The End of the World

 

Eat This and Have a Cup of Tea

Calligraphy (Enso, or circle, and words) by Ashikaga Shizan (1859-1959) 

Many thanks to Bruce Kennedy

What Happened?
Sunday, May 22, 2011

New York City

The world was supposed to end yesterday
But Paul and Timothy got it all wrong
They talked to God to see where their math went askew
God said the End of the World needs more juice
Like that jazz sextet at the African Market on 116th
The other side of Malcolm X
Three black guys on the brass horns talking New Age Zulu
Piano Cuban talks back voodoo bebop
The middle-aged Jew translates the Word on his drums
Likewise that skinny Asian American woman thumping the standup bass
(Where’d she come from?)
The Muslims are praising Allah on their prayer rugs
An ancient Japanese guy is slurping at his noodles
Rumor is that he’s enlightened
Although you’d never guess it
He’s eyeing the young women of poetry
Lesbians or straight he has no preferences
They are wearing skirts, they’re wearing naked legs
Their swaying hips prophesy the Ying and the Yang
Today they are our gate into the meadow
Tomorrow perhaps a mockingbird
Summertime and the living is easy, sweetheart
Maybe the world has already ended
Maybe we’re the last to know

●

I usually don’t put my own poetry up on my blog but I’m back from three weeks in New York City. In New York I always get a great feeling of liberation. The rain. The gardens and parks. The people, always the people. Sometimes I think its simply from being among all those people climbing up out of the subways like the animals that we are. This time the subways and the streets were full of hawkers handing out the news that the world was going to end of Saturday, May 21. One yellow broadside I took home was using Paul's letters to Timothy for their calculations of doom. I tried to read it but got bored and watched the Mavericks beat the OKC Thunder. It's an old disease from my childhood. I went to bed as usual and nothing happened. I woke up to a beautiful day and I went to the African Market on 116th Street in Harlem looking for a new kofi, a round hatless hat to keep my head warm and protected from the sun. It's a good place. All sorts of stuff from Africa. A sextet was playing good New York City jazz. A young Asian-American woman was playing the standup bass surrounded by four black men (a trumpet, two sax, one piano) and some kind of white guy hammering away at his drum kit. Obviously, the world hadn’t ended. That was cool by me. I jotted down some notes and that evening I wrote this poem.

The wonderful Enso by Ashikaga Shizan is from the private collection of calligraphy of photographer Bruce Kennedy. I ran into Bruce at the Still Mind Zendo one Tuesday night that I went scavenging a place to sit zazen. I know Bruce from our respective lives in the publishing industry. But I didn’t know he was a fellow Zenster, nor did I know that he was a wonderful photographer and a collector of calligraphy. It was a delightful surprise. And the Ashikaga Shizan fits so perfectly with what I wanted out of this poem. In fact, it says it better.

Self-Portrait in a Bathtub, New York City

Many thanks to Sylvia and John Gardner who kindly lent me their apartment so I could spend some extra time in New York City.
--Bobby

The Lessons of Mr. Wu

I'm in NYC for a few days between the sales conference for Cinco Puntos (Consortium Book Sales and Distribution is our distributor) and the Book Expo next week. I'm trying to get some writing done, putting together a poetry manuscript, looking through old journals, writing whatever I want. And every day for a few hours I get to wander the streets. This is something from my journal.

Monday around 2pm I was deep in the hubbub of New York City, leaving Times Square on the “R” Train going south. I like the "R" Train. It's not so crowded, the cars are newer. A couple of young people were smooching a couple of seats down. In her excitement the girl dropped her can of Coca-Cola, the boy tried to grab it, but he was too late. A puddle of the dark sparkling sugary stuff spilled out onto the floor. The girl giggled. The boy apologized, he picked up the can before it was completely empty but what else could he do? She snuggled her head into a comfortable place on his shoulder and hugged him around the waist so he went back to the more important business of fondling her. A black woman, old like me, hurrumphed at their activity. The train started off and the puddle began to flow, becoming a long tiny river reaching inch by inch back toward where it came from. Like it had its own intelligence, like it had something to say to me--the Tao of Coca-Cola. I watched it slither toward the end of the train. It never came to a logical or physiological conclusion. The train screeched to a halt at 34th Street and the river reversed, understanding the laws of its existence, and snaked back the other way, its integrity intact. Once more a tiny crest of the Tao flowed past my feet. The woman looked at me and pursed her lips. She too was a student of the little rivulet. Weird, huh? 23rd Street. The Coca-Cola repeated its performance, but this time half-heartedly. I suppose this is entropy. I’m always trying to figure out what that word means. Although I can feel it in my bones.The girl and boy got off at 14th to play kissy-face in Union Square. That was my wish for them. The black woman watched them go, gave me a big smile and rose majestically for her exit at the 8th Street Station. A few others came and went, but nobody stepped on the river of Coca-Cola. It would have been a foolish and unlucky act. Bad mojo. I got off on Canal Street. I had business with a Mr. Wu.

