Besides saying that he's the inhabitant of the San Francisco Zen Center, the Casa Floral Zen Mountain Center, Bingoch Farm, I'd like to say that he's also been an ardent worker for world peace, most visibly in the last few years. But world peace, especially through nuclear disarmament, has been one of his main concerns. And I would also like to observe, as his student, that his way of speaking about Zen is an exploration of language for expressing language, and involves a pointed use of poetry, both Oriental and Spanish.

[01:26]

They all speak in a voice of concern and truth. They all speak of the relevance of the identity of our deep feelings and recognitions with the world, and of the necessity and courage of our intuitions and convictions, and of the singularity and inseparableness with the world of each individual. Many people have been moved by these three, as you and I have. So people have published and read many books by them. And Gary has received the Pulitzer Prize. You must be tired of hearing me talk. And Thich Nhat Hanh has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, and coincidentally, he and Martin Luther came into your high school. And Bob Creeley recently had a really marvelous large book of collected poems published by

[02:47]

the University of California Press. But these things should not separate them from us. We are each speaking to each other, and not to publishers or to the world separate from us. You know there is an extreme likelihood, not a certainty, but an extreme likelihood of an intentional or accidental, more likely accidental, nuclear war and holocaust kind of genocide that will bring the voiceless and already suffering plants and animals that are not at war with anybody or anything along with us. It's actually something that could happen at any moment. The phrase, in the wilderness of the preservation of the world, has been going through me recently, a kind of mantra. And I mean the wilderness of what we mistakenly call the inside, because we do not know its

[03:53]

boundaries or fully its expression. It is to this wilderness that we know through cultivation and the limits of cultivation that these poets are speaking. To the wilderness that is the base of all our feeling of trust and desire to trust, to act on our own intuitions and recognitions and mindfulness. All three have come a long way from France, from New Mexico, and from Sierra to speak with you, to join their lives as poets and Buddhists to your life. And let's go the next long way together. Zen Tatsu.

[04:53]

Thank you, Zen Tatsu. Please enjoy your reading for a moment. This is an instruction I hope will take my heart. And take a moment, if you like, not to look about. I think you'll see many old friends here. And I don't even mean that in a word. You'll see many old friends here. It's wonderful to have you gathering like this again. Is that a signal that you can't hear me? No, we can hear you, Gary. How was the reading last night? Yeah. We'll try again.

[05:59]

All right. So I'm going to read a few poems from my new cycle of poems. These are called ax handles. Fifth century B.C. folk song from the Shurjin and the Bodhisongs. How do you shape an ax handle? Without an ax, it can't be done. How can you get a wife? Without a go-between, you can't get one. Shape a handle. Shape a handle. The pattern is not far off. And here's a girl I know. The wine and food in rows. Ax handles. One afternoon the last week in August. I was showing Kai how to throw a hatchet. One half turn and it sticks in the snow.

[07:02]

He likes that. And he recalls the hatchet head without a handle in the shop. And go gets it and wants it for his own. A broken off ax handle behind the door is long enough for a hatchet. We cut it to length and take it with the hatchet head and working hatchet to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle with the hatchet. And the phrase first learned from Ezra Brown rings in my ears. When making an ax handle, the pattern is not far off. And I say this to him. Look, we'll shape the handle by checking the handle on the ax. And he says, and I hear it again. It's in Ruggi's one fool, fourth century, 18th century literature. In the preface, he says, in making the handle of an ax, or cutting wood with an ax, the model is indeed entertainment.

[08:08]

My teacher, Toshio Chen, here in Berkeley, translated that. And he taught years ago. And I say, I was an ax. And Chen was an ax. And I am an ax. And my son, a handle, soon to be shaped again. Model and tool, craft of culture. And so on. Changing diapers. How intelligent he looks. On his back. Both feet caught in my one hand. His glance set sideways on a giant poster of Geronimo with a sharpshooting rifle by his knee.

[09:10]

I open. Wipe. He doesn't even notice. Nor do I. Baby legs and knees. Toes like little peas. Little wrinkles. Good to eat. Eyes bright. Shiny ears. Chest swelling, drawing air. No trouble, friend. You, me, and Geronimo. Are men. Soy sauce. This is dedicated to Bruce Lee at a common time. Standing on a step ladder. Up under a hot ceiling. Tacking on wire net for plaster. A day's work. Helping Bruce and Holly on their house. I catch a sour, salty smell. And come back down the ladder. Deer lick it.

