In Writing: Dale Hobson

My late friend (and an early encourager of my study of Zen Buddhism) Allen Hoey talked a lot about his experiences at Dai Bosatsu during his numerous sesshin and a 40-day intensive stay. He urged me to visit there. The abbot of the Syracuse Zen Center, Shinge Roshi, also encouraged me to come. And people from the Canton meditation group were going there. And my friend Anne, who first got me down to the Syracuse center and helped deepen my practice from the intellectual to the actual, tried to get me to make the journey down to this haven in the Catskills. Decades have passed, and finally I have made the journey.

Leaving Anne at the Monastery

After the cities shrink down to towns, the road shrinks down
from four lanes to two, and then to one — a steep dirt track
up the mountain to the monastery. Anne, no longer licensed
to drive, rides in back. I, no longer safe either, ride shotgun.

Of the five of us, I am the only one who has never been here;
I don’t even own a proper robe. But after settling in, we sit
in the Zendo meditating in the dark. Anne keeps vigil all night
in the Dharma Hall. They wake us with shaken bells before dawn.

Forty or so sisters and brothers voice the morning service,
chanting to gong and drum the basic tenets of the practice.
We do Dai Segaki chanting for Anne’s 49^th-day observance:
May we all cease wandering in the darkness of ignorance. Yes.

We take Anne up above the little lake to the Sangha Meadow 
where the founders and ancestral teachers are given honor.
Jishin Sensei purifies the site as we chant Namu Dai Bosa.
Namu Dai Bosa. (I take refuge in the Great Bodhisattva).

Circling round an apple tree to scatter Anne’s ashes, we chant 
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily,
merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…

Life is but a dream.

For years I have been working at beating back the aggressive invasive species that have taken over much of my property. I thought of it as gardening by subtraction. Get rid of all the crap and then see what I might have to work with. But this year the sun could finally reach down to ground level, and I am finding that there is a whole ecosystem already there in utero, buried in the soil, ready to re-emerge. It makes me wonder what is ever really lost.

Chainsaw Sunday

Back then Allen was always slipping chainsaws into his poems.
It might have been an early love for David Budbill’s first book,
“Chainsaw Dance,” but I think it was mostly Hemingway–
the romance of so-called manly arts–blood sports, boxing, 
fly fishing, general mayhem—being no one to mess with.

But it could have been the sheer Zen of it, the impossibility
of thinking while steel teeth shriek through the heartwood.
Or it could have made him feel he should wear cape and cowl,
superhuman feller of giants, ash-butcher and oak-splitter.
Whatever a chainsaw was to him, it somehow passed me by.

I preferred trees standing, wearing their Joseph-coats 
of autumn splendor, or naked when winter looms, their 
mantles cast off to flutter at their feet. I liked to put hands 
on them–lopping shears, pruners, brush saws– to groom, 
not ruin. Allen filled up the woodshed; I piled up brush.

Now, near 50 years later, my views have changed a little.
Looking at the old pasture I barely dented in a full season
of hand labor, I was out of my depth, old and short-winded.
Knotweed and grapevine, shrub honeysuckle and poison ivy,
on the other hand, somehow retained all the vigor of youth.

I had to call upon a higher power, (electricity, in this case,)
and bought a little 6-inch chainsaw and a weed whacker.
That season I broke through to the river, leaving behind
piles of debris everywhere, working the chainsaw to death,
and burning out the weed whacker. Time to go bigger.

Twice as big, and heavy duty. This season I cleared the field,
at least the half-acre the knotweed had claimed, then began 
peeling back the grape that smothered the honeysuckle that 
hid the long-fallen sumac and hornbeam and boxelder trunks.
All cut and stacked in neat rows now, Allen would approve.

But it was not tabula rasa. Phlox and raspberry I let be,
morning glory, and in the shade a thick thatch of periwinkle.
Some sumac survived under vines. And new discoveries–
surprise lilies popped up, a pear-leaf crab apple emerged,
black cherry, white oak, dogwood, a few big-tooth aspen.

