Another liturgical, if you like, poem from the East Asian Buddhist world, the Dharani for removing disasters, the Vaikin-Shin Dharani. Shubhe mo shubhe sabho sato namo bhagyamo hadeto tojito eno bhoryo kirayati gyarati Ikeri mokho koji sato sabho sabho mora mora moji mo kiri tamo kuryo kuryo kemo toryo toryo Ujaya ji mokho gyaya ji tora tora kiri nishi kura ya sharo karo Momo hamo raho jiri ye kiri kishi noshi nawa rasangora gari Haja haja parasha ya kuryo kuryo mora kuryo kuryo kiri sharo karo Suryo suryo fujiya fujiya doya fujiya doyami jiri ya nore kinji Jiri juni noko yamono somo ko chido ya somo ko moko chido ya somo ko

[01:11]

Nore kinji hangyara ya somo ko moho ni shingyara ya somo ko Namo karata no tora ya ya namo bhori ya bhori kichi shifura ya somo ko Chido mo tora hodo ya somo ko It's my favorite language. It's magical Sanskrit, which, as mispronounced in Japanese, which has no meaning in Sanskrit either. Totally magical. Belongs to another universe. Nobody knows what it means. So we chant it every day. The intention is to spread compassion to all the corners of the universe. Old woodrass, a stinky house. The whole universe is an ocean of dazzling light. On it dance the waves of life and death.

[02:12]

A service for the spirits of the dead. Coyote and earthmaker, whirling about in the world winds. Fundamental ark nest, floating and drifting. Stretched it to cover the waters and made us and earth. Us critters hanging out together, something like three billion years. Three hundred something million years, the solar system swings around with all the milky way. Ice ages come, a hundred and fifty million years apart. They last about ten million, then warmer days return. A venerable desert woodrat nest of twigs and shreds, plastered down with ambered urine, is a family house in use about eight thousand years. And four thousand years of using writing equals a lifetime of a bristlecone pine. A spoken language works about five centuries.

[03:18]

The lifespan of a desert fir, big floods, big fires, every couple hundred years. A human life lasts eighty, a generation twenty. Hot summers every eight or ten. Four seasons every year. Twenty-eight days for the moon, day, night, the twenty-four hours. And a song might last four minutes. A breath is a breath. Two. All this in five thousand eighty-six coyote scats. Pocket gopher elk, elk cat, deer, field mouse, snowshoe hare, crown squirrel, jack rabbit, deer mouse, pine squirrel, beaver, jumping mouse, chipmunk, woodrat, pika, house cat, flying squirrel, duck, jay, owl, grebe, fish, snake, grasshopper, cricket, grass,

[04:23]

pine nuts, rose seeds, mushrooms, paper, rag, twine, orange peel, matches, rubber, tinfoil, shoestring, paint rag, two pieces of a shirt. The greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And around the Great Basin, people eating cat tail pollen, bulrush seeds, raw baby birds, cooked ducks and geese, antelope, squirrel, beetles, chub, and suckers. Ten thousand years of living in the thousands of heliohuman droppings in the Lovelock Cave. Great, tall woodrat heaps, woodrat nests, shale flake beads, sheep scats, flaked points, thorns, piled up for centuries, placed under overhangs, caves and cliffs. At the bottom, antique fecal pellets,

[05:27]

orange, yellow, urine, amber, with shreds of every bush that grew eight thousand years. Another rain, another name. Cottontail boy said, woodrat makes me puke. Shitting on his grandmother's blankets, stinking everything up, pissing on everything. Yucky old woodrat, makes his whole house stink. Coyote says, you people should stay put here, learn your place, do good things. Me, I'm traveling on. Cross-legged, or Carol,

[06:33]

cross-legged under the low tent roof, dim light, dinner done, drinking tea. We live in dry old west, lift shirts, bare skin, lean touch lips, old touches, love made coins, making, always new, same stuff, life after life, as though Milarepa four times built a tower of stone, like each time was the first. Our love is mixed with rocks and streams, a heartbeat, a breath, a gaze, makes place in the dizzy eddy, living this old clear way, a sizzle of ash and embers. Scratchy breeze on the tent fly,

[07:36]

one sip tea, hunch on bones, we do be here what comes. Now I'm going to go to the most spacious point in this whole sequence called the mountain spirit. And this is at a somewhat different pace than what you've been hearing so far. Though I will not slow it down as far as no drama would slow it. I will be, in a certain sense, singing parts of it. Singing has a broad range of possible meanings. As you know, if you listen to music

