POEM OF THE DAY BY NORMAN DUBIE

A Fifteenth-Century Zen Master

for Stephen

A blind girl steps over the red staves

Of a tub. Steam rising from her shoulders and hair,

She walks across a dirt floor to you.

I think you are not her grandfather.

You watch with her a pink man

Who has avoided taxes for two winters—

He is being judged by roosters

And has been chased this far into the countryside. Above him

Burning sacks of bat dung are arranged

In the purple branches of the thistle trees.

The river is indifferent to him.

And so are we.

You tell your mistress the burning bags of shit

Are like inert buddhas

Dissolving in a field of merit.

She giggles. A front tooth is loose.

With the river bottom clear as the night air,

The bargeman sings through the hungry vapors

Rising now like white snakes behind him.

You told his wife that Lord Buddha made wasps

From yellow stalks of tobacco with a dark spit.

Down in the cold bamboo a starving woman

Has opened a small pig—

The old moons climb from its blue glistening stomach,

Or is it light

From the infinitely receding sacks of shit?

Master, where is the difference?


-Norman Dubie