When the weather is good he sets up his card table on the south side of Canal near Mott in the swirling humanity at the edge of Chinatown. His business he calls “Grass Arts.” He cuts small thin strips of bamboo and thick grasses, he dyes the strips various colors and then he braids them into exquisite little animals. Like palm crosses the church ladies make to celebrate the arrival of Jesus to Jerusalem, but these animals are lovely and very delicate. Real craftsmanship. I bought a mouse and two swallows, gifts for grandchildren and friends. $20 bucks I gave to Mr. Wu. Happy for my success I took the slow way home. I’m on vacation and I get to enjoy the bustle and chaos that is New York City. After walking around through Columbus Park, I took the #6 to Grand Central Terminal and walked to Bryant Park. I clutched my bag of Grass Arts. I didn’t want to lose it. I sat in the green grass under the library and read my book. And then after a while I hopped the #104 bus, still clutching my paper sack and my purse.

Oh, it was a beautiful springtime ride up Broadway toward my borrowed home on the West Side. People came and went. I got a place near the window and went back to my reading. The book is Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Malantes. It's gotten great press, I was given a galley (one of the bennies of being a publisher) and so I brought it along. The book has swallowed me up. The first half of the book is about a platoon of soldiers (boys really, 18 and 19 years old, some as old as 23) struggling through the gunk of the jungle in the rain and mud, little or no support from their command. Their clothes are rotting off, pus is oozing from all their sores, their feet are swollen with jungle rot. They are fighting and suffering and dying, their commanders and the chain of command lost in their own mechanical psyches of ambition and fear and delusion. I was one of the young men who dodged that war. For good reasons too--I never wanted to go to Vietnam, I didn’t know anything about Vietnam, I didn’t believe anything that was told to me, and I was afraid. But I have friends who did go. Now all these years later I am sure that violence answers absolutely no question of politics, nationality, ethnicity or whatever reason the power brokers use to stir up their pot of madness,. But how do I know this really? It remains an abstract idea. So I study violence like a man who has misplaced something in his house. Something that I need to find and understand. Sure, this is crazy, but it’s who I am and it's what I do. I'm an old man now. At 107th I got off the bus. I was hungry and somehow sad. The sorrow inside the book was sinking into me. I went home and ate.

This morning I got ready to send one of Mr. Wu’s little birds to my granddaughter Birdie. The pink one. Birdie loves pink. But the sack of Grass Arts, I realized after searching frantically around the apartment, is still on the #104 bus. The bus went into Harlem, my sack of Mr. Wu’s gifts like a piece of flotsam in that puddle of Coca Cola, moving along to wherever it goes. I hope somebody found them and passed the beautiful little animals to their children or grandchildren. Or maybe an old man found the sack and he needed the money so he sold them to somebody on the street. I hope so anyway. I hope those little creatures of grass found a good home for a while.

Tomorrow I will go back to see Mr. Wu.

Happy Birthday to Kankin, The Sutra Reader

Last Thursday, April 15th, was my birthday. I am 68 years old. Shit. Who would have guessed? My brother died before he was 60. My dad died as a young man in a plane crash, training young men to fight in the war. My grandfathers on both sides didn’t live real long either. Lee and I were in San Antonio on business, and we spent my birthday evening--a low-key dinner at the Cove Restaurant--with our son Andy Byrd, his daughter Emma Birdie and Joe Hayes, my good and close friend all these many years. Joe’s been like a Godfather to each of our children. It rained most of the day and the San Antonio air was humid and cool, like silk, the smell of honey suckle and roses and pittosporum. I like Dogen’s comment about the sutras, holy text, being “transmitted and retained on trees and rocks, are spread through fields and through villages, are expounded by lands of dust and are lectured by space.”

