Dharma Talk I
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
Elizabeth Bishop
The Fish
snow maybe
this late in the season
fall on the exposed shoulders
of the stone Buddha--
see him there
beneath the tree
(she let go, recently
a limb, amputated
by the cold
it seems, and age,
taking the plastic picket
fence points all the way
to the ground.)
Isn’t it though,
snow this late, what
cools the crocus
lips as they open
their throat-hold
on spring and swallow
like a dehydrated
child come in
from an all day
play, all day trenches,
hands
sometimes bare
sometimes fists
inside the sog
of homemade
mittens, whose
cuffs, even stretched
ride up the wrists
toward the palm that,
if lifted up
to the sun,
pulse a deeper
blue, a blue
Cezanne would
give birth to on his palate
mixing, mixing, mixing
ignoring the stones
the other children
throw, sometimes
hitting , sometimes,
like late spring
snow, missing
that open throated
crocus, that silent
beak-wide crow,
just arrived on the broken
fence post, his thrown down
throne, the stone
Buddha, knees
bent like the bird's tucked in
wings, sitting, just
sitting the winter through,
and now how the spring
all falls around him
while he smiles
a stone cutter’s smile
while we see
beneath it all,
some-
things in us
hardening,
some things in us
going soft, pushing up
getting free all this time
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