This next book has--
this next poem has a word from Zen in it.
The word is "koan," and the koan you are all probably familiar
with is, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
They are those unanswerable questions
that Zen students are supposed to struggle with.
"The heart's counting knows only one.
In Song China, two monks, friends for 60 years,
watched the geese pass.
'Where are they going?'
one tested the other, who couldn't say.
That moment's silence continues.
No one will study their friendship
in the koan books of insight.
No one will remember their names.
I think of them sometimes, standing, perplexed by sadness,
goose down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.
Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains, but not yet,
as the barely audible geese are not yet swallowed, as even we,
my love, will not entirely be lost."