[10:12]

Nice, she says. And she shows me the frame of the window she's playing. Clear redwood. But dark. With a smell. We scored a broken-up, 2,000-gallon redwood soy sauce tank from a company without a business down Bruce's house. Out in the yard. The staves are stacked. I lean over. Sniff them. Ah. It's like shinshu miso. It's like the darker, saltier miso paste of the Nagano uplands. The central main island of Japan. In fact, it's just like shinshu pickles. And I see in my mind my friend shinshu and me. One afternoon, years ago, trudging through days of snow, crossing the Japan Alps, and descending the last night to a farmhouse. Taking a

[11:14]

late, hot bath in the dark, and eating a bowl of chilled, red miso and pickles. Nothing ever tasted so good. Back here, California, hot summer sunshine, dusty yard, hammer in hand. But I know how it tastes to lick those window frames in the dark. The deer. The deer. Strategic Air Command last summer on a little backpacking and climbing trip with my older son. Koi Peak, eastern Sierra Nevada, just up above Mono Lake. The hiss and flashing lights of a jet pass near Jupiter in Virgo. He asks, how many satellites

[12:16]

in the sky? Does anyone know where they all are? What are they doing? Who watches them? Frost settles on the sleeping base. The last embers of fire. One more cup of tea. At the edge of a high lake rimmed with snow. These cliffs and the stars belong to the same universe. This little air in between belongs to the 20th century and its wars. Work point. someone said that most of the last three or four centuries of western occidental culture poetry has been love songs. I kind of like

[13:16]

work songs, too. This is called Getting in the Wood. The sour-smelled rue-stained water squirts out around the ledge, lifting quarters of rounds covered with ants, a living glove of ants upon my hand. The pole of the sledge a bit peened over, so the wedge springs off and tumbles, ringing like high-pitched bells, into the complex depth of twigs, poison oak, bark, sawdust, shards of logs. And the sweat drips down, a smell of crushed ants. The lean and heave on the beam that breaks free the last of the bucked three-foot round, yet lies flat on smashed oak limbs. Wedge and sledge, pea and maw, little axe, canteen, piggyback

[14:17]

can of sawmixed gas and oil for the chain, knapsack of files and goggles and rags, all together the dead and the doubt. The young men throw splits on the piles, bodies trending, learning the pace and the smell of tools from this delve in the winter, death toppled over the oak, four quarters. Now where we live in the Sierra Nevada well, this is really true of all of California. You can live outdoors six months of the year if you like and doing so keeps the house from getting so hot from the cook stove. So we have an outdoor kitchen with a kind of ramada shade shelter over it, cook in a circle of stones, use the dead man's that won't work so well in the cooking

[15:19]

range anyhow. That's fine. But it's very vulnerable to raccoons in the winter of life. So this poem starts with that. It's called True Night. She will sleep in the black bed. From outside this green room comes a clatter. Comes a clatter. And finally the steely mind rises up to a hook, rises up to a fact, like a fish to a hook. A raccoon's in the kitchen. A falling of metal bowls, the clashing of jars, the echoing of plates. I snap alive to the kitchen. Rise unsteady, find my feet, grab the stick, dash in the dark. I'm a huge

[16:20]

pounding demon that roars at raccoons. They creep around the corner. A scratching sound tells me they went up a tree. I stand at the base. Two young ones that perch on two dead soft limbs and peer down from both sides of the trunk. Roar, roar. I roar, you awful raccoons. You wake us up at night. You ravage our kitchen. As I stay there then, silent, the chill of the air on my nakedness starts off the skin. I'm all alive tonight. Barefoot, shaping like gravel, stick in the hand for ever. A long streak of cloud giving way to a melting thin light back of my pine cone.

