Refraining with Water

What are we but our loves
pool-dives into denuding pleasures
their body ours all surfaces re-founded?

On entry the pool resets our temperature,
our sight and hearing
won’t share its air, we must bring our own

borrowed from another moment
from a constant air-pool, brought into water
as a loan of less than a minute

a tall woman, huge to a small boy
teaches us how to move in the water
on borrowed time and breath

she wants to show us her racing dive
in the small indoor pool
used by damaged veterans relearning

how to move in a hostile world
they’ve seen as it is
she sets her feet at one edge,

bends briefly, launches out over the water
big as a jet in a tight suit
where she lands the water parts

throwing itself out of her way
making place for her
from its quiet space-hoard

briefly the pool is a foot lower
her great splash a water cry
of surprise, of joyful entry

she, we and the water
refrain from a moment’s separations
her diving from our watching
our cry from that of opening waters

Straw dogs

Unmoving but set to move
a pair of straw dogs stand on a low table

beside my chair in late-evening lamplight
tails and ears up, noses up,

their legs a faint rustle
their bark a weedy cough

freshening winds without sails
bodies without organs

recalling when they were a meadow’s green wave
needing nothing while sun and moon

traded skyways, traded many single shadows
for all-shadow, traded here-and-now for what’s-next

in a wild freedom of readiness without intent
in a world awash in intent without readiness

One speaks for them. He says:
we’re always empty, never hungry
accustomed to homelessness

walls will always find us
we have only to blink

While the world spends its uncounted ages
and firefly lives, we are its slow turning

While gain is their delusion and loss their enlightenment
we are their watery recycle

I am their axle and she their wheel
an answer thrown and its carry

I am the curve of the earth
and she its fly-over vanishing

They’re dancing now, bouncing on straw feet
then still but gone quick as a stray thought

Arse Poetica

A body moves at a world’s pace
a rolling gait, a slide-step, a false start
the managers hover, the pitcher winds,
the man on first lurches

Clouds not forecast threaten
bottom of the third no score
crowd restless game so far a bore
slow as Mercury’s sun-face transit
a dotted line five hours long,
slow as frozen meditation
on a wooden monk’s face
however long you wish even length-less
a moving stasis never quite observed

A woman fan nudges another
points to the runner’s ass
they snicker as he and it advance

Does the universe advance?
Not here, where nothing truly seen moves
not even the ground beneath the field

The groundskeepers walk the length
of their rolled-up tarps
watching the un-forecast clouds
today’s emotion tomorrow’s text

A subtler game in play has no label
behind the spread and strut of scenery
of taking off and putting on;
something original, as unlikely
as leaves flying back onto their former branches
on trees that grow yearly younger, shorter
as rivers drawing water from seas,
carrying it hundreds of miles upland
to its other sources

Too much always too much
a sliver will do; no need to gobble
each is its own desire ironed out
as lives of ancestors and galaxies

A race in frozen sections: the runner launching,
feet and legs chasing each other
reaching, digging, driving,
the catcher throwing his mask aside
digging the pitch out of his glove,
his arm cocked

What drives a poem isn’t what’s ahead
or right in front, beside, around, inside;
it’s what’s behind

I’m Don Brandis, a retired healthcare worker with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Washington and a life-long interest in meditation and spiritual transformation. Beginning with Thomas Keating’s centering prayer and readings from the Bible, Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, I’ve studied other texts and practices from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. I meditate in the early morning and have slowly learned to see through some of my preconceptions and those of others around me. The big polarities begin to fade: between on the mat and off, monkey-mind and nirvanic peace, the messy rush of daily life and the kingdom of heaven, forward and backward, then and now. I have a somewhat better sense of what a situation actually requires, and I might seem a bit kinder, more patient, less reactive.