seashore

I wonder if Zen mind
is as good
as the seashore 15 minutes north of Jacksonville.

I'm talking about
the eternity of a horizon
and the waves of the womb.
The smells and sounds of sex and death that merge
into sand, that lose their name in the long stretch
of sand, of ocean basalt
and microscopic creatures hewn
unto the infinite, the atomies;
of God in everything.

When I am taken.

When I am taken up,
my mind will be like this -- emptied.
Devoid of person
and filled instead with the world
devoid of metaphor.

death certificate

The final disposition:
where we ceased to monitor your affairs
or rather, the government declares
its hands are washed of you.

The servant stands
his back to you, and one hand laves the other
in the white noise from the tap.
Later he undoes the cap of a pen,
kept warm near his heart; a line
of ink flows out,
embracing a name, it is done.

The cause of your death
was simply ceasing;
the beat beneath your breast
at first off-tempo, then
unbroken line. You stopped
moving forward into when, you ceased
at then. Arrested.

Or if you prefer,
your flesh was stilled, while life
flowed outward into light
like ink on paper, clean perpetual
and left behind the name.

Hear then, the sound of the pen
consigning your remains, the last resolve.
Into your hands, O Lord,
we commend all for whom we pray,
entrusting on this day to someone
far away,
this bag of bones

To journey on alone, and unremarked
wherefore the servant's hands are white
as snow; and on alone, undone
across the untracked landscape of
your final disposition.