Showing posts with label the road. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the road. Show all posts

Sunday, August 18, 2013

A Cure You Can't Refuse


As you get ever elder and a bit more solitary, ever more fixed on the path toward perfection of your fine-tuned ways, grandkids are an excellent cure. 

With no effort at all they get you out of what you didn't even know was becoming a rut, lift you back to the surface of the Big Road you've always been on - the road you now and then dare to call your own - and when you're back up at your natural perspective, with all those natural wide-ranging prospects arrayed before you and those naturally broad horizons beckoning, your eyes return to seeing what they have grown to see, your ears to hearing full scale; your nose sampling the air for even more reality, your feet stirring with the old stride, where did I put my highway shoes, and before you know it you're on the road again, at least in your head; but plans are simmerin' in there, are they not, had a fire goin' all along, you sly dog... 

But for now you just stand there, new in a new way, savoring the true surface, source of all directions...

Grandkids are great.


Wednesday, January 07, 2009


NANAO ON THE BIG ROAD


Heard in late December that traveler Nanao had left the local pathways; took me a while to find this poem of mine about one night on his life's journey. Walk in peace, Nanao.


Nanao at Ashuzan

Smiles wide.
And often.
Long hair, gray beard
growing white,
firelit eyes
turning now and then toward the stars.
Cold mountain night
woolen hat
homespun clothes
rubber boots.
Sake Cup in hand
long-fingered
hunkers down by lanternlight
before the forest cabin
banters easy with the children
up straddling the drying racks.
Slow quiet--
wind rustle
fire crackle
stream sounds.
Begins to talk of Snyder
reads a long walk they took once
up the Kamogawa
in Kyoto.
Speaks on of light years
of simplicity
leading to now and beyond,
sipping
smiling
sitting simply, traveling
the eternity of birth
pathvoice
for this fireside of faces
of the ever going on.

--Nov. 1, 1986
[Published in Kyoto Journal # 2]
Last time I saw Nanao...

[w/tks to Ken Rodgers.]