We live in a cage of light
An amazing cage
Animals Animals without end
—Ikkyū
He brushes the Heart Sutra onto seashells and tosses them into the pond. “Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form.” The waving, wielding, yielding, booming fluid that is puddle, companion of moon, compassion of moon;
Heartbreaking atmosphere swallows seashells in the perfect
Wisdom of the moment, of the moon, in the ancient pond beyond,
To the other shore …
Though it is frozen, melting, dripping, Animals Animals
Dripping from within … Pond without end …
Something is swimming across her, and then there’s the swooping,
The shimmying.
In every Japanese garden, there is a pond. Weeping willows
And black pines.
Water’s edge. Darting turtles, daring.
In every human being, there is a pond. Weeping and pining. Her
Edge. Her ledge.
Her daring.
Jorge Luis Borges recognized that his inner animal had nearly expired. While in his younger years, he was a monkey, now he had turned into a tired old moose. The first sign of the metamorphosis was his losing his black, then the reds; his last color was yellow. And one day, our hero awoke to realize he had become
His mother’s dream.
It was her eyes that kept him.
Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour was written while he was dying of stomach cancer. Stalked by death, he was a sheep cat. Little sleep cat. The lame one. The lamb.
Fading colors, farming colors
Kafka asked for his work to be exsanguinated upon his death. Defenestrated. The waning breath of his words to be bled out, tossed, singed, torched, not humiliated by bylaws and red tape.
Once the growl is gone. A soft resting place. Elephant
Intelligence. The grief.
She spots the cup of pond on the night table. The table has slipped into a dream, and she buries her nose into the lovely pond and, with her paw, sends ripples deep into her animal. A guttural noise in the forest, yonder, that’s buried in the body on the bed, in the bed of her body. The ground rolls over, and, as she leaps to safety, the pond follows her onto the floor,
So the dead can ride over rivers … into the sun,
Wearing their horse bone suits
Her death closet filled with ancient helmeted heads,
Water monsters
A body of standing water, a standing body. Water gardens are ponds as are solar gardens of thermal water. Vernal ponds spend some of the dry season not as ponds. Though even when waterless, they might be referred to as a basket of fluid,
They might be referred to as ponds.
The ones that are most deeply hidden are touched by sunlight or a
Person
Walking through them without being submerged. Ponds as
Ponds and ponds not as ponds but as puddles reached into
And turned into ponds
By light and life
Ponds turned inside out.
Once ponds sculpted the moon, the moon of his eyes filled
With jellified orbs—He saw
Amoebas and seahorses and starfish and multiverses
Singing above and beyond this shore …
Animals Animals without end …