(She asked me to write something about The Buddha, but the tree kept getting in the way . . .)

In my garden all are flowers,
shining like Buddha beneath the Bo tree.
Here there is but a single wish:
to bloom.

The same music which turns our longing
into a fine sweet dust, and flutters
silently in the tall solitude
of cemeteries, while dreaming its secret purpose in leaf and sky,
memory and childhood,life and death, raises my thoughts
among innumerable stems
to flow quietly among the delicate intensity of petals, a fragrance almost tactile.

If I revere anything it is
for the fruit it bears like a wound,
the little self of mere appearances
sacrificed to a greater unity
in the scars of an unending music
and the perfect hope of an energetic
God . . . So I visit my garden

with reverence, a bringer of water
laboring in fields of love, hoping
by this simple communion
to bear the burden of a man's fruit,

and to know, like the faithful corn,
the power and the beauty
of one honest season.