Zen Preludes

Seven Zen Preludes: Halloween Morning: Times Square


1
This is the corner where the tourists stand
to have their photo taken
before the greatest possible concentration
of bazillion kilowatt billboards.

I’m surprised to feel so tenderhearted toward them.

They will think when they look at the picture later,
“My friend took this.
That was the day we had raw salmon.
That was the day we got the last seats at the matinee.”

That it is Times Square is irrelevant.
It might as well be
Iguazu Falls
or a stand of trees
weighed down with autumn.

Oh. I wish I were taking somebody’s picture,
kneeling, ignoring the crowd
to get a better angle.

2
The pigeons note my pigeon-disgusting chai, move on.

The brown sparrows come after,
perching on the rim of my table.
They’re sure I’ve something hidden,
something kept from the complacent pigeons,
but that may yield to them. The brown of their feathers
is more complicated than one expects.
I rise. Go to the Starbucks. Buy a bagel.
Crumble it pieces and present it to the sparrows,
bit by bit. You can tell by the casualness of receipt
this is what they expected all along.

3
A tiny Japanese girl with her face made up
to be a kitten offers me a plastic pumpkin
to put something into.
Her parents watch, beaming.
They have got the custom slightly wrong.

I have nothing. I have a plastic bottle of antacids.
I put that in.
The girl-kitten dances for joy.
The smiling parents bow, and bow.

4
The woman with the cigarette catches me
cleaning my glasses with a dollar bill.
“I learned that from my father,” I say.

Then tears course down the lenses,
and I have to take the dollar out again.

5
The domes I cover myself with
are the color of the air, therefore invisible.
But I know they rise above those towers
and seal the square, the city, the gray Hudson
flowing down, against what ever danger
I was sent here to prevent.

Who knew that they took in so much?

6
The policeman and his horse
pose for photographs.
The horse is beautiful and allows
on his nose the caress of children.

Some life in this city will be saved
by a caress on the muzzle of a beautiful horse,
and the cop and the horse chant
from their quarter of the well of light

O come, O come

7

I am sitting here weeping in gratitude
for the gift of poetry.
Passers-by think I have lost someone
and the news had just come.