Buddha
I used to sit under trees and meditate
on the diamond bright silence of darkness
and the bright look of diamonds in space
and space that was stiff with lights
and diamonds shot through, and silence
And when a dog barked I took it for soundwaves
and cars passing too, and once I heard
a jet plane which I thought was a mosquito
in my heart, and once I saw salmon walls
of pink and roses, moving and ululating
with the drapish
Once I forgave dogs, and pitied men, sat
in the rain countin Juju beads, raindrops
are ecstacy, ecstacy is raindrops—birds
sleep when the trees are giving out light
in the night, when rabbits sleep too, and dogs
I had a path that I followed through piney woods
and a phosphorescent white hound-dog named Bob
who led me the way when the clouds covered
the stars, and then communicated to me
the sleepings of a loving dog enamoured
of God.
On Saturday mornings I was there, in the sun,
contemplating the blue-bright air, as eyes
of Lone Ranger penetrated the dust
of my canyon thoughts, and Indians
and children, and movie shows
Or Saturday morning in China when all is so fair
crystal imaginings of pristine lakes, talk
with rocks, walks with Chi-pack across
Mongolias and silent temple rocks in valleys
of boulder and tarn-washed clay,—shh—
sit and otay
and if men were dyin or sleepin in rooftops
beyond, or frogs croaked once or thrice
to indicate supreme mystical majesty, what’s
the diff? and I saw blue sky no different
from dead cat—and love and marriage
No different than mud—that’s blood—
and lighted clay too—illuminated intelligence
faces of angels everywhere, with Dostoyevsky’s
unease praying in their X-brow faces,
twisted and great,
And many a time the Buddha played a leaf
on me at midnight thinkin-time, to
remind me “This Thinking Has Stopped,’
which it had, because no thinking was there
but wasnt liquidly mysteriously brainly there
And finally I turned into a diamond stone
and sat rigid and golden, gold too—didn’t dare
breathe, to break up the diamond that cant
even cut into butter anyway, how brittle
the diamond, how quick returned thought—
impossible to exist
………… Buddha say:
………… ‘All’s possible’
by Jack Kerouac
from Poems All Sizes
City Light Books San Francisco, 1992
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