Zone
There's water there, the garden opens
Singing, you wear your red skirt
Summer is a pattern of
flowers on your sash
Days pass
as you turn. Birds
fold their wings ten thousand ways
All this time I'm far from home
Along the road, wheat fields breathe from
their broad lungs, the land
sends out clear noises. All this
time, I'm trying to get across it
Soil circles earth
I've a thousand expressions
to display my yellow face
Wheat fields hum a song
–in the East
There's steel. Highways
cut through what used to be fields
Jazz bleats
in the shadow of high buildings
There, the homeless
find wheat fields in their dreams
At the blast of ten trumpets a new
continent arises and the sea
rolls the passion of sex. In the East
the voice of home
breaks up each day. I cover my face
sobbing among ruins
Still I try to track
the zone I dream of. On my way
seeing my youth, seeing
middle age mounting me
like two sharp and
shiny rib bones
hampering my breath
here on western land
I find that any direction I
walk, every impulse whatever
points clearly, unambiguously
towards–China
Homing
As I walk homeward
dusk surrounding
in groups behind me wanderers
sing out their songs of labor
carrying their hands as they would carry money
carefree, never asking where they're headed
Since I left youth behind
I see my days each day in strangers. Once I
sang from waywardness
happy in my passion. Each day
a line of poetry. For all the things
I seek and for those I curse
As I step onto that road
that cuts empty and still through overgrowth
rivers glitter around me
The world I entered once and wasted
sways in my heart with a gentle sweetness
I touch the soil in quiet ecstasy
Things crowd around me
each singing in its bound
For the first time, I hold my head up
In that light I need no language
to express my gratitude
Youth has fully ripened, as fruit
bodies out between pit and skin
my poems press out around my heart
simple and full of feeling
holding the dreams and the labor
of a life of pain
As I walk this plain of consciousness
in a fullness of light
where every object vanishes
reappears, metamorphoses
I feel "home"
inside my body
and these pains and aspirations
though together in one
dwelling, belong to different centuries and
different lives. Home gleams in my
blood. My blood
flows round the house which is
made of light. My bounding heart
beats in cadence with
this house radiating its
pure white beams
