the river of zen

The river of zen has carried me far from my home. The horses, impatient in their stalls, await the supper that will never come. On the old county road, the snowplows are peeling the vast drifts. Is the kitchen light still on? I barely recall the barn loft filled with the green smell of summer from the hay put up in June. The current is swift here, running through rocks and branches, old tires, a rusted stroller and beer cans. It has carried me past cities, mountains, islands, and farmlands, through stillness and through storms. Where it will carry me I never know. Sometimes alone in my raft, sometimes with a vast flotilla, ever moving through I watch the passing riverbanks with curiosity. A family picnics on the grass, people come and go, fishermen, dead bodies, abandoned mills and many locks that shift my little craft up and down. Sometimes I ferry folks for a little ways.  I welcome companions on the river; singing and laughing we have nothing to do, and we do it together with ease. 

I am far away from where I began, looking for just a little pool of sanity in a crazy world full of bone-cracking pain. All those notions are long gone now. Sometimes I lay back on the raft and simply drift, watching the clouds above, and sometimes I have to paddle like mad to keep afloat in dangerous rapids. But where I am now I do not know. The landscape is unknown to me, and I have no map or compass—still I am more at ease here now, the old settled ways abandoned and forgotten, the noisy thirst for conquest and adventure quenched too. 

There is a way of leaving home that is absolute. Nothing stays. The house is not only left, it is demolished, and if you could return you would not even recognize the site where it once stood, so solid and firm. I cannot tell whether I am lost, as my old friends must think, or simply abandoning every fixed destiny for the sparkle of light on open water. Until I have completely learned this river’s ways you will find me here, calmly sitting with legs crossed, lost in study of this mystery.