Ken Weisner edits the longrunning poetry journal Red Wheelbarrow. This year a poem of mine entitled "Esalen" was included:
Esalen
In the dark bar—
wooden tables, black chairs, colored Christmas lights—
she says There is more grace in the world than we can see,
says her small boy
will never speak, devilish gene robbing him
of voice, fingers—but his shaman eyes appear
in people’s dreams, speaking there
what cannot be said here. One day,
a passing Buddhist monk stopped
at his baby carriage, asked to pay respects
to such a teacher. There is more grace
in this world than you can see echoes another
of her brother the psychedelic seeker, lost
chasing the Gordian knot of consciousness,
spiking his coffee with magic mushrooms
which she drank, unknowingly, during a visit.
Later, as she stopped her car on the ridge to view
phantasmagoric pine, undulating asphalt,
she glimpsed for a few hours the landscape
her brother cannot escape. Outside the bar,
down the hill in the warm sulfur baths,
a Brazilian healer prays over the tumors
in another friend’s belly, the waves
beneath the cliffs sounding a kind of grace.
In this morning, she will come to us at breakfast
at this same wooden table, say
she wants more of this, the only life she knows.
This one, where she is eating oatmeal
in small spoonfuls, in a black chair,
lips savoring dark sugar, sweet milk.