Let It Go, Buddha

Let it go, Buddha
keeps saying, still so attached
to detachment that veins

I imagine at his temples
are throbbing like the chanting
of ancestors on a CD

I bought cheap for $7.97.
For once again I’ve had
the wrong idea, Calvitholicism

an indissoluble oil slick floating
on Buddha’s smooth sea
of equanimity. Try

as I might – and well,
there it is: attached
at the straining hip of effort.

Zen Master Seung Sahn says wanting
enlightenment’s a big mistake.
I say add it to the list:

the first marriage, the first
religion, the second – trying to save
the whole world with words.

---

D. R. James’s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020); his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at Origami Poems Project; and individual poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and journals. He lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan.

[image: Buddha sculpture at night | Jan Kopřiva]