Zen poetry comes in many forms. There are the essential ancient wisdom poems by masters, like the Shodoka, the Shinjinmei, and the Hokyo Zanmai. There are koan poems and poems that comment on koans. There are poetry contests, like the one described in the Platform Sutra. There are satori poems and death poems. There are philosophical waka and lightbulb haiku. What they all have in common is that they give “a glimpse of it.”
Early on in my Zen practice I published a series of poems that became the Bodhidharma’s Eyelids, in the magazine Exquisite Corpse (Cybercorpse 10 and 11). These I called “zazen poems” or “practice poems,” beginner’s-mind poems that did not aspire to wisdom or pretend to some unearned or ill-understood “awakening,” but simply poems that attempted to describe my own interior experience during or in consequence of zazen, the core experience when it comes to Zen. This kind of poem is experiential, often confessional, usually modest, often surreal, depending on the unique “glimpse” of the practitioner.
Not all Zen poems are Zen poems. Several poems of Wallace Stevens, for example, such as “The Man on the Dump,” which I have written about elsewhere, are more effective in conveying key Zen moments than many more self-consciously Zen attempts which may lack the true zenki (dynamic perception of the entirety of our being-in-the-world). Each successful Zen poem possessing zenki marks a passing through one of the endless dharma gates. Put more simply, it offers a “glimpse.”
I am glad to share here such a beginner’s-mind poem, “A Glimpse of It,” by Lana Matthews Sain.
A GLIMPSE OF IT
When at last, after long loathing, you cradle
into your palms the scraps left
of yourself, the few slivers
you did not trade, and yield
your pride to the rind of Earth —
the rocks, the weeds, the algae-ed lake
behind the trees; when you submerge
your ear into its hum and stop filtering
its song or googling how it should sound,
it’s like those first few cranks of the pedals,
or maybe the first flight of a bird — the balance,
the momentum, the release. How the sun blinks
and bends the leaves toward me
in late afternoon and saves me a seat
on the front row of chipped and weather-eaten
concrete steps where lizards skitter
through the tiniest cracks, crack
through me, lizards become me.
At the altar of this crinkling flesh I bow
to the backs of my own hands. Relax.
I spend thirty minutes, still,
in the shallow sea of soft Tennessee
humidity, allow a nervous fly to buzz
above my eye. Go inside
and spend thirty minutes more, buzzing
with my old vacuum: thirty minutes scraping
the floor, thirty minutes collecting dust,
connecting the perfect attachment
and watching the corners exhale
debris. Thirty minutes and everything
is swept clean. Thirty minutes of nowhere
else I’d rather be.
This poem could well have been about zazen, but as Lana points out in the statement below, the origin of the poem actually predates her zazen practice:
“Interestingly enough, I wrote this long before I ever attended zazen or had any structure around a 30-minute sitting, but finding myself exhausted in my own self-loathing and grief, one day I just surrendered myself, literally, to the earth and lay down on it in an almost meditative state fully aware of the present for around a half hour or so, and that's what the ‘glimpse’ was, followed by a feeling of everything being just fine right where I was. Of course, practicing zazen regularly, the shift is more prevalent in each day/each circumstance.”
Lana Matthews Sain is a recent graduate of Sewanee’s School of Letters MFA program, and a regular practitioner at Stone Nest Dojo in Sewanee.
— Richard Collins
Lana Matthews Sain, University of the South, Sewanee