The Gift
I glance at a windblown evergreen tree.
Ever at playful work, the poet mind,
a pollen image seeking honeybee,
extracts vision of a metaphor kind.
Topmost cluster of entangled branches
becomes Chinese calligraphy letter.
I blink, hold my breath and vision blanches.
The mystic mind, empty, without fetter,
perceives nothing but what the I does sense.
Shape is shape, green is green, simple suchness
of tree and treed ambience condense
all perception to grace of wind’s caress.
But even finer than this dual talent
is what the gift to observe does present.