And there, where the knotweed insured nothing else grew
for 40 years, the long-patient seeds and spores of the old
cow pasture began to emerge, resurrected by sun and rain–
marginal wood fern, evening primrose, burnweed, soapwort,
white clover, great mullein, dwarf mallow, purple foxglove.

Not all native, but abundant, diverse, once tumorous growth
was cut from the field. Though I have no need to graze cattle,
the wild whitetails will be glad of the browse. And windrows
of slash and twig will hide hare from owl, give shelter and shade.
There should be enough raspberries to share with bear and bird.

All through my long life, nature has cared for me, body and soul.
Well past time to begin taking care of her. The chainsaw sings out
as I work back toward the stone wall in the shadow of the pines.
This Sunday, I cut away the dead so that the light might fall upon 
the quickening soil. I pour out my sweat into the offering plate.

Dale Hobson, 9/12/25

Each year, a few weeks after school let out, we would overpack one of a succession of enormous station wagons and drive a thousand miles west to Indiana. Hobson relations were liberally salted across the state, and we would manage to see most of them while doing the rounds. Corydon, Freelandville, South Bend, Indianapolis, Vincennes. From the decades of distance, they meld together–Indiana, where it was always July.

July in Indiana

It’s 85 degrees at midnight. I lean 
out the window seeking a breeze.
Peepers sing to the dark, to the corn, 
and the blacktop, and the rising moon. 

In town a dog is barking at nothing.
Farther off a hundred freight cars
racket the rails, the engine blaring 
through each deserted crossing.

I find my Dad here in this pile
pranking around with his brothers.
In the curled photos he’s dashing
and spruce in Army Air Corps khaki.

And there’s Mom, war bride-to-be, 
reclining as Odalisque, adorning 
a field of alfalfa, with a shy smile
for the man behind the camera.

Here’s my brother being bathed
in the sink of a 12-foot trailer–
what married students lived in 
in Bloomington on the G.I. Bill.

Skip ahead and there’s sister
in a cowgirl dress and there’s 
me, sporting droopy shorts
and a look of toddler anxiety.

Then three generations: grandma
and grandpa, seated, backed by 
a wall of sons and daughters-in-law.
A moat of grandkids surrounding.

An odd lot of memory remains
of those summers, a few weeks
each year of Midwest swelter.
They blur together now into one:

Bare feet burning on blacktop,
swimming, drive-in movies, endless
fried chicken, corn smothered
in butter, homemade ice cream.

Every evening, thunderstorms
boiled up out of the west. We’d 
rock back and forth on the porch
as the wind turned damp and cool.

That America was easy to love.
A thousand miles west of my life,
it could have been another world.
But I had to run away into the Sixties.

After, I rarely returned to Indiana.
Once to take Dad to his 50^th reunion
just before he died, once to take our
daughter to great-grandma’s 90th.

But on a sweltering night I will find
myself back there, when trees flash
vivid, lightning-lit, and the heat
yields ten degrees in five minutes.

I’m back there when the night train 
wails for mile after mile. We meet
again in mind, quick and dead alike,
and the long years since come undone.

This is a second stab at this scenario: me, insomniac at a window imagining my fellow insomniacs awake with me, near me on a moonlit night. Only a few lines remain of the first take: Light in Other Windows. I’m not quite where I want to be with it be even yet.

Night Owls

A hazy half-moon hangs upon the wee hours,
a lone lamp beckoning at the edge of the village.
Everyone’s asleep but the sleepless, who gaze 
out from dark rooms as late freights rumble by.

As for me, past my three-score-and-ten, I sleep
little and lightly, as if saving up for eternal rest.
But each inhabits a different village from each
as long as the rest of the village lies asleep.

One is wondering why the dead keep calling him,
why even in dreams he can’t be done with them.
Another wonders where she lost her way, if 
the way things are is the way they will always be.

One studies his reflection in the window, as if he 
were twins, one in darkness and one in the light.
In another a naked man smokes until a sleepy
murmur sounds and moon-pale flesh reaches out.

A calico cat blankets a windowsill, still but for her
blinking eyes which track mice in the moonlight.
A vet startled out of nightmare keeps moonlit watch,
cleans his sidearm, reassembles it by touch alone.

