To come into being again,
overaged,
in the morning's slow awakening,
in a kind of resignation,
a kind of laying down of arms,
a kind of unconditional surrender—
is an open, truthful way
of leaving the world in peace
with all its evolutionary occupations,
and allowing one's own bewildering fact
to atone for its existence
as best it can,
in a poem by Hsieh Ling-yün or Rumi,
as interpreted by David Hinton
and Coleman Barks,
respectively

There is a kind of starlight
in consciousness's inescapable assessment
of the odds;
a kind of illuminated band of mist
in the relaxed acceptance
of body and world,
and all the faces that are of earth,
long since returned to the earth;
already become earth,
in the fullness of time;
the few handfuls of dust
drifting through perception,
while Lisa Frost rises from the radio
with the Åland Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia,
and their reference surfaces,
just as yesterday's twenty kilometers of roller-skiing
light up again
within the body
with a crackling Tenzin Gyatso giggle!