Devi's Mountain Call

Wherever has the most sublime and natural world that I once loved with all my being gone?

This beautiful and glittering world, this voluptuous lover of mine has disappeared into unknown.

I remember ripe green days of hiking in majestic mountains now no longer mountains; now they are only mountains.

I remember frolicing in ocean views with all my granite ridge line lovers. What cairns are they now sleeping with tonight?

God I miss your balsam perfume and your sun-drenched glacial markings with those secret summer birds that sing 'I love you' all day long.

God I miss the pebble in my hiking boot and all the silence you afforded me beneath the birch tree while I loved you on that April afternoon.

I know you're there somewhere but all this mind can know is your apparent disappearance.

Oh wonderful snow dancing in the heart of space, who are you now?

I know my mourning is for something that's undying and my mind is dying for the death of its own doubt.

Oh dissolve my mind the way this snow dissolves into itself!

Soul of the Solstice

Beneath the growing shadow of this earth,
there is a winter solstice always rising.
Name it love. It energizes action—
in a way that sunshine lends its light to life.
We always reach towards it despite the fact
we may not know it. We may be caught within
the cold of some incredible desire
to compensate ourselves for something we think
we’ve lost. But light is always there and pure
and we are never in the need for its
return—for light is always in its light.


~Son Rivers 2009

Three Twoems in Search of Objective

Coca-cola can but a cup of root beer. Basho walking in the woods with Bilbo. The Outer Banks, an inner tube, and an awesome red guitar.

Three pots, two kachinas, and a braid of sweetgrass are sitting in a boat. A panther walks beneath a green umbrella. In the distance, frogs!

The grace of paper napkins hovers above three water lilies. Holy is the presence of an envelope. A waffle iron blesses all the keys. Quartz!

Read All About It

Beneath the surface of the senses
lies a land that simply is.
But when you land within its borders
there’s not a surface overhead.

There are no borders; there is no land;
there’s not a ‘you’ to understand.
There are no words; there’s not a poem;
there’s only bliss of this—unread.


~Son Rivers 2009

Cheap Spirits

The shadow of the earth is deepening
and here the sunless cold is turning water
into ice. One homeless man beneath
the Salt and Pepper Bridge will die despite
the seven-hundred-fifty milliliters
downed of Californian table wine.
His blood will never feel the resurrection
come this April, but the heart has never
needed such religion as its sign.



~Son Rivers 2009

Love Is All There Is

It was a Monday night
and football was America
when John was shot and gone
outside the thoughtful old Dakota.

“Limitless undying
love which shines around me like
a million suns. It calls
me on and on across the universe.

Jai guru deva om.”


~Son Rivers 2009 / John Lennon 1940-1980

Words to the Heart

I need a doorway to my heart.

I need to let the flood of being in there out.

I need to let the sea of what I am be seen by what I am.

I need to feel the tears within my oceanic being fill the desert of my eyes.

I need to know the waters of existence always have been running in the bloodstream of my own unknown without a why.

In other words, I want to cry!



~Son Rivers 2009

Waxing on a Waning

Let me first say, there was a moon in the sky. And it was just a day or two past full.

And let me further say, I saw it, brightly yellow and larger than life in that optical illusion larger than life as it rises.

And then, the fact is, the indisputable scientific fact, a cloud passed by, and covered it in darkness...almost.

For there, in the evening sky, in the early evening sky that sometimes seems even darker than darkest midnight, gleamed this:

an absolutely lovely unexplained chaotic brightness emanating from that unconditionally spotless nothing!


~Son Rivers 2009

I Saw in Consciousness an Oak Alive

Call this Consciousness an oak tree—either metaphor will do.

And say this oak tree grew ten thousand leaves—say green—not red, nor blue.


Let’s pretend these leaves—ten thousand leaves—have come to see themselves

as something other than that oak tree—so something other than themselves.


And then at autumn feel the fear they face before they start to fall—

despite the fact they’ve always been that oak—still am, still here, still tall.



~Son Rivers 2009

Now Gita

Arjunas of the world, unite!

Forget the shackles of your fear-induced investments for identity-related safety goals involving selves and time you’ve never had.

There is no time! The past is but a fiction, and the future only science fiction all about a world that never will exist.

Only you exist! Right here, right now, and you are that existence, only that existence, nothing but existence!

Arjunas of the world, exist!

And be that bliss...