After learning in practice as Buddhist patriarchs, we are barely able to learn sutras in practice. At this time the reality of hearing sutras, receiving sutras, preaching sutras, and so on exists in the ears, eyes, tongue, nose, and organs of body and mind, and in the places we go, hear, and speak. The sort who “because they seek fame, preach non-Buddhist doctrines” cannot practice the Buddha’s sutras. The reason is that the sutras are transmitted and retained on trees and rocks, are spread through fields and through villages, are expounded by lands of dust, and are lectured by space. --From Chapter Twenty-One, “Kankin, Reading Sutras,” in Volume One of the Shobengenzo by Zen master Eihei Dogen (13th century), founder of the Soto sect of Japanese Zen Buddhism as translated by Gudo Wafu Nijishima and his student Chudo Cross.

On April 3rd I took the vows during the Shukke Tokudo (aka “the Home Leaving Ceremony”) to be a Zen Buddhist teacher, or priest (I like the word teacher better), in the Soto Zen lineage, the Order of Clear Mind Zen. My teacher is Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi. He gave me the Zen name of “Kankin,” based on the Dogen’s text quoted above. The story of my Zen practice is long. I could even date it back to my high school days when, with Harvey Goldner, I’d got lost in daydreams about Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and the essays of Allen Watts and the poems of Gary Snyder. But the particular history of receiving this name Kankin is a much more particular story, an abbreviated version of which follows. I starting writing this as journal notes, but since it’s important to me as a poet I decided to publish it on this blog.

Three old men in the shadows: 
Ken Hogaku Hogaku McGuire Roshi, Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi
and Bobby Kankin Byrd

I’ve been sitting zazen for a long time. In the beginning it was off and on, fits and starts. Being in El Paso for the last 30-something years, away from so many things, I stumbled along my own way. Finding things here and there.

“The path has its own intelligence.”

I agree with that. That’s what you learn walking up and down hills in the desert or the woods, the streets of a city even,  no matter where. Some animal--a deer, varmints, cats and dogs, some unknown Buddhist, a little kid, whatever--has gone before you. Like even this quote itself I found on a business card that the poet and performer Joy Harjo gave me in Tucson. I hadn’t seen her in years. Our kids had gone to daycare together way back in the mid-70s at UNM in Albuquerque. So wonderful to see her. She gave me her card so I’d get in touch with her. And yeah, it was on that card I saw the statement, “The path has its own intelligence.”

Yeah, that's right. The path has it's own intelligence.

So at first I did zazen by myself, sort of catch as you can--five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 and even 20 minutes--, not knowing exactly what I was doing, looking from one book to the next for instructions, but definitely wanting something. A friend told me about Phillip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen and that book in particular invigorated my practice. And of course Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind which I've probably read five or six times by now. But without others to sit with, my practice lurched along, bouncing off the walls. Sometime in the 1980s I attended sesshins with Rinzai teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi, first a weekend in Santa Fe and later several week long sesshins at the Bodhi Manda in Jemez Springs. Joshu Sasaki Roshi is an astounding man (he’s 100-something now). My journals are full of memories of him and his words I heard from him, either in Sanzen or during his teishos, even for the little time I spent with him. He enlivened my practice. Illuminated it. I drove north to Santa Fe and Jemez Springs / Bodhi Manda to attend those sesshins, but as time passed I never felt at home there. Roshi was lost behind the rustling of student robes. The Sangha never felt welcoming to me. The people there were into their own rhythms and habits. The trip was a long journey away from family and job. I quit going. My sitting became irregular, sporadic. In the mid-1990s I started sitting again, strongly in fact, although again by myself, sparked by a strong sense of sorrow and hunger for something other than the man I felt myself to be. Ironically, my wife’s Christian practice--it was important to her, I could see her mature, especially in her works of compassion--made me realize that I needed a spiritual discipline to practice. Just not Christianity.

Then sometime in the early 2000s I happened to hear about the Las Cruces Zen Center of the Soto variety. I didn’t know much about the difference between Rinzai and Soto. The usual things. The Soto sit facing the wall, the Rinzai have their back to the walls. According to the legends, the Soto tradition comes out of a rural, farming mindset, the Rinsai have the taste of soldiering, of the samurai in their institutional memory. I just wanted to sit, and I didn’t much care if I was facing the wall or not. The LCZC Sangha met on Monday evenings at Harvey SoDaiho Hilbert’s house on Baylor Canyon Road below the Organ Mountains. Harvey was a disciple of Ken McGuire Hogaku Roshi who received transmission from Soyu Zengaku Matsuoka Roshi. I started driving to Las Cruces every week. An hour back and forth. An hour and a half of practice. At first I was cautious. I’m not a good joiner. But I enjoyed the services--the bells, the chanting of the Three Refuges and Four Great Vows, the Heart Sutra in English and Sino-Japanese along with the beating on the wood fish (mukugyo), but especially the two meditation periods separated by kinhin. Sitting zazen with others is powerful. And the sangha was friendly. They let me be but accepted me. They were happy that I was there. And Harvey’s dharma talks were very special. Good food for my home practice.

