Ajahn Sucitto

Bodhisattva: Image in Wood

Trouble rises up out of the Earth.
Perhaps it grew me cell by cell...
tender sprout, bud, heartwood, bark...
willing to be in this sentiency.

Carved, fashioned, I become what you see.
In some dreamtime, under someone's heartbeat
I must have been Chinese.
Picture me: long downcast eyelids,
hands arranged like fragrant flowers
opening for the Awakening bee.

But the craft overwhelmed me.
A splintering ran like the Word –
from head to heart.
My face was torn off by someone's God;
and now only one flower is left,
awaiting her turn.
She screams the nameless name
which is everywhere, everything.

You have drunk my blood,
you who shape the signless.
Give me back my thundering flesh.

Islander

My plans are vague
my wanderings meagre
along the tidal edge
where things become meanings
and praise is just the intent
to keep moving out from harbour.

Here has no anchorage.
Attention yaws, then turns
on the swell that runs, streaming
to each moment's landfall –
the misty archipelago
that dangles in the ocean's gape.

Ferrying between the nowheres.
But just this is an arrival –
to be with the heave and suck and surge
where all things break over.
And I let the whorl of space know me
as heart-gleam, salt-tang, sky....

Endnote (on an acoustic guitar)

Yes, the full voice of rosewood

Yes, the movement through chords and phrases,
strings and fingers, the patterning

the movement the burning
that works ear and hand and desire

until the silence runs, is shaping sweetly –
unfolding seas that unfold the land;
until warriors of listening, shepherds of listening

with melody running and burning

until the gift of desire, until the resounding
hears no tune no hand no listening ear

no this or any other mind

until the stillness receives our playing.

Until yes the music

Transmission

My teaching is a rolling out
over no fixed ground:
of no onward journey.

This way is of no way home;
of a sudden strange arrival
on a waterlogged raft of dreams.

With every dawn come the duties:
clear the jangled mess
of wires and hooks from the spine;
bale drowning monologues out of the head;
breathe deep and breathe steady:
all around otherness is watching.

Everything buckles, talk gets leaky.
Texts won't listen to a thing.
Is there an image that doesn't see right through you?

All that can be here is the shining wish.

And into this I give my eye:
and for a giddy while we float,
and for a while there's a rhyme...

that lets the glitter of light and rain
that roars through our own wild country
say all the truth that can ever be said

about those distant sun-warmed hills;
about this deathless ocean.

The mudra of mountains

gesture of space opening above all this
even though it neither knows nor cares

but allows the pines to stand their brittle spears
and the snow to blaze and crunch and squeal

and the valley to draw its warm wings
over the cluster of night-lit houses

and we can climb and struggle together
and feel touched by a wordless praising

so that we step out of history
over its edge into thin clear air

with its sound like crystals singing
for every brief, blossoming snowflake

though we never wanted such freedom
it will come

it will come out of inevitable mountains
it will leave nothing behind

but their clawed and weathered fingers
glinting light, carving decisions

this is Amida Buddha's blessing mudra
before he claps his hands

Ajahn Sucitto is a Buddhist monk of many years' standing. Based in Britain, he teaches at meditation centers throughout the world. Meditation and its insights are the constant theme in his poetry, and some of his work appeared in an anthology 'Tomorrow's Moon' ( available at cost of postage from Cittaviveka Monastery, Petersfield GU31 5EU, England ). He also wrote an account of a six-month walking pilgrimage he undertook in India in 1990-1, published by Wisdom Publications as ' Rude Awakenings.'