Introduction

No poem can last for long unless it speaks, even if obliquely, to some essential human concern. Tu Fu’s poem about the pathos of ruins at Jade Flower Palace, which opens this anthology, has lasted more than thirteen centuries, reminding us that impermanence is one of poetry’s oldest themes, perhaps the oldest. Of the prince who ruled there long ago, Tu Fu writes:

His dancing girls are yellow dust.
Their painted cheeks have crumbled
Away. His gold chariots
and courtiers are gone. Only
A stone horse is left of his
Glory.

Awareness of the fleeting nature of things may well have sparked the first poetic utterance. Lewis Mumford in The History of the City suggests that the earliest human settlements arose when our distant hunter-gatherer ancestors refused to leave their dead behind. It’s not hard to imagine that such a decision may also have inspired elegiac honoring of the dead in the form of heightened speech or songlike lament, a kind of protopoetry.

Ki no Tsurayuki in his preface to Kokin Wakashū, the first imperially sponsored anthology of waka poetry, published in 905, observed:

When these poets saw the scattered spring blossoms, when they heard leaves falling in the autumn evening, when they saw reflected in their mirrors the snow and the waves of each passing year, when they were stunned into an awareness of the brevity of life by the dew on the grass or foam on the water . . . they were inspired to write poems.

“Death is the mother of beauty,” as Wallace Stevens would put it a thousand years later. There are other sources of inspiration, of course, but none more ancient or enduring than the pang that accompanies our experience of loss — and our uniquely human foreknowledge of loss.

Perhaps there is some comfort in knowing that impermanence defies its own law, is exempt from its own implacable strictures, is itself unchanging. Ikkyū states the paradox succinctly: “Only impermanence lasts.” The truth of impermanence, as Ryōkan says, is “a timeless truth.” It is not historically or culturally conditioned. It is not an idea but a process, observable anywhere at any time. ­Buddhist poets of ancient China and Japan may have been more finely attuned to that truth, through formal meditation practice, but Western poets are held within the law of impermanence no less firmly than their Asian counterparts, and awareness that all things pass away is inescapable for anyone who pays attention. Of course, our culture encourages us not to pay attention, to live as if we will live forever, as if we can plunder the earth unceasingly and without consequence. “What dreamwalkers men become,” Master Dōgen writes.

But living in alignment with the truth of impermanence opens a secret passageway to joy. Once we acknowledge how inherently unstable are the pleasures of “this floating world,” we are free to love all things without attachment. In The Trauma of Everyday Life, ­the Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein tells a story about asking the great Thai Forest monk Ajahn Chah to explain the ­Buddhist view. Chah held up a glass of water and said:

I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, “Of course.” But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.

It is only our quite natural but completely impossible expectation that conditions remain stable that makes sudden changes sting as much as they do. If we knew ourselves as living in a ghost world of unceasing change, we wouldn’t take ourselves and the things that happen to us quite so seriously. And we would see more clearly the preciousness of all life. Ellen Bass asks the provocative question, “What if you knew you’d be the last / to touch someone?”

What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

In the closing couplet of “Sonnet 73,” Shakespeare writes, “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” Yamamoto Tsunetomo, in the eighteenth-century samurai manual Hagakure, takes this idea of already broken or soon gone a step further, advising us to meditate on inevitable death every day: “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.”

Ajahn Chah and Tsunetomo make explicit the underlying premise of this anthology: that mindfulness of impermanence leads to joy. Living in the full knowledge that everything changes changes everything. It loosens our grasp and lets the world become what it truly is, a source of amazement and amusement. Han Shan says:

Once you realize this floating life is the perfect mirage of change,

it’s breathtaking — this wild joy at wandering boundless and free.

Freedom from craving and from fixed ideas of self lets us experience the world as a friendly place where, as in Ron Padgett’s “Inaction of Shoes,” the things we have to do thank us for doing them; or like Chuang-Tzu we know the joy of fishes, and all other beings, through our own joy; or with Ryōkan we “pretend to be a crane softly floating among the clouds.” When we let go of insisting that we are who we think we are and that the world should give us exactly and only what we want, all things shine forth. A pair of wool socks, knitted “with threads of dusk and sheep’s wool,” becomes perfectly miraculous in Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks”; a “pretty bubble in your soup at noon” banishes despair in William Stafford’s “It’s All Right”; and a caged bird singing in Marianne Moore’s “What Are Years?” lets us know that “satisfaction is a lowly / thing, how pure a thing is joy.”

