Right Action Poem

 

The Studious Woodcutter Zhu Maichen

Zen Buddhism places Right Action

on the Noble Eightfold Path

which you might want to start 

getting acquainted with

because paradise comes with homework.

Classical Chinese philosophy already asked:

how can we produce good vibes 

and then spread the good vibes everywhere

like a wave

or succession of waves—

like a big, floating harmonic system? 

From where we now stand

—to call it a bluff is already a bluff—

the whole skin of history appears 

pocked with furious dark lesions 

serpentine and pestilential 

the blood evidently all gone wrong

until pulsating spumes of spent person 

disappear into the visible future

we are each of us dutifully pointed t’ward.

The visible future:

of purple and pasteboard

of flickering pendants

of quicksilver and of quicklime too.

Let the saboteurs remain forever honourable

extending camaraderie and equivocal solidarity

to even those who are not ever busy

being the least bit easy to please;

let there be no more debates henceforth 

but rather collusion and communion

some not-yet-specified special spark of 

pump-action collective recognition

and facilitating harmonic system.

Arms like steeples piercing 

the light’s downpour

countering the surge 

brace of bone and flexion.

How does the future you are looking at directly

which could hardly be said to have provided

any instruction in how to read it 

ultimately somehow become thinkable?

Let the prize be the serenity

you secure and maintain;

show them what you are fighting for

by being good and by being well.