The services included a nice incense ceremony before tea was served.  A piece of charcoal is lit and sits in the incense bowl at the altar. Each practitioner, if she or he so wishes, can approach the altar, bow to the Buddha, take some kernels of incense and drop them on the charcoal, bow again to the Buddha and then bow to the teacher. For a number of weeks I didn’t participate. I stood there, watching, my hands in gassho. It didn’t feel right to me. Bowing to a statue. Watching the smoke. Bowing to a guy I didn’t much know. I didn’t understand it so I didn’t do it. That was okay. After maybe a month or so, I did it. Something was happening in my life--I forget exactly what now--but I wanted to say a silent prayer.I bowed to the Buddha, which is a bow to the emptiness, the absolute, the dharmakaya. I let myself go. Just a little bit. The air felt good. I  dropped a number of incense kernels on the charcoal and watched the smoke curl up into the air. I said my silent prayer. And I bowed again to the Buddha and I bowed to SoDaiho. It felt very right. I slowly began to meld into that community of practitioners.

A few years passed. My home practice became stronger. I was sitting 25 or 30 minutes in the mornings, lighting a candle, a stick of incense, doing abbreviated chants and a few prayers for my family and our communities, making vows for my own practice, sitting zazen. Perhaps a little bit at night. I was reading a lot of Zen literature and attending weekend sesshins as much as I could. I felt at home in my practice. It became a necessary part of my life. If, like when I traveled, I couldn’t find the time or place to sit, I would get nervous. There’d be an odd hunger in my head and heart and body.

Things change, of course. They always do.

The LCZC, through the help of Judy Daishin Harmon, had begun renting a small house on Mesilla Avenue for services and practice. Harvey Hilbert and his wife Judy finished their place off the grid above Cloudcroft and moved up there. Judy and then Mike Gozen LaTorra received their Shukke Tokudo ordinations and became priests. After a while they shared responsibilities as co-abbots of the LCZC. On several occasions Harvey SoDaiho asked me to receive the precepts, to do the Jukai ceremony. I treaded water until on April 2nd, 2005, after a weekend sesshin at the LCZC, I took my vows during a Jukai ceremony with several others. The name he gave me was Hen-shin, which means transformation or rebirth. There really wasn’t a lot for me to do by then. I had read all the books, talked with Harvey SoDaiho, talked with others. Being in El Paso I was sort of on my own leash. But I did have to sew my own rakusu. A black one, of course, to signify that I had received the precepts. I had sewed the thing together with my own hands. Thick clumsy hands they turned out to be. That was a task. The rakusu pattern is complicated and confusing. The directions were a puzzle by themselves. The whole process was a koan in itself. In the evenings and on Saturdays I sat there at the dining room table and sweated and even bled over that rakusu. Nothing makes a man more mindful than jabbing a needle into his ungainly fingers. Lucky for me Lee gave me advice with the pattern and even did some of the sewing for me when I thought I might weep.

The life of the LCZC, Clear Mind Zen and Harvey Daiho Hilbert Roshi its founder is a story I want to tell another time. But its history has not always been a smooth boat ride along a wide easy-going river. Nor has my relationship with Harvey. There were disappointments. “Confusion,” a good friend told me once, “is a relatively high state.” Like working on a koan, the relationship between a teacher and student. A few years ago, there was a riff in the sangha. The usual gunk that goes along with being human. It happens, no matter how long we sit and stare at wall. This goes for roshis, this goes for students and priests. The sangha bifurcated. The dance of an amoeba. The division process was not easy. By then Judy Harmon had gotten a divorce from her husband and as part of that difficult process she quit her position as co-abbot and left the Zen Center. Mike SoGozen LaTorra had remained at the LCZC as abbot. He and Harvey Daiho had a disagreement. Or “quarrel” would be a better word. The clash, on one level, was about practice and understanding the dharma. The word “enlightenment” was one of the sticks thrown on the flame. It was also about the teacher and student relationship. Zen in America stuff. And finally it was about very personal disagreements. Two men who perhaps understood the same thing differently. The sangha bifurcated. Like an amoeba. The division process was not easy. By then my friend Judy Harmon had gotten a divorce from her husband and as part of that difficult process she also left the Zen Center. Mike Gozen LaTorra had remained at the LCZC as abbot and Harvey Daiho went on his own way, formalizing his Clear Mind Zen organization which he had been talking about for years. Mike and Harvey--student and teacher, close friends, fellow Zensters--quit talking to each other.

