Nine Gates

The first gate's touch. You touch the world and it touches you--you reach out and find you're cell. A second gate will open before your eyes: a well-timbered womb mumbles back as you blindly beat your drum.

An ear, a hum

holds you

as you suckle life.

Now grown, you see a third gate reflect a fourth:
You Imagine Loves and Hates and I's.
That Four equals Five.

The sixth gate is death and you know its borders well
around words, neither yours nor mine, we pile like snow
onto water. You will say the water's clear and snow melts.

Look closer.

Look beyond the shell

game of life

and feel ohms

like electricity

branching into

the seventh gate: Awe

is not the branch resting on river of life
but a hook inside a needle that weaves
itself, a tapestry: memories, selves
the gross net of life cast
like a magic carpet ride
glistening like snowflakes
who melt to sheen on the back
of a branch floating down deltas
Mississippi blues kissing
staring down river's abyss

with the pool of the moon

If brilliance were just a second

you'd drift like foam

whipped in a jiff

and going home....

But given time it curls
like a great Fin
up skating from seas
the world's never known

--even idea, let go

You must ; The eighth gate will not hear your bald cry from the world, it will not raise you from the sea. You cannot drown in it, but drift down to the bottom, like a shark without his Fin that the sailors make into soup.

You float down

up from bottom

as primal doubt

to the knowing universe

kindness--cruelly

set things like these rhythmic gates

flinging mud up like a ranging horse

or a whistling grave -- you decide

If you still believe in gates, the ninth gate is beyond gods' sutra
and if real, beyond cold calls of fact, and if false
I'm positive it's beyond the nurturing call of nature
who feeds us best when we are cruel, beyond bliss
living, if real, must (insert self here) then leave
it is cruel conditioning of seasons
that cricket upon returns.

(self-portrait)