Saturday, 12 May 2012

Xenia Sky

Am I so dear?
Do I run rare?
And you've changed some:
peach, plum, pear.

Top of Form

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John Bailes 

To Emily
Marginal turbulences roil lost
Impure flavors residual floats
Impairs operations only
When we do not see entirely
Our own gruesome beauty.

John Bailes Dharma Talk Monmouth Zen Circle, Compassion Ocean Sangha Saturday May 5, 2012

This is a portion of a dharma talk I gave at Monmouth Zen Circle, Compassion Ocean Sangha Saturday May 5, 2012. It covers the first section of Dogen's, Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance: Giving. We're new to recording here and the last portion of the talk and the discussion are missing because I am mostly technologically inept.. It was recorded directly on to my "telephone".

http://soundcloud.com/kotatsu-1/john-bailes-dharma-talk

I hear the lyric voice of this gruesome beauty in your free verse. which is why I love it so.

John High 

2:57 PM (7 hours ago)

to John

Taking off a tattered dress worn by the dead & dancing in mud

the girl glanced over the snows of an empty

field— the horse stood by the edge of a cliff

& the voices circling about their wandering

all of this time she had thought that she

& the boy were following them, that there was

some purpose & destiny in their pilgrimage, & now

she sensed in the night that we were

following her here in night, she & the boy trailed by

monks and ghosts & birds & trees & all of

the others, and in that moment in a perfect silent

pitch—we are here.

John Bailes 

10:53 PM (0 minutes ago)

to John

Destined to be here,
eyes open
or
not...

There's something about 
an American poet 
who loves Russians 
and is a Buddhist.

There are all these boys and girls 
blind and dumb 
running around on the steppes, 
down to creeks 
and 
all that land and sky 
so alive from before time 
and even during; 
butterflies and bugs, 
mosquito swarms, 
clouds, horses, swords and slaughter: 
some kind of 
destiny.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, the Czar; 
Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Mayakovsky; 
Stalin, pogroms, and Pushkin; 

Finn's starving north of Leningrad, 

St. Petersburg;
 Solzhenitsyn's archipelagos: 
Not one ever returns 
as in the river, 
Neva. 


Who is paddling now?

I hear the lyric voice 

of this gruesome beauty 

in your free verse 

which is why 

I love it 

so.

Did I send this one to you already?

Almost the end of April

Reading a recent poem at Robyn Ellenbogen's.

http://soundcloud.com/kotatsu-1/michelia-champs-a-1

Almost the end of April

Almost the end of April

I look everywhere

for evidence

          of my being;

everywhere is.

How many times do we

raise the entire universe:

          orange peel

          stop light

          grocery clerk?

Each of us always

not even reflected

in.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Great River Zendo

West Bath, Maine

Of Gondolas, Frank O'Hara and Bodhisattva Vows

  

Some might call it a gondola

that carries us through

the night.

This gondola moving

on or not

seems.

If you ask someone

they would say

so.

Similar veins recoil

tumescent instruction

resuscitates simply

lucid nights.

Acrid dreams resume

inconvenient discontinuities

reveal terminal

attachment.

Seeming solid planes

yield naught

turn toward

light.

  

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Prospect Hill

Written after speaking with the mother of a marine...

Complicity and Betrayal

Itinerant worshipped fallen standard repugnant fissure leveling water thimbles broadly open tulips fly rampant furnace liniment littoral rosetta firmly fistulating glimmer.

Remorse or sadness: truth romance and deep love found in states of aggression where we are no longer fighting for some other ideal than one another. Really there is no other than this meeting in which we give up all for and it is what we all want need but that many get it through goading others into the act for no other reason than to see something they never can enact themselves.

What a sorry statement it is to know that people feel the only way to fulfill this yearning and enter knowing is through war.

What perversion it is that we put ourselves in this predicament to find too late we stand only for one another and no ideal and certainly not what we were sold on to get us into this predicament whereby we forsake all else save the situation in which we find ourselves. The forsaken meet the forsaken in the open spurred by a predicament of others’ making and if lucky realizing too late this is all which just might allow a total consumption with nothing left.

Only a few are so lucky.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Prospect Hill