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  • Portrait of my Daughter as a Young Buddha
  • Ralph Black (bio)

Maybe it’s the way she sits at the dinner table, legs tucked beneath her, beaming fully at her plate, as though the heap of fettuccini bolognese was nothing but an edible mandala, an eight-fold al-dente koan that will lead her to the sated side of emptiness.

Or how some mornings, still pink from the shower’s stuttering jets, she kneels on her bed, wrapped and enrapt in a large gold towel, back straight, head tipped high as a lotus, one arm curved across the universe of her belly.

I’ve seen her pour buckets of sand into the ocean, dump seawater onto temples of sand, sluicing the ephemeral into the eternal as though both were pieces in a child’s game. I’ve heard her cry out at night a sound like wind ohming through a grove of aspen, then wake on the ragged border of sleep, her eyes enjewelled with a glimpse brought back from fleeting worlds.

So I call her who she is: Gautama, Saugata, Bodihisattva, Elise, a four-chant name I repeat like a mantra, hoping to reach her in the dharma-swirled practice of morning cartoons. [End Page 136]

The way she berates her sister for breathing, or leaves socks in the fruit bowl at night, the way she holds in her body a vortex of noise, releasing it like a previous incarnation—a fleet-footed, night-nosing, kink-tailed caterwaul—might lead some to doubt the nature of her true nature.

But she knows every song is a sutra, every road a way out and back in. She knows what a stone means meeting water, and what a bell sounds like the moment before it is struck. [End Page 137]

Ralph Black

Ralph Black’s poems have appeared in the Gettysburg and Georgia Reviews, West Branch, and 32 Poems, among other journals. He is the author of Turning Over the Earth (Milkweed, 2000) and The Apples Psalms (Paper Lantern Press, 2008) and is the recipient of the Chelsea Poetry Prize and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review. He teaches at SUNY Brockport, where he is Co-Director of the Brockport Writers Forum. rwblack@brockport.edu

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