Cheating Zen, I Trudge Snow Melt Mud Steeps Up The Drive By Beauty Blinded - 04/05/2020 Journal Entry Less Than A Month Into C19, A Prose Poem Poem by Warren Falcon

Bodhi is not a tree;
There is no shining mirror.
Since All begins with Nothing
Where can dust collect?
- *Yeno (Hui-neng,638-713) , traditionally considered the Sixth Patriarch of the Zen sect in China

14/05/2020 - The only face mask I need here in Keene mountains is supplied by late afternoon sun while I trudge snow melt mud steeps up the drive by beauty blinded. Going to explore the barn newly purchased. Not dressed for barn storming but I had not anticipated more than a week up here when we arrived on March 13th so packed light and left my barn-butch clothes forlorn in a pile of MUST WASH UPON RETURN laundry. Hopefully the spiders and barn spirits will allow me entrance dressed as is.

POST barn storming: upon opening the door I am confronted with a mirror and by mine own visage masked by smudge by smear by crud by dead bugs layered by how many years of going unwashed, by not much to reflect but by barn stillness by planked sun dialing internals by insect flight by perhaps rodent by invading birds by bones theirs these of which are strewn in tight corrals for perhaps a horse or two.

I have been reading zen much up here, not doing enough sitting but for these walking meditations of sorts, cheating of course, my course of meditation is 'cheating zen' which I believe, and can argue, that there is good scholarly evidence for and such in history of zen, there being no real rules and orthodoxy but the most import zen 'doxy' is orthoproxy, or, practice, but/and there is much recenty read and repeated in text enough about 'polishing mirrors', that and the bright sun obscuring face, not even MY face but just 'face' or parts with one left eye tracing the left hand path I've much in life taken (cuz force and temperament) .

There's teaching everywhere. Some of it a ponderance and other such as shake clothes and sheets and towels and such before use since winter spiders love to idlely spider there (idling spiders, fiddling legs, when do they sleep?) . And having suffered a severe spider bite some years ago, the craterous skin rot rotting in perfect concentricities, spectrum of colored putrifactions, fascinating to watch slowly devour perfectly good skin, pock full of the stench of beauty and enlightenment or opposite but as they say all doors lead or in this case all pores cede, that's one zen lesson I do not want nor again need.

Some weeks later, spring snow and freeze, old knees resisting zen, prayer too. Rekiah's nephew is here renovating old house so the place shakes and vibrates with hammer and saw scrapes of heavy old stuff to be replaced with heavy new stuff so's psoas's sore me below ground floor down in here inhering pine knot plank plotch catch all or most dusts the mouse/rat/chipmunk dung the plaster the fiberglass o let this cup pass Lord of Ghosted critters-occupants-seven snake skins entwine water pipes cool wet I guess for snakes need so evidence speaks dark hiding nooks with food rodents
close by old bones and

fur fall into shower stall

'ankledeep in damage

though she

dances...'1


three days

before the

pipes broke-since


from frozen

a'toilet I sat

read the castings tea leaves an old
constipated sage squozen scrieing
fallen oracle bones and fur - spiders
too what butoh walk leg by leg by
leg by leg by leg by leg to what purpose
there on the plasticine stall floor/
wall not sure but am sure that the
dead flies of winter go uneaten/unsucked

Spider first days here I spoke to every morning
from the john me wondering at its slow slow
movements for 3 days till 4th its legs all curled
tucked tightly beneath its carapace I blow at it
from the cold seat - bunched draws round my
colder ankles it budges not at all I realize it is
deceased legs uniformly creased a beauty to
see first time ever've felt remorse for a bug a
spider and once cleaned flushed

my pajamas
up I gently

lift Spider up with toilet paper so soft
double ply-ed solomnly march spider on
bier so soft softly into still harder winter
snow and darker woods Middle-March flip
flops no socks slow going find a rock up
near the woodshed so place Spider there
with oddest prayer ever in my life but Lord
Buddha helps re: 'all sentient beings'
etcetera etcetera que sera OK

so perform brief bone chill rites then slide down
path patch to my ground floor entrance to hot
shower then to Hopkins' poem - The Windhover
the more meaningful than ever for its

'dappled-dawn-drawn' things or rather
substituted or addendum-ed pray ponder
'threaded-sewn-moaned' things strangely
mourned actual tears born no doubt of
projections upon small cringes majestically
formed objectively perceived from secret
sightless spaces suspended cocooned
in darkness or once in close woods of
August last

there strung
they were
and purled
pearled between
limbs beneath trunks
amid ferns spun and
nettle no rattle
click no ears but
work they away
faint stray among
leaves

echoes caught
where spider tufts
sough claw intimate
sleights fragile
were filament
traced strands
taut there seasonal
a webbed kingdom
made

'a first unfallen church it might have been.'2

***

1 & 2 - lines of Nathaniel Mackey's
from his 'Song of the Andoumboulo