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| This bird is cold. The Gazebo is enclosed. In the winter zero-activity is also its openings are covered with shutters made of thick slabs of oak. The bird roams inside, a Raven, used to winter, used to the dark -- silent, smart, uncomplaining. In early spring the oak opens, screen takes its place. the bird, silent still cold, moves, its black eye glitters, and sometimes paces to the front of its cage. But no further. Flight is denied. Summer. Warm breezes. Because this is a mountaintop, the screens are down. The air inside, which is the same as that without, mingles with the space of the endless universe. The Gazebo released in a winter storm, walls shattered, there is now no inside, no out. The cold bird having seen everything, all these things, for its own reasons leaps up, its strong, dark wings rowing to the pines and the sun, Raven-roaming, by milky way, the end of things; the same dark knowing bird that had been caged, with one sharp hoarse cry mixes imprisonment with air, two winged, and vanishes behind the trees. |
It was the historical
Buddha, Shakyamuni, who discovered that zero exists through the activity of zero. This is called the activity of emptiness. -Sasaki Roshi- |
Steven Fortney
Black Buzzard Press, Visions International, Fredericksburg Va.,
October, 1998
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