Moore, though hardly a ­Buddhist, illuminates an essential aspect of the ­Buddha’s teachings: the difference between satisfying a desire and being released from desire, which is the difference between pleasure and peace. But we are conditioned to prefer pleasure, and to pursue it relentlessly, rather than to relax into joy.

The poems gathered here point to a different way of being in the world, and they do so in part by inverting conventional valuations. When Ryōkan, on his daily rounds of alms gathering, is hijacked by the village children, he happily puts aside his begging bowl and joins in their singsongs and kickball. And when his behavior arouses the scorn of more practical-­minded adults, Ryōkan asserts the deep power and absolute rightness of his joy:

I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.

Time is forgotten, the hours fly.

People passing by point at me and laugh:

“Why are you acting like such a fool?”

I nod my head and don’t answer.

I could say something, but why?

Do you want to know what’s in my heart?

From the beginning of time: just this! just this!

He does not bother replying to the people who ridicule him, but he does tell us where joy can be found: in the present moment. Indeed, Ryōkan’s “just this!” is Zen in a nutshell — just this moment, nothing added, pure consciousness stripped clean of all our self-centered stories and desires. The people who pass by are caught up in reaction, judgment, aversion, just as we all are. But Ryōkan does not judge them. The poem wonderfully dramatizes two ways of being — one that is childlike, spontaneous, open to sudden delight; the other rigid, reactive, always with better things to do than play with children or act like a fool.

Many of the poems in The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy have this subtly subversive quality. Issa gently undermines our human arrogance, placing himself on equal footing with all other beings, even insects:

      I’m going to roll over,
so please move,
      cricket.

Likewise, in “Ode to a Dead Carob Tree,” Pablo Neruda feels an immediate kinship with a fallen tree. He is on his way elsewhere, but the tree stops him, he lets it stop him, just as Ryōkan lets the children interrupt his alms-gathering and Issa pauses to give the cricket time to move. This act of stopping and attending mindfully to what the present moment presents is crucial:

I walked closer, and such
was its ruined strength,
so heroic the branches on the ground,
the crown radiating such
earthly majesty,
that when
I touched its trunk
I felt it throbbing,
and a surge
from the heart of the tree
made me close my eyes
and bow
my head.

In a sustained act of seeing, Neruda takes it all in, the fallen carob tree’s physical form, its roots “twisted / like tangled hair,” but also its kingly spirit — its heroic “branches on the ground,” its crown that radiates an “earthly majesty.” Seeing the tree in this way, being with it, leads to an act of empathic connection: he touches the tree. It is this physical contact that allows Neruda to experience “a surge / from the heart of the tree.” Notice how easily he says “the heart of the tree” and how easily we accept it, remembering for a moment what we have learned to forget — that all things are animated by the same life force that animates us, that all things are our brothers and sisters. And then Neruda closes his eyes and bows his head in an ancient gesture of vulnerability and reverence. It’s the same impulse that compels Whitman in “Reconciliation,” a poem written just after the end of the Civil War, to bend down and place a kiss on the face of his “enemy,” a Confederate soldier:

For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead;

I look where he lies, white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw near;

I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

In “No Title Required,” Wisława Szymborska catalogues a series of events typically considered significant — ­great battles, coronations, revolutions — ­alongside “ordinary” things — clouds passing, a river flowing by, grass stitched into the ground, and concludes:

So it happens that I am and look.

Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air

on wings that are its alone,

and a shadow skims through my hands

that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure

that what’s important

is more important than what’s not.

“So it happens that I am and look” might be the banner that hangs over this book. That act of mindful attending is essential to these poems. Old Shōju says, “Want ‘meaningless’ Zen? / Just look — at anything!” And Li Po shows that such looking dissolves the sense of separateness that plagues us and that even Einstein regarded as a kind of optical delusion.

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

This kind of seeing requires mindfulness — the intentional, nonjudging awareness of present-moment experience. In my own practice of neighborhood walking meditation I have found that looking intently, without judgment, at the most “insignificant” things — hubcaps, weathered fence posts, gate latches, bolts on fire hydrants, weeds, trash on the street, and so on — has the most profoundly awakening effect.

