and into bed. His frame scratches and groans
once, then silence. Sometimes I fear
he's died, suddenly, bloated face's
red shot eyes staring at the nothingness

he's cursed since before I was born.
How could this father have been conceived
by two devout loving parents who never swore
or touched a sip of drink in their lives?

I wonder if as a boy he ever feared the ghost
of a man, his timid, polite, gentle uncle
who floated to the room across from his,
who never worked a day in his long life

too busy breathing the distillery a block away,
white lightning eyes shining in the dark after hours
with the whores on Haney's Corner -- was that wisp
in the moonlight knowing his mother had died

giving birth to him, my grandmother, then, the mother
of five brothers at age seven, cook for two dozen
farm hands, seamstress in their aunt's sweat shop --
how did he feel, pressed down under her wing,

gasping for breath, unable to move his hand along
the grain of an axe handle? Her love had carried them
on foot or horseback six miles each way to school.
My dad snores and I know it's safe to sleep

and dream again the blindingly vivid image:
Dad coming home through his mother's front door,
sunlight flaring in from behind his lean frame,
and following him, my grandpa, not the

memory long dead of a heart attack, and
Dad's uncle, not that old syphillitic madman
who'd escape to haunt us -- they all sit
around Grandmother's table. When he looks up

from the blessing, half the source of my being
is the radiant soul he was destined to be,
his hands speaking a strangely
uncallused language. From behind thick

black lashes, his quickened blue eyes
blaze my way -- but he can't see me,
my beautiful father, my provider, who has
never cursed a drink in his life.

Politely we push clumsy shoulders, purses, legs, shove
umbrellas, rear ends, arms, briefcases, heads, bags
into the cattle train, the last California 1 Express bus
from the heart of our world-class Financial District
to the end of the line a few blocks from my flat.
"Express" meaning little at "rush" hour, the bus
more the Hotel California on wheels. I maneuver
to a slot near a window -- motion sickness requiring
a view out, if only its dizzy blur of facades.
There's the baglady I just passed on Market, as always.
She's pursuing something -- one of us, perhaps --
checking doorways, under benches, behind signs,
bending to peruse a scrap of paper -- it's
picked up, closely scrutinized, tossed back down.
"Move it on back!" the bus driver shouts.
"Come on, move it back. Back! Back! Let's
go, let's get it moving back there!" Sausaged bodies
squish, dislodging me. I renegotiate my grip
on the cold metal pole, find my warm spot,
jostle, bump -- last week I threw out my back
when the hit brake threw us all at once, a blob
of jello splatting....It's not a cattle train,
really, or Trojan Horse. This monster's the one
alive, aggressive, stomach growling louder than mine,
nerves twitching, brain idling in body inert but
tuned to pounce. It's Blake's Tyger, Jonah's Whale,
Zeus devouring his afternoon sacrificial snack.
Whatever, it's greater than the sum of its parts,
or ours. "Let's go!" The bus driver transcends
impatience through anger, ignoring capacity limit
regulations. Now we're impatient, angry. But not
with anyone or anything specific. It's
the end of the day, we're tired, exhausted really,
zombies on Prozac, valium ventriloquists on overload,
slaves to more bang, more buck, victims, vermin...
The baglady's voice crescendos: "Woe! Woe! Woe!"
Or something to that effect. Some of us glance out
the open windows. The greying executive next to me
mumbles, "Crazy old bag." Sun flares from poses
frozen in plate glass behind her. Squeak!
the bus door thuds shut, brake release squeals,
engine revs, anxious hands grip both sides of the
trash barrel balancing her leaning as if to vomit.
As we pull away she's shouting, "Satan! Satan!"

