Site of Zen

There in suburbia,
backed up against a neighborhood nature park,
that plot of land indemnified
per the ordinance of the city's new incorporation,
a field sluiced by a creek
whose banks are riprapped in a silt fence
made of coirs that catch the people's trash:
gatorade bottles,
rusty trikes,
a mangled traffic cone
catapulted from the tollway above the ravine,
the tollway your brain stopped listening to
through the barbed acoustic attenuation wall (A.A.W.),
that dampens the sound.

There in suburbia is a dead-end street
that leads to the community's middle school,
a school flanked by non-attendants of the school,
whose homes were built for the private class.
Nevertheless, the school is important to mention
because the pre-, peri-, and post-pubescent children
ooh and ah at the spectacle of what they see in suburbia.
Unfortunately, those children are immured
in wheels of their mobile, yellow cage.
The closest their affection can come,
comes through throwing their prized possessions
with adoration as offerings to the gods.

The diesel rumbles by, windows down,
and the broadside battery unleashes its salvo.
Fifty children, arms dangling, fluttering,
and firing an enfilade of pencil toppers,
Rice Krispie wrappers,
and once I found a keychain.

This house,
this long ranch house,
double-storied ranch house,
was once defined as a compound.
The proportions of the windows are wrong:
small, not symmetrical.
The home's facade is mostly plaster, of mustard beige,
with unbecoming stonework
that it wears like poorly fitted shin guards.
The word ugly comes to mind.
The yard is easily fifty yards from the street,
if yard is the correct description.
Residential forest is more apt.

Then, one day, now distant in memory,
a feller head attached to a Caterpillar
harvested the whole lot
till there was nothing but stumps, sawdust, and slash.
The entire earth before the home was blighted
by the to and fro of near constant daily labor.
Skidders and forwarders skidding and forwarding,
so that all the soil was upheaved and scarred
by the tracks and batteries of heavy machinery.
The only recognizable bit were the stumps,
like dog tags collected from a corpse.
That was until the stump grinders
made do with that too.

Months would pass,
and walkers-by like myself would wonder
why the forest was put to death
for no reason
but an uglier yard.

Then, one day, off to the left of this gangly estate,
came an outline of a pebble path,
defined with plastic edging.
Then stones, then mulch,
and aside it all was a shovel staked in the ground
as if marking conquered land.
Beside it, a hose,
offering itself like the serpent of life.

Day by day, week by week, noticeable progress —
but noticeable like watching a video with dropped frames,
a time-lapse without a subject.
The yard improved itself without sight of its keeper,
who seemingly worked in that queer hour of 10:15 a.m.,
when even homemakers were gone away on errands.

We still weren't sure what it was,
till the gateless gate erected itself
as a Japanese torii.
The keeper had made for himself a Zen garden.

Many would call it ugly.
But as its expanse has expanded
to envelop the whole left yard,
I have come to visit this Shinto shrine,
awaiting its progress with the same anticipatory glee
as throngs who await the marginal developments
in the news cycle, in the daytime dramas,
and on whatever it serves by the algorithm's latest trend.

What many may still see as ugly,
I now see as beauty.
The vermilion red is the beacon of my nightly walk,
set nowadays to the croaking of summertime creek frogs
and the pulsing bursts of lightning bugs.
A Japanese maple grows out from the garden.
From the sand rake have been made concentric waves
around a rock like Mount Meru,
that grounds me from my day's worries and duties.

Knowing not the keeper of this place,
I have found, in myself, a keepsake.
Somewhere in this world that makes no sense
has erupted, spontaneously,
a site of Zen.