It was not a fun time. But things change. The Buddha said that. You can quote me, he said. Mike SoGozen retained his position as Abbot of LCZC and he continues teaching there to a strong sangha. Harvey Daiho Roshi cemented in his mind and heart the Clear Mind Zen organization which he had been talking about for years. Zensters took sides, going this way or that. With others I tried to heal the riff, but that was not to be. At least, not immediately. The three pillars of Zen practice--Great Faith, Great Doubt, Great Effort--really made sense during this time.I kept in contact with Harvey Daiho, although at a distance. He was my teacher.
I realized this fact deeply. I felt really at home with his understanding of the dharma.  I just didn't make the weekly drive to Las Cruces. Something in my practice had changed. His understanding of the dharma was and is crucial to the growth of my practice. I had started, with his blessing and sometimes participation, a small sangha in El Paso. I called it the Both Sides / No Sides Zen Community. I wanted practitioners from both sides of the border to feel at home there with us. At the time El Paso or Juarez really didn’t have a place to come together as a group and sit zazen.

And “small” is a good word to describe what we were doing. We sat at the home of Richie Barajas and Briana Armendariz, which also served as the office for Richie’s practice, Black Tortoise Acupuncture and Herbs. We sat there--many times just me, Richie and Briana, sometimes only two of us, sometimes only me--for over a year. Train tracks run behind the house, and I always found it interesting when a train came rumbling by during our zazen. Its long whistle provided good resonance in my body. Then, a couple of years ago, John Fortunato began sitting with us. He offered the sangha his home. He’s a bachelor, and he had, he said, a large sunroom that would be perfect for sitting. He was right. We’ve been sitting there for two years now. And our sangha has begun to grow. Any Saturday (services begin at 330pm in you’re in town) we’ll have six to eight people sitting with us.  Several times during these years Harvey suggested to me that I take the precepts to be a teacher (aka, a priest), do the Shukke Tokudo. No, I didn’t want to do that. I don’t like the words like priest and disciple, I don’t like robes, I’m uncomfortable with the entire hullabaloo. I was happy sitting, helping to keep the doors of our sangha open and acting the part of a lay teacher.

During these years, besides reading, I had the opportunity to talk to others who were practicing in one way or another. Three, in particular, were providential and nourishing to my own practice. One was Claude Anshin Thomas, whose book At Hell’s Gate is probably the best book I’ve ever read about the struggles of being non-violent. Claude Anshin, with a small sangha, was walking the U.S./Mexico Border from Brownsville to Chula Vista, CA, on a pilgrimage for peace. (I wrote about him and his pilgrimage here.) He and his fellow pilgrims stayed in El Paso for a few days, I arranged a talk for him at the Unitarian Center and we had a gathering for everybody at our home. It was good time and a good chance for me and others to hear Claude Anshin and to witness his practice. Also, Mike Gozen LaTorra worked it out to bring punkster roshi Brad Warner to Las Cruces and El Paso, and then last year we brought him here again. Brad’s books have been important to me, not only for his ideas(he was certainly the best guy to open the door for me into Dogen’s Shobengenzo) but also for his iconoclastic rhetoric and tetchy rants about the touchy-feely practice of Buddhism in the U.S. That same rhetoric and his practice of Buddhism has helped me immensely in reconciling my poetics to my practice of Zen. (I’ve written about Brad here and here.) And finally there’s my good buddy and fellow poet JB Bryan, who can be as happily cantankerous as Brad when he’s talking about Zen (or poetry or whatever). JB is a leader at the Three Stones Zen Group in Albuquerque. The Three Stones folks are a delightful sangha, and they practice a non-denominational, anarchistic (aka "chaordic"), egalitarian and homegrown Zen, although their roots can be found in the work and teachings of Charlotte Joko Beck. (She has likewise been very important to me. It's wonderful to read a wise woman write about Zen practice.) The Three Stones is a perfect fit for JB. He’s always delighted to preach to me about institutionalized, hierarchical Zen with all its bells and whistles and bowing and scraping. His Zen heroes are old patriarchs like Han Shan, the Cold Mountain poet, and Hotei, the Happy Buddha.

