I listened as my old friend began reciting aloud the Sutra of the Old Wave—
She’d lived a monk’s life at Tassajara & then Rome & Santa Fe & the joy she stitched around her
In the sounds of the Old Wave reminded me the way an elegant silence would cocoon her body
Easily as rain collects invisibly into a necklace of pools along a path after a spring storm
One night in Rome I photographed her standing in Piazza Santa Maria still & poised as the nearby Virgin
& only weeks later I gave her the print asking what she was thinking that moment & she
Looked entirely amused & I wasn’t at all surprised she’d answered—why just nothing
Her laughter was origami unfolding or the steady pulse of Solovyov’s mystic white lily
As her body was gathered up into the Sutra of the Old Wave