metonymy4u

           because

if i were another of your tears the ocean didn’t want
i’d give something unexpected to the world
             instead of a child,

my daughter thought the story funny when six
years old i told her while swinging in the chair
we strung for her the year of her birth.

she thought we’d made the whole thing up.

how we’d conceived the idea of her
while holidaying in stockholm, tried
all the way from hessen to the dolomites
to give desire expression. finding none

i planted a stone for your memory.
tilled the garden for other works,

i might leave in your stead.

             emptiness

this is water when you wanted it,
adding nothing to the sum.

sure it’s the oath that we all took
to live aware for a while,

and let loose the bounds of thought—
language jail settlement storm.

the question is whether accumulation
were better left off,

while we go back
to buddha’s simple emptiness. that is

more rich than all possibility,
fertility and joy—

snow cascades.
what can one add to wholeness?

to completion or
eternity?

if you accept one more for yourself,
you lose yourself as sure as a fish

loses the race to hook line and grab,
as sure

as open-ness dies in the field
of knowing: it is the

only landing that ever launched a ship
the only bow that never went astray

the only eyes that ever saw,
tender hearts above the fray. with

computation and mis-engeneration
shall i enter the wisdom of speech,

learn
and foster a life?

return anything at all to the universe?
strike a journey

with only
the compassion in my heart?

let it go and go.
be in gone.

live in went.
sigh, in love.