Flower Moon Dispatch

Poems After Simmering

image: Kyle Glenn

"Learning to Walk Back Into Your Life"

-

Sometimes I go about pitying myself
and all the time I am being carried
on great winds across the sky.
- from an Anishinaabe song,
documented by ethnologist Frances Densmore, early 1900s

-

We've all been raised
in a You Can't Let Down 
Because You Have to Keep 
Holding It All Together culture.

Most everyone dresses well
and conjures the occasional smile
between polite surface small talk.

In a You Can't Let Down
Because You Have to Keep 
Holding It All Together culture
there are only small sips of joy.

We enter a trance 
as we do our living
and that trance 
causes a deep forgetting.

It's like one day
you're walking down the sidewalk
and you suddenly have the sensation
of having stepped out of yourself.

Maybe it was a loss.
Maybe it was a betrayal.
Maybe it's the million-and-one details.
Maybe it is a primal disappointment in one's own country.

For whatever reason,
you're no longer standing 
in the life you thought you were leading.

Stone Lake, 
of flowers and vases fame,
had his own disappointment.

It led him to say:

"Southern Zen. Northern Zen. 
I've tried it all.
This hermit has his own philosophy now.
Time to devote myself to my hillwalker's stick."

_______

"The Practice of Purification"
__

between thunder claps
chorus of midnight tree frogs  —
purification

__

Sometimes the dust of the world sticks to us.

Weighs us down.
Distorts our vision.

Without knowing it,
we can even carry the dust
from one place to another,
from one room to another.

We cease to see the other.
We don't hear.

This is why
purification upon departing
purification upon arrival
becomes a thread-guide for heart-mind.

Otherwise we end up
haunting one another
with ghosts we didn't know
were attached to us.

_______

"Deep Within Mysterious Shade"
- eve of the Flower Moon

There comes a point
in some Wayfarer's lives
when the words
flowing off the brush
are no longer yours.

The words arrive
from some other source
beyond the fabricated "self"
like messages coming in
from far across a valley.

The other side of the valley is all shade
murky gray dark
blue-gray steam dark 
dragon-green clouds 
slithering 'round rhododendrons dark
dark-enigma dark.

And if you keep walking the Road
the Road deepens your humanity;
leaves you with no choice
but to stand inside your life
and surrender the brush to the words 
making themselves known to you.

_______

"Flower Moon Tea"

When the dipper in the sky
turns just so
out pours starlight renewal.

Sky nectar
finally reaches the tongue
having passed through 
cloud
air
stone
river bend
into tea pot

into leaf
into steam
into a cup called luminous abyss.

The two-word teaching arrives.

Stay open.

_______

"The River One"

_

Good fortune comes to determined Wayfarers.
- Hexagram 56, The Wayfarer, I Ching
_


At first, The Way feels like a river — 
'out there';
a river far from you.

Though subtle,
you feel it,
hear it,
sense it, 
beyond.

The river calls to you.

With time, you aren't any more certain.

Is it that you draw closer to the river
or does the river draw nearer to you?

Then, one day,
you realize there is no 'you' —
only the river.

You see then:
you have always been in the river.

There has never been a 'you'
separate from the river.

The Way is not something you do.
The Way is something you are.

You, The River, One.

© 2026 / Frank Inzan Owen / The Luminous Procession: Poems From Within and Beyond the World of Red Dust

soundworlds: “Humid Heat” and “The Calling” / Intersecting Skies / Roy Mattson