--For Khenpo Tsultim Rinpoche

     I.

    Outside, the night is dark
    Crickets bleat like dull knives
    on whetstone

    It is all a loosening static
    A luminous silence
    Before rising up to a full moon

    II.

    Spontaneously, humor has come
    And egoless, it is beyond laughing
    A void in essence
    Just as the mica in sand
    is caught by the lip of the tide and the sun
    All at the same moment

    III.

    and being void
    Cannot be grasped by the mind
    Just as a great negative of earth and trees
    Appears beneath my feet
    A mirror reflection of the moon

    IV.

    Light passes through the window
    Catching the hand settling the cup to the mouth

    Great bliss arises
    Turkeys, in a harem of hundreds
    Ascend the lightning struck boughs of walnuts
    Into the starry night
    Their wings damarus
    The sound of froth, hot tea brought past the lips

    In the relative it is like a dream
    And in the ultimate is emptiness


Copyright © Henry Oso Quintero, 2001.  All Rights Reserved.