Four teenagers drove into an abandoned garage
in New Jersey, a turnpike town so called,
one boy in the front seat, one boy and two girls
in the back.  They had just bought
three dollars worth of gas and they drove into
the garage, closed the door, let the car run until
five hours later they were found dead
with a note on brown paper sack
and an unused pack of razor blades
(they'd all cut their wrists
before, and that didn't work)

.

     "Likeness and love hurry upward like flames . . ."

.

He'll carry you, child
with dark, heavy eyebrows
as you look back over his shoulder, six years old
too big to be carried

but you're Daddy's little girl   
it's a crowd on Canal Street in New Orleans
and Daddy's a fine, big man

.

My hand, the pores so prominent
on the back of my hand.
                        I do not know
the back of my hand.
It is strange to me; it's grown old.

I know the wall better.
                         The soundless room
without movement
                 until I saw my hand move.
It seemed far away,
unfelt, an object
                  and my observance
also unfelt,
             another object.

.

A pause taking shape within space
moments that lengthen
                      perhaps widening
the conscious
               but also changes in time
as spirals move through interval
my body expresses me
just as my hand writes
in the particular, unavoidable way it does
my own dwelling in the spaces I occupy
time that I measure
                    I am free to look into
the whole as it happens
"from where I sit"
                    I can feel my body
or waft in thought
                   riding there
onward in a certain way

.

Children romp on a weedy hill
behind a monolith
of governmental buildings, functional,
prisonlike, one boy steps with
high knees down the hill,
leaping and flinging wide
his arms as if in freedom

.

Boys play with abandon in a ruined building,
running through holes in destroyed walls.
One laughs so hard his sides ache.
None of them seem to notice the rubble
strewn on the floors,
they run without looking down.

.

Two women in separate windows
separate boxes in a brick building
held apart by a plaster wall, they
stare down into the street.

One, fat and aged, her face
a blur of glasses and eroded features
has tied a huge American flag

to a cord that runs to the top
of her high window.

The other puts on her coat to go out.

.

     "Thank you for writing.  I had a feeling 
something was horribly wrong.  It sounds to me 
like she needs medical treatment immediately 
and that she needs to be where people can look 
after her.  It is not an inspiring place, but 
it is safe, if that is how she needs to feel 
and there is a good man there named Dr Gregory.  
It is not cheap; does she have any kind of insurance?
It sounds like something should be done fast.  Would 
it be possible to get a medical person to her and 
give here a tranquilizer that would allow her to 
get on a plane?  It is abhorrent to think of her 
vegetating in misery.  I too feel useless out here.  
My sister recently had a breakdown. She was seeing 
a psychiatrist who got a social worker to stay with 
her and get her on a plane.  But she realized she 
was in difficulty."

.

    One night, as Kukai walked along the mountain path,
he felt a sudden lightning circulate within him and
there was a roar of thunder at the top of his head.  The
mountain, the stream, the world, and his very self
vanished.  The experience lasted for about the time it
would take five inches of incense to burn.  Thereafter,
he felt like a different man, purified by his own light.
The old man told him that this lightning must be put
aside.

.

Even if you see Buddhas, throw away such visions.