De-extinction PostcardI have spent so many nightsworrying about losing bones, teeth,hair, recovering a ring of tanzanite. As a childI wanted to be a dinosaur, roaming the floodplains – duck-billed, stout. Having survived, I would like to pull carcasses out of sinkholes and set them to work, Run, Spinosaurus, run! The problem with resurrections is there is still all this life – unexplained bulbs in the flower beds, cabbage heads, mud, mosquitoes foraging at dusk to smother all our celestial striving. I’d miss bananas. I’d miss melancholy. Lazarus limped home, but we know nothing of what happened in the soundless dark. Only the rise, only the returning. I’m trying to hold this late morning, these parched yellow flowers, even the two dogs at my feet, synching heartbeats, who do not once consider the tragedy of a day continuing without them. To whomsoever this should reach: I write from a town that no longer exists, in a language whose final words have been carved into a trunk of pylon. Send no rescue missions for us. If you have known love, understand: The view to infinity is marred by hedgerow, a line of bedclothes drying. The going, when it goes, is forever gone.Living Through the ApocalypseThey will have us believe we are waking to a garden which is a parable a tea party where some of us get cake and others get sticks that the man jumping on the corpse of another man is doing so to save his life that the red hole in the dead man’s chest is a rare kind of flower which blooms only when the body turns to dust Some days we can believe that the seas sneaking up on us will take us over the edge Some days the scrub stretches out like a warm pool where cameras watch from behind lily pads Remember there was a time when the leap was joyful when mountains had wings before they were clipped There was only the heart and the beating of it Everything else was a kind of slumberA Stupa for the 49th Year of LifeWhen you come upon it in the 49th year of life, do not be alarmed if it does not sit atop a hill with a ceremonial gate, warning you not to waver off the path, or if it has not risen from the ground like a giant honeybun, ancestor of the spaceship. Expect a simple begging bowl buried at the crossroads, enough to hold these reliquaries: ointment jar, isolated sea town, fibrilla of mother’s breast, mucosa of father’s stomach, shard of cousin’s jaw. As though the war had always been between life and lifelessness, when really it’s about who can take the dinghy out into the void and stay there, bob-bobbing the longest. How the old disciples waded through an ocean of sorrows to show the Buddha without showing: riderless horse, empty throne. Aniconic path to nirvana. Perhaps you’ll want to circumambulate? Or has all the whirling got you begging to be let off the ride? Enough with chanting the world has no beginning, because mostly now it’s about ends. The square root of emptiness is emptiness. The hungry ghosts are not metaphors. Even the emergency curtains that protect our hearts have been yanked so far back the strings are broken. To see is to be terrified, breathless with sight. This morning, with the many-headed cobra of my aloneness, transferring marigolds from little pots into bigger pots, all that exhuming and filling – how Buddhist of me, I thought, building a universe with this cosmic axis of mud. Living so long, and still greedy for the bloom.Sonnet for the Two Birds in the Mundaka Upanishad“Two birds, beautiful of wing, close companions, cling to one common tree: of the two one eats the sweet fruit of the tree, the other eats not but watches …”— Mundaka Upanishad