To Be a Good Buddhist Is Ensnarement

Jenny Xie

The Zen priest says I am everything I am not.

In order to stop resisting, I must not attempt to stop resisting.

I must believe there is no need to believe in thoughts.

Oblivious to appetites that appear to be exits, and also entrances.

What is there to hoard when the worldly realm has no permanent vacancies?

Ten years I’ve taken to this mind fasting.

My shadow these days is bare.

It drives a stranger, a good fool.

Nothing can surprise.

Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill.

Jenny Xie's debut poetry collection, Eye Level, was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera as the winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets.

Themes

About this Poem

“This poem brings in the kinds of paradoxes that appear in Zen teachings, which are often deployed to short-circuit the analytical mind. Insight and understanding arrive through a leap, and by letting the intellect and dualistic thought fall away. I’ve always been attracted to the idea that what is worth knowing lies beyond reason. To cease the dogged pursuit for answers, and to stay with a vast unknowing—this is a balm.”
—Jenny Xie

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Ongoing

Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.

Jenny Xie

2018

Inwardly

The lightest realizations arrive in restraint—
so the old masters tell us.

Not unlike the tug at the end of a line.

We have language for what is within reach
but not the mutable form behind it.

Or else, why write.

I’m sick of peering at the ego.
No, my ego’s tired of peering at me—

It’s she who awakens me into being.

So it goes: the seer mistaken for the seen.

Jenny Xie

2018

Poems

To Be a Good Buddhist Is Ensnarement

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Ongoing

Inwardly

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To Be a Good Buddhist Is Ensnarement

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