Inspiration

It’s dharma poetry week at the wild fox blog. Here’s one from Jane Hirschfield

(who has quite a wonderful blog, “My Inner Edge,” that I’ve been enjoying tonight):

Think of those Chinese monks’ tales:

years of struggling

in the zendo, then the clink,

while sweeping up, of stone on stone . . .

It’s Emily’s wisdom: Truth in Circuit lies.

Or see Grant’s Common Birds and How To Know Them

(New York: Scribner’s, 1901)

“The approach must be by detour,

advantage taken of rock, tree, mound, and brush,

but if without success this way, use artifice,

throw off all stealth’s appearance, watchfulness,

look guileless, a loiterer, purposeless,

stroll on (not too directly toward the bird),

avoiding any gaze too steadfast;

or failing still in this, give voice to sundry whistles,

chirp: your quarry may stay on to answer.”

More briefly, try; by stymied, give it up, do something else.

Leave the untrappable thought, go walking,

ideas buzz the air like flies; return to work,

a fox trots by – not Hughes’s sharp-stinking thought fox

but quite real, outside the window,

with cream-dipped tail and read-fire legs doused watery brown;

emerges from the wood’s dark margin, stopping all thinking,

and briefly squats (not fox, but vixen), then moves along

and out of sight. “Enlightenment,” wrote one master,

“is an accident, though certain efforts make you accident-prone.”

The rest slants fox-like, in and out of stones.