Bitter Sea
a Buddhist image for the world of suffering
Steel bird heaves to air
unzips some clouds.
Unfurling like a Chinese scroll
below the wing—
suburban sprawl of baseball diamonds
and oil refineries, ox-bowing rivers
and rush hour highways,
then endless checkerboards
of green, grey-green, and brown,
coal-razed hilltops and smog-clad towns.
A geometry that anyone can see
but few can read—
all the shapes our shapeless days
have made falling back and back and back
in drapes of morning haze.
Remembering Lao Tzu,
self-exiled from the kingdom of his day
astride an ox, seated backwards.
This antic master of reversals knew
you cannot flee the crooked facing straight.
His kindly eyes never strayed
from the dust of the Bitter Sea.
Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet, and author of two biographies. In addition to Off the Coast, his poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, Writer’s Almanac, This American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and other publications. His first poetry collection, What the Dust Doesn't Know, was published in 2017 by Salmon Poetry.