[17:21]

The room is still full. Pillow sides of pine trees all whispering, crickets still cricketing, faint in cold coves in the dark. I turn and walk slow back the path to the beds with goose bumps and loose waving hair. In the night of milk moonlit thin cloud glow and black rustling pines, I feel like a dandelion head on the seed about to be blown away. Or a cinnamony open and waving in cool and purring water. Fifty years old, and I still spend my time screwing nuts down on bolts. At the shadow pool children are sleeping and a lover I've known with for years. True night. One cannot stay too long

[18:24]

awake in this dark. Dusty feet, hair tangled. I stoop and slip back to the sheath for the sleep I still need, for the waking that comes every day with the dawn. Thank you. As in the crevice soft autumn hum whispers, so are we, the trees, as are they to the rocks and hills. I've told this story before and I know a lot of you have heard that one before but I'm going to tell the story again. The death coin was given to me by Lou Welch and Lou and I were sitting by a fire late at night

[19:25]

outside in the summer of 71 and after a long silence Lou said to me, Gary, do you think the rocks pay any attention to the trees? And I said, I don't know, Lou, what are you driving at? And he said, the trees are just passing through. As in the crevice soft autumn hum whispers, so are we, the trees, as are they to the rocks and hills. One of the challenges for thoughts on this continent is that we have a couple thousand years of writing

[20:26]

bringing into our poetry the birds and insects and plants of this continent and to approach the degree of richness and mutually affording that you have in an old cultural poetic tradition such as the traditions of China and Japan and all of Asia where thousands of years of poetry have fully informed the landscape and background plants, flowers, birds are throughout the poetry and then people on seeing a wild jungle frog or a certain tide in a certain bay can sing a song and recite the poem back to that site which is the beginning of the poem. So here's my breakthrough poem in that I've taken an insect here that nobody else was ever going to write about, namely the Oak Moth Caterpillar and put it into a poem for the future. Red-shifted

[21:30]

flicker, sharp cool call, the smell of sweet birch blooms through the warm man's winter, and the soft raining down invisible crackling dry death of the droppings of Oak Moth Caterpillars high in oak leaves above. I am sorry I disturbed you. I broke into your house last night to use the library. There were some things I had to look up. A large book fell and knocked over others. Afraid you'd wake and find me and be truly alarmed, I left without picking up.

[22:30]

I got your name from the mailbox as I fled to break you, I explained. I think at that point it was about what it is to be a poet, but I'm not sure. A brief haiku series written on June 1st, 1977. A sea of open blossoms and the radiator boiling over smells of spring. Fat rear paunches, toes, tail, half a mouse at the door at dawn are a loving cat. Setting

[23:33]

sugar water Peter jars for bees out, hung at dusk. This year, the third of the bullfrog he rarely speaks. Is it drought and low water or age? Kid coming out of the outhouse at dusk in pajamas, still tucking them in. How many eggs? Last night, the first time, raccoons opened the refrigerator. You can't slow down progress. You know, it's true. If we were here to have an ideology that took progress seriously, we would have to leave progress to raccoons. A young

[24:37]

couple got married in Nevada County, Rhode Island. I asked them what they'd like for a wedding present. That was Bill Crosby and Cindy. At this point, it was called a mall for Bill and Cindy's wedding. He said, I'd like a splitting mall. Not a splitting fireman. It's like a splitting wedge with a handle on it. So I said, would you like an eight-pound mall or a ten-pound mall? And he said, a ten-pound mall. I knew he was serious. So I put it in the truck and was walking to the party and thinking to myself, I just can't give a nice newly married young couple a mall for a wedding. So I pulled over to the side and I wrote a point and put it around the handle of a rubber band and dropped it off at the party. And then about a week later, I was thinking back and I said, oh, it was in a bad point. So I went over and called me a guy. So here it is.

