The School of Soft Attention. Frank LaRue Owen
Poems
by Frank LaRue Owen
Winner of the 2017 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize
Homebound Publications
Ensuring the mainstream isn’t the only stream
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Published in 2018 • Homebound Publications
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Cover and Interior Designed • Leslie M. Browning
First Edition Trade Paperback: 978-1-947003-96-5 | eBook: 978-1-938846-62-5
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1
“Who said my poems are poems?
These poems are not poems.
When you realize that my poems are not poems,
then we can talk of poetry.”
–Ryōkan Taigu, Zen hermit-poet
2
“The third poetry is sometimes never written;
but when it is, it is written by those
who have brought nature and art
together into one thing.”
–Walter Inglis Anderson
3
Dedication
for doña Río,
who guided me
into the wilderness
of the self, and
the wilderness
of New Mexico
for my mother,
a lifetime student
in the school of soft-attention,
who encouraged me at an early age
to listen to Nature deeply,
to pay attention to dreams,
and to consult the I Ching
and
my father,
for river-times
and
“black water cartography”
4
Preface
The Dao of Receiving
“A man doesn’t go in search of a poem; the poem comes in search of him.” –Yang Wan-Li
Outside: gray day, dark clouds, white frost on branches.
Inside: I sit wrapped in a blanket beside a rain-dappled window
gazing up at the swaying sentinel pines, contemplating Dao.
A black-capped chickadee, adorned with all the same colors of this day, darts in and out of view. Flowing with the moment, a thought stirs like feathers ruffling:
Heart-Mind, left to its natural state, is vast as a panorama of Nature.
If settled, receptive, a poem may arrive like the seed-hunting chickadee flitting through.
A splash of color. A flash of life and movement. A brief moment in this shared dream. Are we truly present to receive it? This is the path, on this gray day, and every other day.
Words emerge from the silent illumination of the wordless Dao.
Yet, words can never be complete.
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