say the benefit is in the acknowledgment of the gift of inspiration and encouragement to come forward.

Without these people, dead and alive and to be, truly far flung; more dead and we hope more to be than are right now. But right now is when this reading takes place.

Not only is it intended to benefit all being but it is the beneficiary of all beings coming forth from this inmost request we all share and express so differently.

One heart blossoms cruel across the dawn of word speaking.

John High introduces us to the land of our making, Dongshan’s territory that can only be covered by each of us – the territory that can only be covered for us by each of us – the territory no one else can cover for us and which we are inspired, encouraged and welcomed to by others – all others – the dead, the alive, the to be.

I am not talking about history. I am talking about each of our lives an inheritance and gift, a direction of gratitude and grace in a land of Love.

Utterance: the shape of the choreography of our movement seeming through space but as space and not in time but as time being; Only Love For The Time Being .

Kotatsu Roko

Monday, 11 February 2013

Prospect Hill