~Son Rivers 2009

Begin Living

Begin with emptiness. Begin with nothing—without the nothing. Begin with that beginning without beginning. But just begin!

Imagine! Imagine everything we think is life. Imagine mothers and fathers and children and friends! Imagine lovers! Just imagine!

What else on earth is there to do? There’ll be eternities to meditate. There’ll be endless balls of string to ravel and unravel.

But now, revel! Revel alone; revel in love; revel in valiant living! Revel in that revel that loves reveling! Revel! Revel! Revel!


~Son Rivers 2009

Tidal Realities

The river outside my door is tidal; I never know the heights or depths it’ll be on any given morning.

It’s ten foot variations cause its waters to descend and seem a stream, or else ascend towards quite apparent flood.

Slack tides can be destabilizing to the nature of things, but a river flowing rapidly upstream is just unnatural.

Although it’s feared my most, impermanence is, after all, the norm. But a river that repeats itself appears to stay the same.

It’s as if there were an incandescent current woven within it all that’s actually unchanging.


~Son Rivers 2009

Thoughtless

The first time I hiked a mountain in the land of the precipitous Whites, I was alone and quaked in fear.

Half-way up the trail, I came to a fantastic ash tree, its lustrous bark imprinted with the claws of a bear.

After that, all experience—house-like boulders, talking streams, vistas glimpsed through virgin trees—surrendered into one.

Finally at the open summit, almost out of breath, I looked out upon a faultless view of endless and empty peaks.

The silence was perfectly contemplative... until another hiker, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, asked me what I thought.


~Son Rivers 2009

After Reading Hsieh Ling-yun

Sitting within these walls of books, I try to remember springtime mountains and fluent streams.

And following this point of view, I come to the middle of a quiet col that holds a silent little pond.

The surface of the pond is still, reflecting birch and ash and sky; my eyes are drawn into its depths and I see everything!

But I'm looking out my window now and the stark November landscape teaches me a thing or two about absolutely nothing.


~Son Rivers 2009

No Bird Watching

This time I met two painters on the viewing platform overlooking the great marshes of Plum Island.

Unlike birdwatchers, they were making their own landscaped wildlife from a palette of godlike colors.

What they were painting though was not what I was seeing and what I was seeing in their art was not what they were painting.

But out there somewhere in-between the burning reeds and grasses slides a Great Blue Heron, singular, original, alive.


~Son Rivers 2009

Merrimack Sutra

This river was the source of water power for the greatest mills of early industrial America and so they deemed it great.

Once polluted, now reclaimed, fishermen, boats, and trophy homes utilize its sparkling waters and so they deem it great.

I've been to its bank and listened to it currents and know the river isn't great. The river flows. And that is--all.


~Son Rivers 2009

Spirit

There’s a voice I first heard in the mountains.
It was sighing underneath a yellow arctic flower.
It was shouting among the birches in the col.
After some years, it followed me back home
and took up residence between the books and picture frames.
Tonight its silent song is burning like a candle in an empty room.


~Son Rivers 2009

Only Heart (retweet poem)

Domesticated self-conditioned
dream-state ghost is thinking up
a virtual reality
to die for.
History, geography,
religion, quantum physics,
general relativity,
but most importantly
psychology self-validate
their own creation.

The mind is but a spider web
that keeps on spinning.
The mind is caught
within that spider web
created by the mind.
The mind can never free itself;
at best it can convince itself
it’s spun a great big web
in which it has ensnared itself.

Only the heart can know
there never was a web.
Only the heart can know itself
and in that knowing know it all.
Only the empty luminous
pure and bliss-filled heart.


~SonRivers 2009

There’s No November Like A Sutra (Retweet Poem)

In New England, November is
the Empty month:
no leaves, no snow,
no nothing.

The summer birds have all flown away;
the winter birds have not yet arrived.
The ever-present ever-shining
chickadee is reigning!

Still, the Blue Jays squawk.
Let them squawk!

I forgot the docks!
And every single boat
but for a lonely kayak or two.
Gone, gone!

The mighty river flowing
pure and free
to the empty beach-lined
empty sea.

The only sutra is
the sutra of the sea.


~Son Rivers 2009

An Empty Wood

Shanti,
shanti,
shanti.

Lately
the ten thousand
multi-colored leaves have fallen

and the woods are now
this timeless revelation
that

the living crystal waters of
this long lost hidden pond
were always there,

like a bright blue inner eye—
reflecting endless depths
of empty sky.


~Son Rivers 2009