Tassajara

The abbot declared your beloved pit bull had Buddha nature,
so you carried her sixty muscled pounds to the mountain

monastery, where we sat sesshin and she ate wool socks,
a box of chocolates, and eight pages of Robert Aitken. 

(All is impermanent, quickly passing.)

Creatures filled that weeklong silence—incessant Steller’s jays, your panting
dog, even our own graveled steps dancing down the valley’s furrowed brow.

I could hardly believe I once meditated the way I used to love:
from the neck up. But then you ruined me, how a koan ruins:

Kindly. By surprise. Seizing all surety. Even beginners
know not to mistake a finger pointing at the moon

for the moon. But I couldn’t distinguish
between your hand and what it summoned:

arrival, dissolution, a soft light to come—which I didn’t,
because your dog sauntered unseen to our low bed

and licked, with vigor, my left breast. The old teachers
used to hit their students. Zen is full of shocking sensations

and sudden laughter. My cackling roused a dozen monks
as you dragged your dog by the collar to a corner.

I wanted to kiss her back because the teachings
ask us to love what feels impossible to love.

Like our last night at the monastery, when she
trailed us to the hot springs and rumbled with a skunk.

In essential terms we are not separate from the skunk.
Still, we fought the stench of interdependence:

You mixed Dawn and baking soda in a bucket
while I slung open the sliding cedar doors.

Outside, the stars were pinpricks in wet denim,
the night dripping. Forgive me, Paul,

that I like to remember you this way: naked, hunched
in yellow kitchen gloves, scrubbing

your fetid dog between us while we kissed,
were kissing, and the moon overhead—

what use did the three of us have for it?—
went missing.