[08:37]

from all different corners of the planet, the operatic or lyrical or leader voice of Western Europe with lots of melody is by far, is far from being the only kind of singing that there is. And indeed, the word chant also is from a root that means sing, and yet chanting, what we would think, some people would think of chanting as not singing, and yet chanting is a kind of singing that is not so easily acknowledged in the occidental sense of music these days. Asia is quite different, and many other cultures are quite different, with other kinds of voicing. The voicing of the singing in no drama, the utthai, is a surprising kind of voicing for the Western ear. And I cannot do it, but I've heard a lot of it, and I like to play around the edges of it,

[09:37]

so take it in that light. The Mountain Spirit. This text. Ceaseless wheel of life Ceaseless wheel of life Red sandstone gleaming dole o'er mine Ceaseless wheel of life Red sandstone and white dole o'er mine Driving all night south from Reno

[10:38]

Through cool forged bridge port Past mono lakes pale glow Past tongues of obsidian flow stopped chill And the angled granite face Of the East Sierra front Ah. Here I am, arrived in Bishop, Owens Valley, called Payapu Nadu not so long ago. Ranger Station on Main Street. I am a traveler. I want to know the way to the White Mountains and the Bristlecone Pines. She gives me maps.

[11:42]

Here. The trail to the grove at Timberline Where the oldest living beings Thrive on rock and air. Thank you for your help. I go to the pass, turn north, End of day, climbing high. Find an opening where A steep dirt side road halts A perch in the round dry hills Prickly pinyon pine boughs shade A view to the last chance range

[12:46]

And make a camp Nearby a rocky point. Climb it, passing a tidy scat arrangement on a ledge Stand on a dark red sandstone strata outcrop at the edge Plane after plane of desert ridges Darkening eastward into blue-black haze A voice says You had a bit of fame Once in the city For poems of mountains Here it's real. What? Yes.

[13:50]

Like the lines Walking on, walking Underfoot, earth-turned But what do you know Of minerals and stone? For a creature To speak of all that scale of time What for? Still, I'd like to hear that poem. I answer back Tonight is the night of the shooting stars Mirfak, the brilliant star of Perseus Crosses the ridge at midnight

[14:52]

I'll read it then Who am I talking to, I think? Walk back to camp. Evening breeze up from the flats From the valleys, salt and death Venus and the new moon sink In a deep blue glow Behind the palisades to the west Needle clusters shirring in the wind Listen close The sound gets better Mountain ranges, violet haze

[15:56]

Back fading in the east Puffs of sailing, dark lit cloud A big owl's swift, soft whip Between the trees Unroll the bedding, stretch out blankets On the crunchy, dry pine needles Sun-warm, rosinous ground Formations dip and strike my sleep If the Noh orchestra was here, you'd hear some very interesting sound behind me right now. Nyoh! Nyoh! Nyoh! A song approaching in the dream. Bitter ghosts that kick their own skulls like a ball

[17:01]

Happy ghosts that stick a flower In their own skull's empty eye Good and evil That's another stupid dream For streams and mountains Clouds and glaciers Is there ever an escape? Erosion always wearing down Shearing, thrusting, deep plates crumpling Still uplifting, ice-carved certs Dendritic, endless fractal string bed rifts on hillsides Bitter ghosts that kick their own skulls like a ball What's it all for? A meteor, swift and streaking Like a tossed white pebble arcing down the sky

[18:05]

The mountain spirit stands there Old woman, white ragged hair In the glint of algol Altair, Deneb, Sadr, Aldebaran Singing, I came to you I can't say no, I speak The poet called the mountain spirit Walking on walking, underfoot, earth turning Streams and mountains never stay the same Walking on walking, underfoot, earth turning Streams and mountains never stay the same As the mountains lift and open Underground out

[19:07]

Dust over seashell, layers of ooze Display how it plays Buttresses fractured, looming, friction only Soon to fall each face A heap of risks, tailless slopes below Flakes weathered off the buried block Tricked off at old Pluton And settle somewhere ever lower down Gives a glimpse of streaks and strains Warp and glide A braided gritty mud wash slides Where cliffs lean To the raven neckless sky Calcium spiraling shells

[20:09]

No land plants dim wind Sands and stones flush down the Barren flanks of magma swollen uplands Slurry to the beach Ranges into rubble, old shores buried by debris A lapping trough of tide flats and lagoons Lime rich wave wash soothing shales and silts A thousand miles of chest deep reef Sea bottom riffled, swayed, swirled, turned and tilled By squiggly slime swimmers many armed Millions of tiny different tracks Crisscrossing through the mud Trilobite winding salt sludge Calcite ridges, diatom babies drifting home Swash of quartzy sand Three hundred million years be rolling on And then Ten million years ago

[21:12]

