“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” So begins the novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent in Jim Harrison’s collection of the same name. Sounds like a distant echo of Yung-Chia, who, in China about 13 centuries ago, said “Just get to the root—never mind the branches!” in his "Song of Realizing the Way" (from The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, Nelson Foster & Jack Shoemaker, Eds.). Yung-Chia was probably not talking about civilization in the way Harrison was, but the parallel is interesting. Who am I? What, after all, is this dance of birth and death all about?

Harrison considers himself first and foremost a poet, rather than a novelist or essayist, and is an avowed non-Zen-Buddhist. But it's pretty clear that a lot of his work hikes in, among, and through the provinces of Zen. His work also occasionally shows up in publications like Tricycle, or the great under-read anthology Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry.

Here are two nonsense-free Harrison poems from that anthology:

DOGEN’S DREAM
What happens when the god of spring
meets spring? He thinks for a moment
of great whales travelling from the bottom
to the top of the earth, the day the voyage
began seven million years ago
when spring last changed its season.
He enters himself, emptiness
desiring emptiness. He sleeps
and his sleep is the dance of all the birds
on earth flying north.

KOBUN
Hotei didn’t need a zafu,
saying that his ass was sufficient.
The head’s a cloud anchor
that the feet must follow.
Travel light, he said,
or don’t travel at all.