A Taste of Good

I spent a weekend in the closet at
an apartment a friend and I shared.
Longer, really. Did not eat.
Drank only water.
Sat in lotus. Not sure what
happened between meditations.
There were only a few coats hung.
An entanglement of shadows
that switched places morning
through evening. An apartment above
where the mercurial feet of children
alternated with a mother’s routines.
I came out on a Monday or Tuesday afternoon
when the woman I would soon live with
came by to bring us bread that had risen
on top of a radiator as she read Dostoevsky.
I was lighter than at any time before or since
until shafts from the window that fell to the rug
might have passed through me as well.
She took off a heavy coat. Said that
a Norther had been blowing in
across Lake Michigan three days straight,
then settled into our only decent chair.
My roommate was gone, probably out to class.
I didn’t do classes any more. Had stopped
working for this. Her aura was lime
and swelled around her in wide arcs
so soft I could have passed within
and come out refreshed, except that
I was already fresh, very fresh.

The First Gate

I spent a summer in a makeshift tent
in the Green Mountains
by a lake rimmed with hardwoods
where I could swim naked.
Deer moved in set patterns.
On the cleared grass of ski slopes
around ten. Then again at four.
There were places
water seeped out of stone.
I ate potatoes uncooked, crisp
like they were apples.
“Pomme de terre,” sharp.
Acrid. Because it was easy.
Seemed nutritious. Cheap.
In July there were patches of dwarf blueberry
that only came up to the knee but bore well.
I was learning to care about little
except what lives in the center.
How to walk away from much.
How to be without a name.
I stripped. To breathe
as Adam breathed.
I came at the dawn
like I was dawn.

Be Pierced

I have walked to the edge of a field.
Snow dusts broken corn as I stand
on crusted ruts tractor tires dug
into muck during the planting season.
The moon is a fingernail
dangled above tree limbs
bare as dental nerves
and surrounded by earth’s exhalation
of a saffron and tangerine admixture
so radiant it couldn’t be more than forty seconds old.
Yet is already moving toward extinction.
If you know of any limits
do not tell me about them.
Find the steel blade truth raises.
Be pierced and aware.

January

On a day when dawn dials in
at minus twenty three in distant Milwaukee
I imagine how my dear friend Gary
has mushed his Honda across that snowscape
to get to a local hospital and be lulled
into an anesthesia-induced reverie
so that a surgeon's blades can
slice out a section of esophagus
that lays just anterior to his spine.
Replace that with a matching
3-D tube printed just for him.
In Baton Rouge I wake to see
oak trunk and branches back lit
by dawn in half a window frame.
The trunk in slight backwards tilt,
Black branches sprung and slender,
willowy at points.
Still a few grace notes of leaves
hang as a norther drags through.
Animates a slow, star-spare
harp music usually lost to me
within the greater symphony.

I have practiced meditation (zazen, and yoga) for decades. Much of poetry is about the inward and outward flow of breath. In my poetry, lines are very often set adrift or combined via a giving over similar to what occurs when I meditate. One has to lose their voice to find the voice of the poem. Then the poem can return within the poet's voice. Some poems call for a fierce sense of self while others rise up as if written by an unseen hand. There are so many poems I could have sent.

I am Ed Ruzicka, an occupational therapist, and live with my wife in Baton Rouge, LA. I have published widely. My second book, My Life In Cars, is set for release this October.