The fundamental thesis of the dharma poetry series is as follows: Many poets have long been expressing the dharma through their chosen medium of poetry.  Now that’s a grand statement, full of big words like “poets” and “dharma” and “poetry,” but the basic idea is that there is truth, or there is clear-seeing, and there are ways to speak truth, or there are ways to see clearly, and both poets and dharma teachers have long been pointing toward a similar way of seeing the world. 

Or, as Ginsberg wrote about Trungpa, “Chögyam Trungpa is a ‘Rinpoche’ or ‘Precious Jewel’ of millenial practical information on attitudes and practices of mind speach & body that Western Poets over the same millenia have explored individually, fitfully, as far as they were able.” 

So, let’s look at today’s fitful Western explorer, Mark Strand.  A product of Iowa University’s writing legacy, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, and a professor of English Literature at Columbia, Strand has produced, in my opinion, a distinctly dharmic piece in his poem “A Piece of the Storm.”

It begins:

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.

The simple event in the relative world is dramatized; a moment is captured.  This opening called to mind for me the end of Zen Mind Beginners Mind, so I pulled it off the shelf, and sure enough, Suzuki writes in the third to last sentence, “We see snowdrops.”

The poem continues (at the end of the fourth line):

                                                                           That’s all
There was to it.
 

This line is a classic poetic-dharmic reminder of impermanence.  Roshi writes, “One thing flows into another and cannot be grasped.”  Strand does not so much grasp the moment as honor its passing in the following lines (continuing with line five):

                             No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral.

Has a better description of basic goodness been penned?  A solemn waking.  Basic goodness is a wily term.  I like John Welwood’s glossary definition from his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening: “The translation of a Tibetan term that refers to the wholesome nature of our being, as well as the intrinsic wonder and delight of reality when things are seen in their suchness.”  Strand could have well called his poem, “The Suchness of A Snowflake”, but that would have been too obvious.

The short poem concludes (beginning in the seventh line):

                                                                  No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”

What is Strand saying with these last few lines?  Why “the sky”?  Why “an opening”?  Does anybody have any interpretations they’d like to share?  Could we have a conversation about this?

In watching the brief life of the snowflake, Strand saw an opening sky.  Sounding awfully like a poet himself–a kind of life-poet–Zuzuki writes, “So the point is to be ready for observing things… This is called emptiness of your mind.”