[25:40]

A mall for Bill and Cindy's wedding. Swung from the toes out, belly breath riding on the knuckles, the ten-pound mall lifts up, sails in an arc overhead, and then lifts you. It floats. You float. For an instant of clear, far sight, I fell on the crack in the engrained ankle of the old ground, stood up to wait to be split. The mall falls with a sigh. The wood collapses apart and lies 20 in a week. As the mall splits all, may you two stay together. laughter applause [...] I've been going up to Alaska

[26:43]

almost every year for the last five years. Doing some poetry reading, some teaching, some community consultant work with white communities and Native communities both. At one time, I was over in western Alaska near Crystal Bay, which is the richest salmon fishery in the West from the West Pacific. With the Japanese and the Soviet salmon fishing boats hovering out there right along the Americas. You get to have salmon catch. Which makes me also think to remind us, a little thing has slipped by that probably none of you have noticed. Five big salmon fishing boats went down in the Bering seas. Five big boats all the way out to the West Coast. And quite a number of fishermen were lost. A number of lonely families

[27:44]

were forced to sail west. There's a bar in Dillingham, Alaska at the end of Crystal Bay called the Willow Tree Bar. And while I looked at that bar, I found myself in the same bar that I had been in many times before. As you see on the bottom of the page. So I wrote this poem, Dillingham, Alaska, the Willow Tree Bar. Drills chattered full of mud and compressed air all across the globe. Low to the ceiling of the bars, we hear the singing of new songs. All the new songs in the working hours of the world. After you're done driving the cab, back to the truck and home. Caravans slipped from lakes folded through under the water while the pipeline set four feet off the ground. On the wooden floor of the glass in hand, laugh and cuss

[28:46]

with somebody else's wife. Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos, Filipinos, workers, all these on the edges of brawl in the bars of the world. Hearing those singing new songs in Aberdeen, Naples, Galveston, Darwin, Fairbanks, Wyatt, Brown, drinking it down, the pain of the work of wrecking the world. I love applause, but it didn't fit in. Removing the plate of the pump on the hydraulic system of the backhoe. This one is dedicated to Bert Heibart, a now-deprived wizard with heavy equipment. Through mud, fouled knots, lack of grind,

[29:47]

it opens a gloom of spotless steel. Machines get perfect, swirl of intake and output, relentless clarity at the heart of work. Applause. Breasts. That which makes milk can't help but concentrate out of the food of the world, right up to the point where they suck in poison, too. But the breast is a filter. The poison stays there and flesh it. Heavy metals and traces. Deadly molecules hooked up in the strings that man dreamed of, never found

[30:49]

in the world to the day. In your wisdom, petrochemical complex a snake. So we celebrate breasts. We all love to eat them. They are like philosophers who hold back the bitter in mind to let the more tasty windows slip through for the little ones who can't take the poison so well. The word that comes later, after child raising, for the real self to be, is to bring burning poison away. Flat breasts, tired bodies that will snap like old leather, tough enough for a few more good days, and the glaring eyes

[31:49]

of old mother, old father, are gay. Old rotten tree trunk. At this point it is written for a dead chest of red fur that can be found in a 7,000 foot elevation on a slope in the Sierra. The whiting brain of twisting outer style shell studying broken limbs of animals peeled off auto-bear's skin. A big rock, locked in tepid clasp, now lifted to the air. Amber beads of ancient sap and pottery cracks in red dry rock far away from the pitchy purple corn. Beautiful body

[32:52]

block, up and across the mist of a wily man's near neck. On a slope of rock-filled air, a breeze without cease, if, as the Buddhists teach us, meditation on decay and rock cures lust, I was. A delight in thought of hummus beetle army. Stains that suck the life still from your old insides under crystal sky. And the woodpecker flash from tree to tree in a row of rare hairs on a green orange edge right there. Looking out at blue lakes, dripping through snow patch, soaking in glacial rubble, crumbling rocky cliffs and scree, corruption decaying, the sticking turnover, death into more of the life that seemed a

[33:53]

paradise, and the long slow feeling that follows the woodpecker's cry. I'm going to take a little detail here. I was planning to read these few points at the very beginning, and I forgot to. Five points, five short points from Texas by a woman named Delmarie Rogers, called The Physical Plant. I met Delmarie six or seven years ago in Boston. She works for the University of Texas in the maintenance department, and told me she wanted to write some poems for The Physical Plant. Finally she did, and sent them to me this month. So these are points for The Physical Plant by Delmarie Rogers. One, truck. The helper at the air conditioning

[34:55]

and heating contractor gets in his truck, backed up so fast, straight across the parking lot, that even the toughest sparrow in the industrial district has to have mighty quick reflexes to get out of the way. Burn. When two guys got a bad burn in an electrical accident, wags in the shop called them Sparky and Flash. Their way of expressing how glad we are to still have them among us. We're happy to have you among us. The silence. A steel beam fell from the loft to the concrete floor, roared like thunder. We all pricked our ears.

