Your Catfish Friend, by Richard Brautigan and Lumen - Empty Monastery, Visiting Dharma - Guile with a friend from Cypress Terrace by Meng Hao Jan

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
     one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
     of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
      somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
     at peace,
and ask youself,"I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

From The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster.


Lumen - Empty Monastery, Visiting Dharma - Guile with a friend from Cypress Terrace

It's a delight to meet, set out, and together
visit Master Dharma - Guile's ch'an stillness

where people never go. At his stone hut
we only find a tiger dozing in a hammock,

shadowy wind harbouring perennial snows,
springwater welling up into pine cascades.

We came from lives so different - but here,
dharma mats offer a joy we share utterly.

New Years Ever at Chang Tzu-jung's House at Lo-ch'eng

Amid seas of cloud sailed in Ou and Min
island anchorages all windblown swells,

somehow it's New Year's, and somehow
I'm gazing at my old village friend here

so far from home. I a sky-raft wanderer,
you caught amid tangles, your path lost:

how many times can we meet in this life
when farewells last ten years and more?

By Meng Hao-jan, The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan translated by David Hinton.

Richard Brautigan "A High Building in Singapore".

It's a high building in Singapore that holds the only beauty for this San Francisco day where I am walking down the street, feeling terrible and watching my mind function with the efficiency of a liquid pencil.

A young mother passes by talking to her little girl who is really too small to talk, but she's talking anyway and very excitedly to her mother about something. I can't quite make out what she is saying because she's so little.

I mean, this is a tiny kid.

Then her mother answers her to explode my day with a goofy illumination. "It was a high building in Singapore," she says to the little girl who enthusiastically replies like a bright sound-coloured penny, " Yes, it was a high building in Singapore!"

Written by Richard Brautigan, part of the collection "Revenge of the Lawn". Published by Rebel Inc, Canon Gate, 1997. First published 1972.