Sutras from the Sea is a collection of over 3,000 short mystical poems. While each sutra stands alone, as a whole they progress thematically from mortal pathos to spiritual transcendence.

“Capture your heart,

and release it

to the wild.”

“Nature lies in language

like love’s locution

in the nautilus curled.”

“Does the beauty

of the moon

not chide your vanity?”

Sutras on the Mountain is a collection of over 3,000 short mystical poems. While each sutra stands alone, as a whole they chronicle a coming to terms with loss.

“Go up the mountain

to know yourself,

come back down

knowing only the mountain.”

“The little shards

of smoothed and rounded

colored glass

you find by the shore

are the tears

that poets shed

as they reached toward love

among the stars

and fell into the sea.”

Ethan and Kirsten were a couple as undergraduate students at Yale University in the late 1980s. Thirty years later, they reunited around the Great American Eclipse of 2017. These poems were written in the years following.

“I lifted my starlit eyes to ignite

within the trapping amber

of your embered eyes,

that carried the unquenchable fires

of love’s first light,

and without hesitation reached hard

through all the buttressed oblivion

of my broken humanity,

beneath spanning aortic arches

into the sacred chapel

of my sudden cusping center,

to that unatrophied antecedent

of the very muscle memory

of first love, first mind, the first divine,

a holy grail unimbibed,

yet by life untipped or certain supped,

grabbed hold and drew it whole

from my shattered breast,

held its heavenly cup

shaking in kisses and shamanic cries

to your cracked and likewise hungry lips,

and together we drank

the pagan blood of illuminated being

beneath the terminator of forsakenness…”