So every week we rang the bell, we chanted and beat on the wooden fish with its eyes that never close, we lit incense, we sat on our zafus and practiced zazen, we did the silent kinhin dance, we sat some more, we chanted the Heart Sutra in Sino-Japanese (our voices so much stronger after sitting), and we sipped on our tea. It’s been good. Late last year, one of the men who had been practicing with us for some time told me that he wanted to receive the Jukai Precepts. I was delighted for him. But I said, “You’ll have to go find a teacher to practice with.” He looked at me and said, “I think I already have.” I was both startled and honored. But of course that meant, if I wanted to do things rightly, I had to take the vows and become ordained—to receive Shukke Tokudo. After much thought I went up to Las Cruces and told Harvey this story about the man who wanted to receive the precepts. I asked him if he would ordain me.

“Of course,” he said, laughing so hard I wondered if he would fall off his zafu. He said I wouldn’t need the robes. I could buy the brown rakusu. I had done my duty of making the black rakusu.

So this is how I came to receive the name Kankin on April 3rd. Before the ceremony we had a modified Zazenkai (one day sit) from 8:30 to 2:30. I sat strong. It was so good to sit with my friends. It’s the best way to be alone. Then people started showing up. We had about 35 in all. My family was there, folks from the sangha, friends and kids. Harvey’s teacher Ken McGuire Roshi and his wife Fern McGuire Roshi. Ken and his wife Fern both studied with Matsuoka.You can see photographs here that Lee took.

Tokudo means ceremony, and Shukke is leaving home. Thus, “The Leaving Home Ceremony” or “Home-leaver’s ceremony.” In the old days monks-to-be left home and went into the monastery. Not so much anymore. Especially for American Zen Buddhists. Here Zen is much more a householder practice. But “leaving home” is still a very important concept. I like to think of “leaving home” as leaving that comfortable place called home or the ego to serve something greater than ourselves. In a way we all leave home, we leave the ego, when we do our home practice, the wall in front of us, alone with our breath and the universe in which we live. No separation--the absolute, the universe, the breath, breathing together in and out. We do this too when we come together to sit and practice as a Sangha. And we do this when we climb off our zafus and take our practice out into the city,  the place of our life, where the 10,000 things thrive and multiply.

During the ceremony I vowed to practice and to teach others, if they so wish, the Way of the Dharma as I understand it. I vowed to appreciate my whole life as the life of the Three Treasures--the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, and I vowed to serve Family, Sangha and Community and to practice right livelihood.

I take Refuge in Everything That Is (Buddha)
I take Refuge in Reality and its Teachings (Dharma)
I take Refuge in Humanity (Sangha)
I vow to cease creating evil
I vow to do good
I vow to work to create abundant good for all beings

So this is my birthday present to myself. Good luck, huh?
Bobby

Happy New Year Cooking Beans

It’s 2010, a New Year, a new decade. In Memphis where I grew up Tula (Darthula Baldwin, the black woman who worked for my mother and who helped raise me) would cook up black-eyed peas and turnip greens to celebrate the New Year and bring good luck for our family and all of our loved ones. Usually she served the feast with pan-fried cornbread. Good and cheap delicious stuff (1). Now that we’ve lived in El Paso these 30-something years we’ve traded in the black-eyed peas for beans .

A while back I wrote a poem about my beans and folks have asked me how I cook my beans. So this is the way I make beans. Pinto beans, that is. I live in the El Paso and so if I say I’m going to make beans then I’m going to make pinto beans. Refried beans or ranchero beans or gringo vegetarian beans. Beans are pinto beans. If I’m going to cook black beans or navy beans, then I say I’m going to cook up some black beans or some navy beans(1). Now, be forewarned, I cook gringo vegetarian beans. And I make a big pot of them, three or four cups of dried beans at least. No sense of having beans on one day only. We like them for a main course the first night and then from then on we eat them however we want them. We garnish them with chopped onions, tomatoes, Monterrey Jack cheese and salsa, and I chop up a clove or two of fresh garlic and drop them on top of my beans. That way I’ll live forever.

