What Is Your Work?

Another Little Misfit

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What is your work? the prompter asked. The prompter or promoter. Not the poet. The poet declared, This is my work. What is your work? This is my work. To see, the poet says. To hear, to taste, to touch, to smell? To think. The sixth sense. The mind. What is your work? Not this. This. Not this. This again. What has been your work? A lifetime. A lifetime isn’t over. Work isn’t over. Still working, still asking. This is the work that should be done. The words of the sutra. A buddha’s words. Or wisdom’s. Sources, speakers, blur, all words, all sound, coming from light that has no name, or ten, or a hundred, a thousand, a million, millions of millions, beyond counting, the singular lesson the sutra imparts, over again and again. This is the work to be done. To observe. To count the uncountable. To name the unnamable. To see. To listen. To iterate. Every iteration a fragment, necessary, incomplete, broken from the whole, reflecting into the breach all that it is and isn’t. This is the work that must be done. To offer. To receive. To give. To give up. To grieve. This is the work.

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