[35:55]

Nobody heard. In the dead silence, a voice said, Somebody dropped the set out of their room. Bobby. Bobby always asks me if I've done anything wild or exciting on the weekend. Thank God he was handsome. Him asking me that was probably the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. The last one is called Triangle. Back at the end of the most gentle, wettest man who ever walked in the king's shop

[36:57]

is the butt-naked, crass, sensuous woman on the pool couch. All of us, male and female, draw near this shrine to watch her. I'm going to finish up now with a few points on this cycle from my own image. The king and the red. Two cats and several friends

[37:59]

of Jimmy's, who are all fanatic river runners, great lovers of the rivers, invited me to shoot the Stanislaus a couple of years ago in April to get one more good look at it before the new Moana's Dam water really began to bury the water part of the canyon. I just read in the paper that the canyon right next to this river really felt like the new Moana's Dam. The canyon is not gone now. A couple of references in this poem. One is Soucher. Soucher, or Sue, is the same person as Sue in the book. Who wrote a marvelous poem on river running called The Hundred Days Backwards. You can find it in Burton Marsden's one-volume Columbia University Press book of translations of Soucher. Dogen, also an engineer, wrote a piece which is virtually a prose

[39:01]

poem in the 12th century called The Mountains and Rivers Sutra, which I never wrote. I look up at the cliffs, but we are swept on by down there. The rafts wobble and slide over voids of water. Boulders shimmer under the arching stream, rock walls straight up on both sides. A hawk cuts across that narrow sky hit by sunlight. We paddle forward, backstroke, turn, spinning through eddies and waves, stair steps of churning white water, and above the water hear the song of the Kenyan men. A smooth stretch, lifting, pressing. Hear it again. Downward song, dee-dee-dee, [...]

[40:04]

descending through ancient beds. A single female parrot flies down stream. Shooting a hundred pacemakers, so sure, so far, for a moment, it all stands still. He said, I stare at the water, it moves with unspeakable stillness. Dogen, brightening at midnight, mountains afloat. Water is the palace of the dragon, it does not flow away. We beach up at the Chinese camp, between piles of stones stacked there by black-haired miners a century ago. Cook in the dark, sleep all night long by the stream. These songs that are here and gone, here and gone, to purify our ears.

[41:07]

Finish with this. Ah, to be alive on a mid-September morning, forming a stream, barefoot, pants rolled up, holding roots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern rockies, the rustling, shimmering, icy creek water. Stones turn underfoot, the swamp hard as coals, cold nose-picking, singing inside, creaking music, heart music, smell of sun on the ground. I pledge allegiance to you. I pledge allegiance to Turtle Island, North America, and to the beings whom therein dwell, one ecosystem, in diversity, under the sun, with joyful interpenetration for all.

[42:13]

Thank you. It was wonderful to hear this. Joyfulness and varied readings. Since many of you don't know Thich Nhat Hanh, am I speaking okay? Since most of you don't know Thich Nhat Hanh, I'd like to say that I met him in November of last year. And I felt, at last, here is a true Buddhist teacher. And I was also grateful to meet Vietnamese Buddhism and find it's also our own. We were talking in New York.

[43:27]

He said that he trained several generations of Buddhist monks in Vietnam. And I guess he saw how much help we needed. And so he agreed to come out and work with the students at the center. And we just spent 10 days in Paso Haro. He produced a Tathagatagarbha training series on mindfulness, how you can pick up a telephone by the way, and do something. And he's a person who makes it clear that if you want to produce peace, you have to be at peace. Everyone here is involved inside and outside. Just inside. Inside. Inside. Inside.

[44:32]

Please enjoy our people. Next, I just left from the other side. Thank you. Up, Martin. Beckoning. This morning's dawn and I am here. A cup of steaming tea.

[45:33]

A green loam. Your sudden image. From loud to good. Your hands on the wind. Beckoning. The shining of a tree's new bud. Flowers, leaves, and pebbles all recite the Sutra of the Rose. Thank you. This is a poem about three of us. A ten-year-old girl, a pirate, and myself. The ten-year-old girl was on the boat.