So before I go to bed I rinse the beans, cover them in a pot with lots of water and then soak them overnight to soften them up. In the morning after breakfast and coffee I drain those beans. And then I pour in a box of Pacific Organic Mushroom Broth. Good stuff. It was worth a shot. After cooking beans for at least 30 years, I discovered mushroom broth a couple of years ago. Brilliant idea that really happened by accident. We had a box lost in the pantry for some reason and I'm always experimenting with my beans, so why not? The broth adds a dark and earthy taste to the beans. I put the beans sitting in the mushroom broth on the stove and get them started toward a boil. I also set the oven at 250 degrees. And I start throwing in stuff. I find the biggest onion we have, chop it up and throw it in. At least four large garlic cloves chopped up. 1½ teaspoons of ground cumin. 1 teaspoon of curry powder. Maybe more. 2 or 3 teaspoons of salt. Same with pepper. Just how I feel. I never keep count. 4 tablespoons of Extra Virgin olive oil. Maybe I shake in some Italian Seasoning. Whatever. When it all comes to a boil then I stir it up and open another box of broth and add another inch or so of liquid. Sometimes I just add water if I’m tired of wasting money on my beans. I need to make sure that there’s enough liquid in the pot so I can forget about my beans. I get distracted. I like to cook things that don’t need me to pay too much attention. Before I finish I might add a can of organic tomato sauce or chopped tomatoes or even tomato paste. Cooked tomatoes are supposed to be good healthy stuff for being a man. I think about things like that. It makes cooking more interesting. I put the pot in the oven and go away. The beans cook for five hours or so at 250 degrees.

Like I said in my poem, people like my gringo vegetarian beans, but I’m not averse to meat in my beans. You can’t eat beans in a Mexican restaurant in El Paso without getting some meat in your beans some way or another. If you’re eating refried beans, then those are usually are flavored with some lard. That’s okay. There’s no better place in the world to eat beans than in El Paso. Still, if I cook vegetarian beans, more folks can enjoy them. Lots of vegetarians running around these days. Son Johnny Byrd's novia Ailbhe is a vegetarian. Joe Hayes is a vegetarian (well, he eats fish). I used to be a vegetarian. Still, I will use meat under one condition--Somebody gives me a hambone. Especially a Honey-Baked hambone with flakes of ham still hanging from the bone. Those bones make delicious beans.

So that’s how I make beans. With my first pot of beans in this New Year, I wish for good luck, peace and justice for our friends and neighbors—our brothers and sisters—in La Ciudad Juárez across the river from where we live. My first pot of greens will be for our children and grandchildren, for all of our friends—may we all be blessed with good health and spiritual well-being.

Happy New Year.

Notes:

(1) I still cook the turnip greens, and I cook them mostly the way Tula taught me--lots of greens, onions, garlic, spices but I do them vegetarian style, olive oil instead of a hamhock, sometime I use vegetarian broths of some kind or another. I simmer them all day long on the stove top so that the smell and the humidity from those greens saturate the house and make me want to weep with all those memories. Lee, by the way, is in charge of the cornbread. It’s juicy with butter. It’s the grandkids’ favorite. 

(2) I’m sorry, JB, but that’s the way it is. That’s life, the way we live it here.

Keith Wilson: 1927-2009

Joe and Jill Somoza just called to tell us that our close friend poet Keith Wilson has died. Keith had been in a hospice in Las Cruces for almost two weeks. He passed quietly with Heloise, his daughters Kathy and Kerin and his son Kevin at his side. Keith’s been suffering from aphasia for a number of years and he had lost his ability to speak and to be a poet, so it was time for him to catch the boat to the other side. He will be missed. I will miss him.

Keith, as a friend and a mentor, was a very important influence in my life as a poet and as a householder. I first met him and Heloise in Tucson in 1963 where he was a lecturer. Through him and Barney Childs I became involved in the Ruth Stephan Poetry Center, along with my friend Paul Malanga, and was able to hang around poets and poetry. The Wilson household was always full of talking poetry and laughing. Creeley, Snyder, Duncan, Jerome Rothenberg, John Newlove and so many others were always coming through. It was a special time back then. I’ve always felt privileged to know poets and to be part of the special community of those who make poems. Keith was an entry way for me into this special world.

Last year poets in Las Cruces and Placitas/Albuquerque organized celebrations of Keith and his poetry. He was present at each event and enjoyed them immensely. You can read about each of those occasions on previous blog entries here and here where I've included introductions by Joe Somoza (Las Cruces) and me (Placitas) and poems. The picture above I took in December 2005. Keith was still writing, although I suppose the aphasia was probably creeping into his world.