An ocean floor Glides like a snake beneath the continent Crunching up Old seabed till it's high as Alps Sandstone layers script of winding tracks And limestone shines like snow Where ancient beings grow When the axe strokes stop The silence grows deeper Peaks like Buddhas at the heights Send waters streaming down To the deep center of the turning world And the mountain spirit always wandering

[22:16]

Hillsides fade like walls of cloud Pebbles smoothed off sloshing in the sea Old woman mountain hears Shifting sand tell the wind Nothingness is shapeliness Mountains will be Buddhas then When bristlecone needles are green When scarlet testamon flowers are red Mountains feed the people too Stories from the past Of pine nut gathering baskets quickly full Of help at grinding, carrying, healing Ghosts of lost landscapes

[23:17]

Herds and flocks Towns and clans Great teachers from all lands Tucked in Wovoka's empty hat Stored in baby Krishna's mouth Kneeling fatigued in Vimalapiti's one small room Goose flocks Crane flocks Lake Lahontan come again Walking on walking Underfoot bird turns The mountain spirit whispers back All art and song Is sacred to the real as such

[24:21]

Bristlecone pines live long On the taste of carbonate Dolomite Spiraled, standing, coiling Dead wood with the living Four thousand years of mineral glimmer Spaced out growing in the icy, airy sky White bones under summer stars The mountain spirit and me Like ripples of the Cambrian sea Dance the pine tree Old arms, old limbs Twisting, twining Scatter cones upon the ground Stamp the root foot down And then she's gone Ceaseless wheel of lines

[25:30]

Red sandstone and white dolomite A few more shooting stars Back to the bedroll Sleep till dawn Verse White enough to keep you looking Open enough to keep you moving Dry enough to keep you honest Prickly enough to make you talk Green enough to go on living Bold enough to give you dreams Now we're going to finish with the final poem, Finding Space in the Heart. I first saw it in the sixties,

[26:42]

Driving a Volkswagen camper With a fierce gay poet And a lovely but dangerous girl With a husky voice. We came down from Canada On the dry east side of the ranges, Grand Coulee, Blue Mountains, Lava flow caves, And the Alvord Desert, The Pronghorn Ranges, The glittering obsidian-paved dirt track Toward Vaya, Seldom-seen roads late September, Thick frost at dawn, Then follow a canyon And suddenly open to silvery flats That curved over the edge. Oh, ah, The awareness of emptiness Brings forth a heart of compassion. We followed the rim of the playa To a bar where the roads end, And over a pass into Pyramid Lake

[27:44]

From the Smoke Creek side, By the ranches of wizards Who followed the teepee path. The next day we reached San Francisco In a time when it seemed The world might have a new way. And again in the seventies, Back from Montana, I recklessly pulled off the highway, Took a dirt track onto the flats, Got stuck, scared the kids, Slept the night, And the next day sucked free and went on. Fifteen years passed. In the eighties, With my lover, I went where the roads end, Walked the hills for a day, Looked out where it all drops away, Discovered a path Of carved stone inscriptions Tucked into the sagebrush, Stomp out greed, The best things in life are not things, Words placed by an old desert sage

[28:48]

Who died two years ago. Faint shorelines seen High on these slopes, Long gone Lake Lahontan, Cutthroat trout spirit, Silt, Colombian mammoth bones Four hundred feet up On the wave-etched beach ledge, And the curly-horned desert sheep outlines Pecked into the rocks. And turned the truck onto the playa, Heading for Nonant, Bone-grey dust boiling and billowing Mile after mile, Trackless and featureless, Let the car coast to a halt On the crazed, cracked, flat, hard face Where winter snow spirals And summer sun bakes like a kill Off nowhere to be or not be, All equal, far reaches, no bounds,

[29:51]

Sounds swallowed away, no waters, No mountains, no bush, no grass, And because no grass, No shade but your shadow, No flatness because no not-flatness, No loss, no gain, So nothing in the way, The ground is the sky, The sky is the ground, No place between, Just wind-whipped breeze, Tent-mouth leeward, Time being here, We meet heart to heart, Leg hard-twined to leg, With a kiss that goes to the bone, Dawn, sun comes straight in the eye, The tooth of a far peak called King Lear, Now in the nineties, desert night, My lovers, my life, Old friends, old trucks drawn round,

[30:54]

Great arcs of kids on bikes, Out there in darkness, no lights, Just planet Venus, Glinting by the calyx, crescent moon, And tasting grasshoppers, Roasted in a pan, They all somehow swarmed down here, Sons and daughters in the circle, Eating grasshoppers, Rivising, Singing sutras for the insects In the wilderness, The wideness, The foolish loving spaces, Full of heart, Walking on walking, Underfoot, earth turns, Streams and mountains, Never stay the same, The space goes on, But the wet black brush, Tip drawn to a point, Lifts away,

[31:56]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