This week, I bring you a lyrical poem, balanced lightly between love and hatred, purity and pollution.
In addition, the poem includes many images of fire and water, somewhat reminiscent of Robert Frost’s excellent little poem, “Fire and Ice.”
Time flows without boundaries from past to future to present, bringing persons and places cascading into a bundle of experiences and memories. This flood of time flows in dreamlike fashion, and if the poem does its work well, draws the reader into the very heart of the narrator.
In nautical terms, “reach” means a course farther away from the true wind, in contrast to “beam reach (close in), and to running downwind. In other words, “reach” finds its place more or less in a range of wind angles, and results in a moderate vs. a tight (close-hauled) sail, or a wide-open canvas billowing with the wind behind.
Now, you probably didn’t need to know all that, but maybe it helps because the poet was thinking about this moderation in writing the verses.
A reader may find it enjoyable to compare/contrast this poem with the “The Long Swim Home”, Part 1 and Part 2, previously published which also makes heavy use of ocean setting images.
TheReach
I wake up with cherries white to red
reaching for what I’ve done and said
dismembered shards and threads
Neither fire nor dust but hair ablaze
body washed, sins erased
each day’s cleansed origination
in a pure unlikely freshet of inspiration
Far out in Okimura’s sea
a river runs beneath the ocean
chants wearied bones alive again
Later, my body bruised black with beating
founders on sea-burned rocks of waiting
yet tides charm me outward on their vibration
smoldering memories of long-past violations
breasts ripe with salt
thighs’ wet stroking does not halt
I can only do now what must be done
efforts’ illness left behind on a downwind run
Siddhartha sits on the ledge
cuts his nails and dangles his legs
stews in the great fired pot of time
columns of sputtering, wick-wax candles shine
while the hot underside of a millstone grinds
down the burrs of what I’ve done
No accounting for what is gone
what’s reached and what remains at all
Stew or grind – which counts more or less?
Could it be two purple asters
held forth by the hand of a holy master?
I used to dance a thousand ways
let rush, not rage, on ten-foot wings
My thirty-foot Blue Body searches
for the last and lost triple rings
I used to hear ten thousand songs
My forty-foot Leaden Body longs
and sits joyful as the cleansing flames
burn out the silver lode of names
I once made love five hundred ways
Now I know love lies secreted
at the deepest gate of an emerald cave
waiting and loyal of heart in endless tidal waves
My purple agate body wakes once more, again reaches far offshore
to the tempering heat of Okimura’s sea
where daily I’ll bathe in naked innocence in the freshet fountain
wherefrom I’ll gaze on ageless Koya Mountain
In gassho
Background:
If you have followed Monday’s poems at all, you will have noticed a continuing theme of wind and water. This is odd for a land-locked kid and young person who only began to live near the ocean at thirty years of age in San Diego. Leaving that seaside town was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. If you listen with your heart-ear, you may very well here the ebb and flow of the waves on the rocks of La Jolla Cove. Between there and the horizon lovely boats sail with their canvas wings fluttering in moderate breezez.
I probably have mentioned this before: I have done my share of sailing, much of it offshore, but being prudent, not too far offshore. Nothing quite approaches the exhilaration of standing on a rolling deck, sails vibrating between wind and water. This is a place of middleness – the place this poem takes place. Go beyond the structure of a sailing vessel, and imagine the immersion of oneself in the wind-tossed water – such frail creatures we are in the hands of these primal elements. But aren’t we frail in all aspects of our lives? So tender. So vulnerable. Yet, these qualities are what make us beautiful, and this beauty makes life the great and joyful adventure it is.
Exploration #1: Siddhartha sits on a ledge dangling his legs and cutting his nails. