PAUL CROUCHER

MindFire Renewed

I sleep alone,

On my tearstained pillow,

Like a abandoned boat,

Adrift on the sea.

          - tanka, author unknown,

           translated by K. Rexroth

Paul Croucher was born in a small mining town near Canberra in 1961. He has worked in bookshops, spent two years travelling in Asia, and six years studying history and Japanese at Monash University. In 1989 he published Buddhism in Australia (UNSW Press). And since 1992 has been looking after his two sons, gardening, editing poetry magazines, and working on a collection of poems.

ROCK GARDEN COMPLEXES

Like a painter's idea of perfection

they hide, up here

in the folds of mountains.

In the groves of an old consciousness.

Poems of sand and stone.

Conspicuous rafters, shadow beams.

Dogen's temple's gravel swept

up like waves before

porous rocks, like porous faces

composed

not as those of powder kept

abstracted in palaces,

but as weather-exposed islands that rise

out of the Inland Sea.

A charactery of the actual earth.

A kanji, that rise out of,

and yet include,

that which they are.

"AT THE SOUND / OF THE TEMPLE BELL ..."

At the sound

of the temple bell

I'm wondering

what the hell

it was

I wanted.

*

Where

could we

ever

be

but here?

GINKAKU-JI

Silver trees

by the old temple

lean into the dying light.

Flags above

the dusk-lit eaves

of centuries

wavering:

May peace prevail on earth

BALLOONING

over

Lake Biwa

she said

that cut loose

from common

sense

it's all

soon

inflated.

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