[46:38]

She is one of these boat people. And she was raped by a sea pirate. And after being raped, she threw herself into the water. And she was drowned. And then there is me, who is not very clear as on what side I have to be. There is the side of the ten-year-old girl who just committed suicide. And there is the side of the pirate. I would like very much to take the side of the girl, but I think that's too easy. If only I can look on the pirate as my enemy, that would be easy, but I could not.

[47:49]

Because I thought that if I were born in his own village, and if I was getting the kind of education and technical life that he has been getting, then now I am the pirate. So I cannot be sure that I am out of the pirate, and I can feel that I am not responsible for his tragedy. So this poem is about three of us. Please call me by my true name. Do not say that I will depart tomorrow, because even today I am still alive. Look deeply, I will rise in every second to be a bud on a spring branch,

[48:53]

to be a tiny bird with wings still fragile and learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arise in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is reverberating, and that of all that are alive. I am the main flower that amorphoses on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the nectar. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am the grass snake who, approaching in silence, feels itself on a rock.

[50:01]

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merging some deadly weapon to Uganda. I am the seventy-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who travels herself to the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I am the pirate, my heart not yet cut capable of seeing and hearing. I am a member of the boat world with plenty of power in my hand, and I am the man who has to bathe in the depth of love to my people, dying slowly in a false river. My joy is like spring, a balm that makes flowers bloom in whole waters of life,

[51:07]

and my pain is like a river of tears, so pure it fills up all four oceans. So please call me by my true name, so that I can hear all my cries and laughs at once, so that I can see that my joy and my pain are one. Please call me by my true name, so I can be with you, and so the door of my heart can be like open, the door of compassion. This is a poem on the sun, because in our community we have a practice of meditation on the sun. One day I proposed to members of our community to meditate on the sun as our second home.

[52:23]

We usually think that our heart is very fragile, and it is not functioning in that way, so we cherish very much our heart. But as far as the sun is concerned, there is a huge loss of time. We should look upon it as our second heart, because it has an attack, and if it goes out, then it also dies right away. So this is the poem. I am full of poetry and thoughts of sunshine. Sunshine rides on space and poetry on sunshine. Poetry gives birth to sunshine, and sunshine to poetry.

[53:30]

Sun is treasured in the heart of a different life. Poetry is made of steam rising from a bowl of soup when winter arrives. The wind is lurking outside, swirling. Poetry is back to haunt the old hills and valleys, yet the poor patched cup remains on the river shore awaiting. Spring carries poetry in its drizzle. The fire sparkles poetry from its orange flame. Sunshine stores in the heart of the fragrant wood, warm smoke giving poetry back to the tale of an unofficial history book. Sunshine, though absent from space, stills the land's rose-colored storm. Sunshine reaching out has the color of smoke,

[54:36]

and poetry, in its stillness, the color of misty air. Spring rain holds poetry in its drops, which bend down to kiss the soil so that the seeds might sprout. Sunshine has got the green color, and poetry the pink one. Bees deliver warmth to the flowers from the sunshine they carry on their wings. On sunshine footsteps to the forest, poetry brings the next time, the joy. With the excitement of celebration, butterflies and bees crowd the earth. Sunshine wakes up the land, and poetry the sun. Drops of sweat fall on the hard ground when flying along the coast. The whole candle on the shoulder, poetry flows with the breath.

[55:41]

Sunshine waves the way down the river, and the silhouettes remain after midnight. Poetry is living for a holiday when the pink light is blanketing itself with brown. The green sun found in a basket full of fresh vegetables. The tasty and well-cooked sun smells delicious from a good bowl of rice. Poetry looks to the child's eyes. Poetry feels the weather hitting things. Poetry stands with its attentive look for the tree. The hands that work the tool of the tree. A rich flame somewhere far away. The smiling sun brightens up the sun's colors.

[56:42]

The rising full sun hides itself in a cobalt beach. Poetry follows its meditation steps with the lines of the page. This quickly within closed boxes. Poetry nurtures love. The last sentence is about what we have been doing in the apartment where we live now. Young people make food packages to send to the smiling children in the third floor. And the work is done in a meditative mood. That is why poetry nurtures love. This is a poem concerning a caterpillar.