This fall Clark City Press will be publishing his collected poems (1965-2001), Shaman of the Desert. 1100 pages in all, it will include 23 of his books, uncollected poems and his autobiography that he wrote in 1992 for the Gale Publishing Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series.

In my other postings you'll see other poems, but here is one of my favorite Keith Wilson poems, a poem I heard a long time ago back in the day. May Keith rest in peace.

The Gift
--for my daughter Kathleen

This is a song
about the gift of patience

of opening

the need to walk alone
ever, deeper, into

This is a poem
against light

a recommendation
to darkness

Bring a candle
the room is warm

This is a song

The Yankees & Me

A long time ago I read that Teddy Gold, one of the original members of the Weather Underground, had told friends that he would never be a good communist until Willie Mays retired. Maybe his love for Willie and baseball was a good thing. We will never know. In March 1970 Teddy Gold, along with Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins, died making bombs to shape the world anew.

But the Yankees and me? I don’t know. It’s a hate/love thing. Lots of confusion. I grew up in Memphis watching Saturday baseball and Series games on a little black & white TV or listening to them on the radio. I watched all those great Dodger-Yankees series with Darthula Baldwin. “Tula” was the black woman who was our live-in maid and surrogate mother--our "Mammy"--while our widowed mother worked 60 hours a week selling real estate. I figure I get my politics from being raised by women, Tula at home and my mother doing battle with 1950s white-male chauvinists out in the marketplace. With Tula sitting next to me sighing and groaning and dipping her snuff, it was easy to love Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. They were heros carved into my imagination. But secretly I also loved Mickey Mantle because he was "the Mick," Billy Martin because he was crazy and Whitey Ford because he was steady. And finally Yogi Berra with large spoonfuls of grudging respect. (I always hated to see Yogi bat against the Dodgers. He was their curse.) Then Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles and my uncle and aunt got transferred out there the same year. I watched the Dodgers in the Coliseum. One Saturday afternoon, before Sandy Koufax learned to “pitch,” I sat on a bench seat high up in the Coliseum and saw him strikeout something like 13 batters and walk 10 or so others. Hell, he probably hit a couple of guys. From that vantage point it became much easier to allow my distaste for the Yankees to blossom. CBS bought them, Ralph Houk unceremoniously fired Yogi Berra, then George Steinbrenner for God’s sake bought them. Richard Nixon, the Boss’ buddy, was president. So from then rooting against the Yankees turned political. Tula, who had died, whispered in my ear: "Bobby, honey, I told you so." Time passed. Thurmond Munson died, like my dad, piloting a plane; Reggie Jackson came and went doing his swizzle-stick impersonation; Steinbrenner spent money and jerked players and managers around. The Boss was always up there in the voting for the annual Asshole Award.

And now comes my son-in-law Ed Holland. I love Ed. He’s great. Andrei Codrescu met him once and asked me under his breath in that goofy accent, “Bobby, did you find your son-in-law in a catalog?" But Ed grew up in Connecticut among a family of Yankees fans. He is definitely a Yankees’ fan. True Yankees fans don’t see the grey around the edges. They are rabid. Like you see on television. This is the guy who sleeps in the same bed with my only daughter. His son Johnny Hollandbyrd, who (ironically) plays “coach-pitch” Little League ball in a Dodgers uniform, is likewise infected. Being nine, he has no idea about his granddad’s confusion. And I try to be a Zen Buddhist. How can you be a Zen Buddhist and take sides? Or not forgive George Steinbrenner? Meanwhile, secretly, I'm a Joe Torre fan. And I admire Derrick Jeter the way I admired Yogi. He's just an incredible ballplayer. Oh well. Here’s a poem I wrote the morning after the Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians. Read it now. Baseball poems are such emphemeral things.

OCTOBER 2007

This morning George Steinbrenner
Is putting on a fresh pair of cotton white boxer shorts.
He knows Joe Torre will lose his job.
And he knows now he will die.
No more “Boss.”
He sighs.
A-Rod doesn’t deserve to be in a poem.
Joba Chamberlain,
Like all of us when we were young,
Believes the world is flat
Forever.

—for my grandson Johnny Hollandbyrd

NOTE: In the the photograph above, black-eye Johnny had just gotten smacked in the nose by a pitch before a game. And the photo below is Ed pitching to Johnny during a game. Johnny's a good ballplayer. He can field and hit for power. That's Ed's doing. He been thowing balls to his son since Johnny was two. Andrei was right. It's like he came out of a catalog. Except he has this Yankee thing. Where did that come from, huh?