A pregnant woman moons out her kitchen window,
rubs her sore back, spoons ice cream from the carton.
And a bookish man stays up staring at a blank page,
clutching a fruitless pen beneath a stingy moon.

All these in just one square mile of night. Watching
over them, I feel I must leave some benediction:
“May the night train carry you to dreamless sleep;
may daybreak burn off what lurks in the deep.”

This feels like the first real North Country winter we’ve had in years. Five or six falls of powder without a thaw. Temperatures below zero at night. Not just coat weather, but scarf and mittens and boots. I prefer to observe it out the upstairs window, from behind my desk, wearing a cardigan and drinking coffee. It’s a good perch from which to consider the outlines of my next book.

The Open Field

All the work of last summer is purified now, deep in snow.
Game trails pierce the once claustrophobic honeysuckle.
Fox and rabbit make dens in stacks of brush and deadfall.

The back yard opens out towards the river, back to trees
whose growth has tumbled the stones of the old pasture wall. 
Morning sun floods between their limbs into my back room.

At least one more season of clearing work remains, or three–
who can say–but it is good work, the results plain to see.
In a world full of pointless and invisible toil, this is not nothing.

The open field is only a beginning, the way a blank page
is necessary to beginning a new book. Fresh, unstained,
it is fit to hold anything imaginable, anything at all.

Some of this comes from an older poem that sort of petered out unsatisfactorily. I decided it needed a second person and a touch of mortality.

Cold Snap

All night as we lay sleeping snow came down,
the way time accumulates invisibly until 
one morning these are the faces in our mirror.

What plans we might have had for the day – 
poof. Nothing is moving from here to town, 
nothing moving among white-freighted trees.

Only snow is moving, snow steadily falling,
flowing into drifts like waves breaking on
the white beach of a slow-motion ocean.

The cedars harbor black-capped chickadees
fluffed up twice their size against the cold, 
beaks tucked under wings white with snow.

The old farmhouse creaks in the draft. I feel
it in my bones, despite a well-worn cardigan.
I feel it in my heart, despite your presence.

But it is just the inner echo of the weather,
a cold snap of the mind, the brevity of the day
laid alongside the bitter length of night.

Cold and dark get no easier to bear with age, 
reminiscent as they are of that dreaded end
when winters come and winters go without us.

My resolution for the NewYear is to get together with other poets and artists more. I’ve been having a dry spell since I finished my manuscript “The Other Village.” Before I retired, I had a weekly writing assignment to keep me engaged with writing. Then through COVIID and beyond, the new book manuscript went through its several versions. The last time I dried up happened after finishing my first book, “A Drop of Ink,” and casting it adrift among the small publishers who obstruct the sea lanes of contemporary literature.

At that time, 2010 and 2011, I joined up with SLAP ( St. Lawrence Area Poets) and that helped get my juices going again, or at least accompanied me through my rejection slips. Well, SLAP is still around, which proves that the world keeps turning regardless of whether I am working the crank or not. So I’m going back to their monthly gatherings at the SLC Arts Council. I looked back through some of the poetry I wrote to fulfill SLAP assignments and found the following from 2011, which holds up pretty well, I think.

Clouds

First, the ancestor cloud, stratus,
the lattice of DNA, recording each
previous incarnation back to the amoeba.
Here remain mother and father,
instructing the body to grow. Here
is Aunt Anne’s eye and Grandpa’s jaw.

Second, cumulonimbus, the thunderhead
of memory, each impulse, each sensation
of the body, every turn of thought
a mote of condensation, a nexus of charge
that accumulates tension, building up
to lightning that twitches out in action.

Third, the cirrus cloud of culture,
wispy memes of attitude and style,
the ghost of every book ever read,
the music and images, flat phantasms,
instructional manuals, interviews with
the dead, this collective upload to eternity.

This is the way the water circulates,
rising and falling, and rising again.
This is how we distinguish ourselves,
becoming one thing and not another,
a discrete chunk awash in anonymous stew.
Any shape can arise when watching clouds.