[57:45]

One day I asked a student of mine to look at his hand and tell me how long he thinks that his hand has been around. First he said that 32 and then he thought that it's much longer than that. And he was fearful of seeing his father and his mother in his eyes. And he could see more than that. So he arrived at the conclusion that his hand has never been born. And his hand has never died. Because he is dead. There is one word in the poem that I should explain to you. Udumbara is a big cloud that blooms only once every 3000 years.

[58:58]

Big rock, big gas, big mist, big mind. Big dimensions traveling among galaxies with the speed of light. You have come here, my beloved one. Your blue eyes shine so beautiful, so deep. You have taken the path raised for you by all the non-living and the never-ending. You say that on your way here you have gone through millions of births and deaths. For innumerable times you have been transformed into fine forms in outer space. And you have used your body to measure the age of the mountains and of the river. You have manifested yourself as trees, as grass, as butterflies, as single-celled leaves and as Chrysanthemum.

[60:11]

But the eyes with which you look at me this morning tell me that you have never died. Your smile invites me into a game called living in the unknown, the game of time. For being cutthroat, you are solemnly using your body to measure the age of the rose branch that grew last summer. Everyone says that you, my beloved one, were just born this spring. Tell me, how long have you been around? Why wait until this moment to reveal yourself to me, sharing with you that smile which is so silent and so deep? Cut a few lines, suns, moons and stars blow out each time, etc. Who knows that the infinitely large must be found in your tiny body?

[61:19]

Upon each point on your body, thousands of Buddha's fields have been established. And with each stretch of your body, you measure time from the non-beginning to the never-ending. The great medicine for all is still there, on the mountain peak, concentrating in the air of spring. Tell me, Saint Gautama, how strange. Who said that Unambara flower blooms only once every 3000 years? That sound of the rising tide, you cannot have hearing if you have an active ear. I have been waiting for this moment for so many years. This is a friend I owe to you all.

[62:22]

Life has left the footprints on my forehead. But I have become a child again. The smile seems to leave the flowers in the back. It moves away and wrinkles. As the rain wipes away the blurring on the image. Again, the cycle of birth and death begins. I walk on palms, but firmly cast among flowers. I keep my head high. Rhymes bloom among the sounds of palms and water. The tears I shed yesterday have become rain. I feel calm, hearing the sound of an ash tree. Childhood or my birth plan is calling me. And the rain melts my skin. I am still here, alive.

[63:25]

With the quiet smile, the sweet group brought forth on the previous afternoon. Carrying the dead body under our feet, I go out towards the rice field in the darkness. Earth will keep you tightly in her arms, dear one. So that tomorrow you will be reincarnated in flowers. Those flowers smiling quietly this morning, few. This moment, you will know more, dear one. You have grown true to me. This morning, yes, this morning, I kneel down on a green grass where I notice the patterns of flowers which speak to me inside. The message of love and sacrifice has indeed come. This is a funny poem.

[64:40]

It's not written for listening. But I have to read it anyway. There is one expression here that may not be familiar to you. Three times eight. The graph of eight in French. For the many French workers, they can only get a job if they accept the three times eight. The three times eight practice. During three weeks, they have to work from five o'clock in the morning to one in the afternoon. And after that, three weeks, from one in the afternoon to nine in the evening. And then, three weeks, beginning with nine o'clock until eight o'clock in the morning.

[65:47]

So, that is the graph of it. The day I take drink of my heart. My brother, the one with brown skin, is hungry. Hell is right there. I was so neglectful and he took the opportunity to take away my part of the steak. My brother, the one with yellow skin, is destitute. His little boy hated in school this morning because before leaving home, he had not had his small sweet potato. I was busy struggling to prevent my landlord from raising my rent. He equipped the firm with new machines and I lost my job. My brother, the one with black skin, cannot feed his children, but his wife continues to bring him new eggs.

