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| Issue 26: | 1 Jan. 2025 |
| Poem: | 139 words |
By Marcus Elman
After Reading Aitken’s
A Zen Wave: Bashō’s Haiku and Zen
Aging like a rock, my face smiles in erosion dancing in the breeze. Original mind? sky conjugations; verbs—without discourse. The rite of being— one foot follows the other; witness or witless! My arms beat birdlike. Don’t scold me like some dreamer, flight is for the birds. I dare my Roshi to sing the sutra on one leg or try the other. Vultures figure eight. River grass dead still. Prison of revenge. Red ants charge, trail crawl; carry crumbs to lounging queens. How cheerful they march. A spoon of honey, a good lesson for the way... pear blossoms charm bees. Darling, autumn wakes; dawn cloudburst at Red Sand Beach. Once more! Oh, once more. Chilly Snow Creek plunge. Rinpoche, where is Snow Creek? Hot tea warms the heart.
Marcus Elman
is a yoga and fitness therapist working mostly with the elder/sage population in Southern California. Also a dancer and poet, he is curious about energy, how things work and get repaired, and the idea of redemption.
As a young dancer in the late 1980s, he collaborated four years with French artist Michel Costiou in the artist’s studio in Paris, on experimental movement. In their common search to activate and awaken energy, they redefined and shaped the art studio as a laboratory of experimental movement and painting. Three of Costiou’s artworks appear in Elman’s debut poetry chapbook, Because the World Is Spinning (MacQ, September 2024).
Elman’s poem “The Boulevards of Los Angeles” received an honorable mention in Beyond Baroque’s 2017 annual poetry prize and was published in the textbook Method & Mystery: A Research-Based Guide to Teaching Poetry (The Poetry Salon, 2019). “The Crossing” was shortlisted for the Into The Void Poetry Prize 2020. His poems have been published in Cultural Daily [see links below], in MacQueen’s Quinterly, and in three volumes of Sunbeams: The Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Anthology (2018, 2019, and 2020). He is a graduate of American River College, UC Davis, and Pepperdine.
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Marcus Elman: Two Poems from his book, Because the World Is Spinning, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 24, 30 August 2024)
⚡ Marcus Elman: Two Poems in Cultural Daily (5 January 2023): “The Prosciutto Ambulance” and “The Offering”
⚡ The Boulevards of Los Angeles in Cultural Daily (26 September 2018)
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