A
REDWOOD
FALLS
March 24, 1919 ~ February 22, 2021
daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
P O E T S W H O S L E E P
Many remember, as I do, reading James Ridgeway first in
I.F. Stone's terrific weekly journal, and later in the
Village Voice. I couldn't have lived and worked
any further from any city, but every week I had the
Village Voice and other important above ground
and underground publications delivered through
the US Mail (thank you) from our major
cities in America — Ramparts Magazine yet another,
Liberation, WIN, The Realist, Old Mole, Berkeley Barb,
the East Village Other, the list is mighty. I was a kid with
little money and these papers didn't cost all that much.
The day of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1968,
riots in the street, I kept current from small town America by walking
down my neighorhood street and into another street to the town
newstand and buying the New York Times (as I did each day).
All of 9 cents.
The other day, the New York Times told me
James Ridgeway had passed away.
Go look and find what treasury he left us.
[ BA ]
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Longhouse
PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303
P O E T S W H O S L E E P
Two Poems After Li Po
I — Conversation
If you ask me why
I live here on
this lonely hillside
I will smile and say:
The autumn leaves
drift on the moving
water, and
the world of men
is far away.
II — Quiet Night
Moonlight spills
across the bed,
outside the frost
is deepening.
I lie awake and
watch the changing
shadows, thinking
of the lonely earth.
A Letter
after Li Chang-yin
I will not ask you
what we know too well,
the heart has
its own intelligence.
I lower the flame in the lamp
by the snowbound window
and let the moonlight in.
Two thousand miles away
you have said goodbye,
and there is no returning.
After Chu Yuan
With you
I will go down
to the river
and bathe in a quiet pool.
I will dry your hair
in the sun
singing a little,
facing the quiet wind.
With you
I will climb the slope
of evening,
warmed and content,
thinking of home.
________________
John Haines
Of Your Passage, O Summer
Limberlost Press, 2004
from Livingston Suite
Maybe I'm wrong. After years of practice
I learned to see as a bird but I refuse
to do it now, not wanting to find the body.
I traveled east to our cabin in Michigan
where I learned that my Zen master, Kobun
Chino Sensei, drowned in a cold lake trying to save
his three-year-old daughter who also drowned.
I make nothing of this but my mind suddenly
rises far upward and I see Kobun in his black
robes struggling in the water and he becomes
a drowning raven who then frees himself for flight,
his daughter on the lake's bottom rising to join him.
What could the vision mean but a gift? I said
maybe I'm wrong. The Resurrection is fatally correct.
__________________
Jim Harrison
Livingston Suite
Limberlost Press, 2005