Poem I Just Finished on Mindfulness

Here's a poem I took to the final stage this morning: it's on mindfulness and how watching one's thoughts (how they always stray from the present moment) can lead to surreal visualizations. It's the sort of thing my students experience when we practice mindful eating: all of a sudden, eating a segment of an orange or a cracker becomes almost psychedelic. The orange sparkles with complexity: the ordinary cracker becomes a serrated desert.





Incidence of Meditation Hallucinogenous with Site-Specific Factors

The up down, up and down of one’s thoughts

dark green, gray-green, and white columns

are splices of different times and places

that a woman horsebacks through

on a carousel and across the way

sprayed-on laughter comes from a canister

labeled Autumn in New England

as one wades ankle-deep in water gone bright pink

through a patchwork of thyme and cilantro.

The lake is stagnant with statements,

a swizzle stick rusting flamingo leaning at one end.

One’s order is up, aji de gallina set out on a tray

beneath the striped awning of a cloud

and like rubble from a graph fallen from the sky

the parts of a week are strewn in front of you

as well as a 3-column hedge in several places

like in a steeplechase, and the high navy Tower

of thoughts about the Future always rising,

and the stubborn taupe stubble of the past

which seen from the side become

the scent of words in the woods,

hundreds of colored puddles—

“woodsy,” “fandango pink,” “polynesian purple”

—that quiver, then shoot up as geysers

at 2,000 words a minute as in a state-sponsored display

of craft and artistry right before a state-sponsored display

of athleticism and technology:

the woods is a holder for a giant woman

wearing a plaid shirt & a hibiscus blossom behind her ear

in an advertisement for teeth whitening

that’s about to dissolve into a series of boxes

computer-generated, like utility boxes in a landscape,

tossing herself back into a laugh

a gondola coming out of her mouth, MEN WORKING IN ROAD,

in the way in which sunset gets inserted behind trees

behind the bristle-brushes of those cell-phone towers.