Contemplating Chuang Tzu

A short meditation

Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash

A commotion in the trees
on this grey morning,
that would in most climates be considered
gloomy and crisp,
but around here we can suffice
to call it temperate,
even pleasant.

Birds with their salutations,
protestations and grim reckonings,
and mocking, as well,
that the luminous blank underside
of the Great Bird — dispatched once again
from a Taoist verse —
seems empty and ludicrous
from their perches at the higher reaches
of the crepe myrtles in my garden.

You remind yourself each time
that the little birds cannot know,
in their petty flight lanes,
what the sky has remembered,
in the totality of a wingspan —
beak to tail, feather by feather —
and you could tell it to them,
but they don’t care.

— New Orleans, 24 February 2021

4 Cups of Coffee

Mississipp