Right Order in the Shop at Tassajara
                     — for Gentoku — 


The shop is as I expected it to be.
Wrenches hung by descending size
   like my father's basement tool bench.
A dust-free solar powered band saw.
Work requests stacked to the left of the altar
    repair a window screen (marked kind-of-urgent)
    build a new drawer for kitchen utensils (marked would be nice)
a place on the work order to dedicate the merit to all beings.

We poets came to ask the shop master questions.
   How do tools sing? He buckled a saw.
   The hum of solar inverters.

He shared respect
   for adjustable wrenches, Phillips screw drivers,
   the store in San Francisco dedicated to fasteners.
   A story of his grandfather’s hammer and a bench.
   The odes of a carpenter. 

I saw two white stuffed animals, life-size, 
on the most inaccessible shelf in the woodlot.
Sheep, I think. Pasture pets.
A quiet hilarity bubbles up.
Do these monks in the silence of mid-winter,
their discipline in the dark of dharma,
do they build nativity scenes?

I point. Those sheep?

He smiles. They are coyotes.
One snarls. A monk bought them
to put in the garden to scare the squirrels.
His breath, a sigh.

It didn't really work out.

            This May wind
            rattles the latch
            of the zendo door.





Tassajara’s Roses

I bow to the young woman inside the flower garden 
as I go through the willow gate. She’s the head gardener,
Felco pruners in a holster on her hip, a straw hat. 

I’m a paying guest. She practices
to be a Buddhist monk. 

Could I, I ask, frog-throated, show you the way
to prune for more rose blooms? I know roses. 

She answers, These don’t produce
many blooms. There is a great call here,
flowers for the dining room, the altars
outside the hot springs, vases in the guest rooms. 
I’m an organic farmer. I don’t know roses. 

This one thing
my age knows – to feel
for both the hard nodes
in new growth that become blooms
and the mushy give of a blind shoot
never to flower. 

I ask for her pruners,
a request I know 
to be like asking a samurai 
to hand over a sword.
I show her the touch,
then when, where to cut. 

Her young bloom face, 
her petal hands discover 
how to encourage a rose
to find more bloom. 

Today’s one act
that outlives
the red rose.