GRAY BUDDHAS

From this sun-rising window,
garrottes of powerlines,
trees cocked and twisted
like Shivas looking over
a plain of India,
mother-place of Buddhas.

Here the Buddhas fly.
They lift in clouds
from the picked-over plain,
sort themselves in long vees.
The geese are awake!
This their Middle Path,
the great Central Flyway

They honk down with equanimity
to the scabbed-over plain,
the grasping ignorant valley,
the scuffling craving fat-taking wheels
of long-spoked immigrant wagons,
of trains screeching steel on steel
steam then diesel,
the wheels of whirling turbines in the bellies of dams,
the ripping grip of John Deeres and D9s,
rubber wheels whining on the greasy tracks of interstates,
our own wheels day to night to day

desiring, desiring, desiring.

Cornfields converge on the city
and the gray robes,
hooded black and white,
sit in the midst of Mara
unmoved, until the trees
move their arms and cock their heads
and hum in the orange light
of a rising sun.

And they rise to their alms rounds,
the Gray Buddhas,
and I rise to beg another day
from the wheel of days,
to spin in the orange light
beneath the honking skies.


© 1997 by Richard W. Todd

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