I admire through a piece of cut purple glass
the sun in its nimbus of glistening light:
it will shadow nicely between the amethyst
folds in the goddess's spreading skirt.
My Buddhist client is telling me how death
dissipates into waves of pure energy.
An elegant way of saying dead is dead and I'd
argue with his spiritualized materialism but I'm
too busy filing down blazing turquoise to fit
the pattern transmuting into his stained-glass sky.
I brush flux on copper foil and lead joints,
solder a water lily -- lavender blushed magenta --
to its cobalt lake. The Buddhist notices
my fingers scarred from handling splintered
pieces of glass he calls sangsara, illusion.
I cut my thumb on purpose, letting its single
blood drop slick and dry on the delicate piece
of pink and creamy white opalescent reserved
for a magnolia blossom. He advises me to
shatter this yearning for sensation and enter
the clear colorless light of the mundane void.
I assume he doesn't mean this gardenscape
mapped out on my workbench, its frame already
expensively hewn from his living room wall, so I
pick the perfect hue for pomegranates fallen
beneath the marbled tree trunk, nail fiery
emerald leaves snugly flush against each other,
cooling silver solder thread distinguishing them
bonding them together. He asks me to realize I am
the One undifferentiated divine body (I wonder
should the goddess's hair burn gold or auburn?),
that all phenomena and worldly existence
is non-existent except in my perceiving mind
(the dove must be gray-blue stroked with sand),
that nirvana is emancipation from non-existence
(dark amber cattails), that non-existence "exists"
in the uncreated mind of the one that created it
(a boulder of melting caramel), is deluded by it,
(will the trellis spray red roses or yellow?),
must escape it (deep crimson), transcends it.
In contrast to this delusion, each piece of glowing
glass held up laid down burgeons into Paradise.
He says the goddess reminds him of his late wife.
 

Strolling through her prim mid-July garden
we pause in what passes for afternoon shade
beneath a peach tree. Koan after koan
and finally I'm getting it, this new position
she calls the still point in the turning wheel.

I don't think I'm that coordinated, but
she says in Zen the mastering of an art
is the mastering of one's being.
The mastering I get. I tell her again she's
more radiant than a snow of peach blossoms.

The Zen archer, she reminds me, spends years
learning to properly nock, draw, shoot
before mastering the art of "letting go,"
of letting the arrow "shoot itself." No,
not suicide! her sigh the only breeze.

The target is the self, annihilation
through consistent hitting of the bull's-eye
the way of merging with the One.
No, not master baiting! she should say
as I look puzzled at a worm, noticing

the tree is full of ripening peaches, some
green, some blushed bursting juicy. I lean
against a branch oozing sticky sap
I'm dying to taste. Parched I say:
But you said archery you do alone, you

become a master when you and arrow and target
are one process, one entity, you know
archery so well it's literally a part of you.
Consider breath, she says, noticing no doubt
my panting. In Greek the same word for breath

means spirit. The archer learns to breathe
in earth -- hold, shoot -- breathe out sky.
Breathing becomes emptying of mind and self.
Only the truly empty can be filled
with enlightened realization that

despite many targets, there is only
one bull's-eye. We began by discussing
the art of flower arranging, but now
I'm so scorcher thirsty I could
drink her sweat, I could suck blood

from a peach stone or an arrow. She says:
Drawing the bow is the moment of highest
tension preceding ecstasy: death, creative
eros, orgasm. In a relationship
you focus on your lover so intensely that

you and she and sex melt into one experience.
You lose your sense of boundaries, not in a
co-dependent sense: your finite, temporal
external self melts away and your spirit fuses
with her spirit. A blackbird lands on a branch

above us and noisily devours a peach. I lick
my lips, noticing bees, a swarm of lucky gnats.
You don't lose your individuality, she says,
in fact the sense of your unique self,
the core spirit, is heightened.

All the generic melts away. You are left
with your true absolute essence merging
with the absolute essence of the other.
When the two are one they are
most fully two: The Zen of paradox.

Koan after koan, but I'm finally getting it.
First you must kill your parents, she quotes,
then you must kill the Buddha, and then
you must kill me. I reach up
and pluck us a peach, warm and luscious.