Try A Little Dialogue Poem by Denis Mair

I'd like to ask someone good with her hands
To help me bind two books into one,
And let two sacred books share one space.
What would they cook up under one cover?
Would they rattle and shake on the shelf?
Could I ever manage to read straight through?
I fear they would conceive something freakish
But I see horns around me in the crowd anyway.
Let me join Europa in decking horns with flowers.
Let's not leave this dialogue to firebrands
Who always play it out in fits and starts
In the fire and blood of history.
Mutual influence can happen
Like Laozi and Confucius talking for 2500 years.[1]
I want to bring the dialogue close
Though it makes me grit my teeth.

I'm a piece of timber for a bridge
And I have been left out in the weather
I was a diploma mill product
Congenitally curious,
So any old edge seemed worth trying,
But meetings and partings made it real,
History made me a witness
In the country stretched across borderlands.

My mind also dreams high and low
While I'm being pulled left and right.
I stand in this trunk of my body
With two arms flung out
And where the two lines cross
Something keeps trying to leap up,
So I know about hanging on a cross.
In the end I want to redeem people too;
I'd like to figure out how they do that!

I want a special Christmas tree
With hexagrams for ornaments; [2]
Tips of all the branches will be visible;
But where they join the trunk is a mystery.

I wish someone with craft in her hands
Would fashion me a special Christmas wreath.
I want pinecones chewed up by a lawn mower
To decorate it, and a tattered flag
That flew from a car antenna in the rain.

Long ago Manjusri told Samantabhadra Bodhisattva:
Go pick something medicinal for me.
Samantabhadra looked around and saw
There were many herbs that could serve as medicine,
So he just plucked any old sprig.
Manjusri turned it in his fingers and said:
This sprig of medicine can cure a man,
But it can also kill a man!


NOTES:
[1] In the history of Chinese civilization, there was never a major conflict between the two native belief systems- -Confucianism and Daoism. Their interchange was always pursued as a dialogue, often internalized in the minds of literati. In our modern world, we have more extreme systems of thought that need to be reconciled. I hope that dialogue can unfold between science/technology and nature-loving mysticism. Such a dialogue will take a long time and a lot of mental space, just as Chinese literati allowed for their Confucian-Daoist dialogue.
[2] The word HEXAGRAMS refers to symbols in the I CHING (the Book of Changes) , which has served me as a sourcebook of images and philosophical questions.