[66:52]

Oh brother, how could you? He said, what can I do? No milk, no rice, no potato. So, the lady brought her baby and left it on the roadside, hoping someone with a soft heart will take it home. I am so busy struggling for better wages. I am so busy in daily life fighting the high cost of life. How could I find time to come here? My brother, the one with white skin, has been practicing three times. He does not eat and sleep like the rest of his family. Hell is right there. He becomes nervous, beating his wife, terrorizing his children. Hell is right there. Our struggle is right here. Unfortunately, how could we give a helping hand

[67:53]

to my brother who is too far away? You said, for the interest of the nation, we cannot stop development. Knowing I am without a job, you offer me one in your company, making bombs and guns to sell to faraway countries. My children are hungry, my wife cries, and my organs bleed. Our brothers there need food. My son will be born without a job and guns so they kill each other. Because I was not mindful, you took away my state. Because I was neglectful, you took away the color of the TV set and also the Mustang and also the exotic harmonica on the beach. Tell me it is not so difficult

[68:53]

to have a car or TV but you have to sign the paper to work for you. I am already so bound by so many things and I do not want to follow you into another maze. You say I am crazy but I am a snail that cannot even carry its own shell and yet is thinking of chondering the Himalayas and the mountains. You have reduced a handful of grain that could have been used to help my brother to produce steak. The heap of steak is now as high as a mountain. The mountain is so high that it hides the sun and I cannot see the face of my beloved one. A handful of grain that should have been used

[69:55]

to save a starving child in Uganda has been used to produce a bottle of liquor. The liquor is being poured on a heap of steak. The blood is being poured on our whole planet. I cannot solve my problem here if I keep thinking of my love. The day I can get a drink of my heart I assure you I will have my victory. François Perrault of the Institute of Mathematics and Economics in Paris said that if only the western countries produced liquor made by 50% and the consumption of liquor by 50% that would be enough to change the destiny of the world. This is a poem

[71:08]

about going and coming and going and it started with a few lines by a Chinese poet. He came back to his village and found that the sugar did not recollect where had he come from an expectable homeland they said. When I left my home I was a child an old man now a scientist. The name of the village but my hair and beard are all white. The village children see me but do not recognize me. They look at each other they giggle and they ask where have you come from respectable old man. Where have you come from respectable old man

[72:08]

I have come from the place you have come from yet you do not know that there is a link between us. I spoke to my snow white children this morning the young leaves on the fields are so new and green there is no link between themselves and the sea. They took root so many years ago on this very land. The name of the village has not changed but after so many years I can only imagine all visitors arriving from some unknown world in this autumn month to come or to go to depart or to return who among us is not a wanderer. Where have you come from respectable old man

[73:10]

you do not see it and how could you see it even if I sing to you the old song I learned still I would be a stranger in your eyes. When I tell you this is my village your eyes dance and you laugh and I laugh too when you say you know that I am just telling you this story. The bamboo trees, the river bank, the village hall yes, but they have none. The name of the village remains the same none. The new bamboo shoot the new head, the new narrow way the new charm what is the purpose of my returning here I do not know. The heart can be made to the last the wanderer has no real point of departure

[74:11]

and no point of arrival this explorer of the free world. As if to a former incarnation sweet potatoes and honey fruits the hay, the cottage I come back to my village the dogs I work and walk with are strangers the dogs are kind the little child the red tile the narrow way they look at each other the two shores suddenly become one and the path of return continues the journey. The great government

[75:13]

closed the door to everyone every morning, evening, evening, the sun rises the sun rises a full moon full of green leaves the virtuous man the two leaves of the pinewood tree fall shut the shining arrow leaves the bow string speeds upward creating the sky explodes the sun the blossoms of the orange trees fall until the courtyard is cut up flickering reflection of infinity I really wonder

[76:16]

deep inside of me there was a moon the moon closed the door came back to the village to talk to itself to let go the doors the doors opened the windows opened the windows to let out to let out and the light Marjorie's lady, sitting dressed on her pillow. At nightfall, grassy flowers were fully asleep. The illusion she was aware of. The wind lifts up her hands, jaded candles shimmer in the silver-lighted river of the sky. The hillside's open doorway fades,

[77:23]

a fully-spark that lights the sapphire floors in fire. Ten thousand lives are spinning, circling, dreams evoking. The moment of this night reveals this world's reality. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

[77:54]

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