“I'm not a Buddha in the sense of I can sit under a tree for a thousand years. Who can? The climate doesn't allow for it, anyway . . . ”

I saw a leaf flying in the opposite direction from the ground but there was no wind. Now how could that be, I asked myself. It was a dead leaf, shriveled and brittle looking, one of the many hundreds that were dropping to the ground all around me from off the trees in the woods beside my house. 

Now that we have ordered well may we turn back
upon suffering; after the fixed moments and precision,
to seek comfort in release. Peace being with us,

I am about to close my refrigerator after removing a package of meat when I hear my door lock turning and a crew of men, without so much as first knocking, walk in.

I dream I hurl a spear into the body of my love. I am brutal, but the spear begins to glow along its shaft and transfixes me. I stand covered in its radiance, unable to move, magnetized towards the spear that I reach out to touch and then grasp and stroke and carry myself forward along its length until I have touched the body of my love itself at the point where the spear has entered. I sob, I shake in convulsions and the body of my love bends forward to comfort me as I support myself against it in a paroxysm of leaving my body.

I paused in my car at a street corner before entering a broad, busy road, looked in both directions for traffic and then eased into the road ahead of distant, oncoming cars, a warm feeling of accomplishment that once more 1 had entered the stream of things to become part of America, on the go. When I reached my house and entered I slid back into a chair and felt stranded, forgotten and apart in my own home.