Just as impermanence calls us to be mindful, the practice of mindfulness heightens our awareness of impermanence. Following moment-to-moment experience in meditation reveals the fluid condition of all we perceive. The breath arises and falls away, sounds appear and disappear, bodily sensations vibrate in one spot and then another, thoughts leapfrog over each other and are gone — everything changing, coming into form, and slipping into formlessness again. In the external world it is no different. A stone may occupy reality longer than a fruit fly or a thought, but a difference in duration is not a difference in destination or destiny. In time, the thought, the fly, and the stone all arrive at the same place.

I felt the full force of impermanence in my own life in 2009, when my nephew George was suddenly hospitalized in Japan — he was half-Japanese — where he had been teaching English. Though he didn’t know it at the time, he suffered from an extremely rare liver disease, porphyria, which sent him into liver failure. In the space of two weeks, he went from living a healthy and active life — he had just gotten engaged and was flourishing as a teacher — to being on the brink of death. A liver transplant was the only possibility of saving him. Because I was the only viable donor in our family, I immediately flew to Kyoto to undergo a transplant that would give half my liver to George. The operation itself was successful, but George suffered a massive brain hemorrhage two days later and did not survive. He had just turned twenty-eight. His death was a devastation for all who knew him.

That he died in Kyoto was especially poignant, because George and I shared a love for the poet Saigyō, who had lived in Kyoto in the twelfth century. Like me, George read and wrote poetry (the only other person in my family to share that passion), and I had brought books by Neruda and Saigyō with me, imagining we would read poems together as we recovered from the surgery.

I had to remain in Kyoto for a month of ­follow-­up treatment, and though I was hobbled and grieving, I was able to visit some of the city’s ancient ­Buddhist temples and to walk some of the same cobblestone lanes where Saigyō, Dōgen, Bashō, Ikkyū, Buson, and so many other great poets had perhaps walked. The experience of losing my nephew in a city that has been for centuries a wellspring of poetry and Zen planted the seeds for what would become The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.

Ananda, the beloved disciple of the ­Buddha, once asked, “Master, are good spiritual friends fully half of the holy life?” “No, Ananda,” the ­Buddha replied. “Good spiritual friends are the whole of the holy life.” The poems gathered here feel like spiritual friends. They offer everything one might hope for in a such a friendship: wisdom, compassion, peacefulness, clear seeing, good humor, and the ability to both absorb and express the deepest human emotions of grief, loss, and joy. And if the poems feel like friends, the book itself may come to seem like a poetic sangha, a remarkable — and portable — spiritual community spanning more than two millennia and ranging from Anna Swir to A. R. Ammons, Chuang-Tzu to Czesław Miłosz, Saigyō to Gary Snyder, and many others ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, ­Buddhist and ­non-Buddhist.

One of my goals in gathering these poems has been to show how beautifully the Dharma manifests even in poems by poets who were not practicing ­Buddhists or knew little or nothing about ­Buddhism. The term dharma has a complex etymology, but in current usage it has two main meanings. It refers to teachings of the ­Buddha, and more broadly to the way things are, universal law, or the truth of things. It is in this latter sense that I’m using the term. These poems show us the truth of things.

The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy is not intended to be definitive. These are simply the poems I’ve found most powerful on these three themes. Many of them have been friends for years, poems that I have returned to again and again, taken comfort in and been astonished by — poems that have deepened my spiritual practice and helped me feel alive to the wonder and strangeness and sadness of the world. Many others are new discoveries that came to me as the anthology began to take shape, as I read more deeply in ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry, and as I began to see the Dharma suddenly lit up in many modern, ­non-Buddhist poems. The result is an extremely personal, nonscholarly (but I hope not eccentric) selection. I have also left out some poets one might expect to find in an anthology of this kind. Another of my goals has been to give Dharma teachers and students a broader spectrum of poetry to draw upon, beyond the widely popular poems of Rumi, Rilke, and Mary Oliver, and to introduce them to poems and poets they might not otherwise encounter.

Deciding how to organize the book often felt very much like arranging stanzas in a poem — and in a sense, each of the sections, and the book in its entirety, can be read as a single poem in many voices. I’ve grouped the poems by affinity and resonance rather than chronology or nationality, and every poem is connected to and colored by the poems that immediately surround it. The book invites random browsing, but reading the poems in sequence may be more rewarding.

My wish is that these poems may become spiritual companions on your path, deepen your practice, whatever it might be, and offer a taste of that eternally transient delight that is always disappearing and always present.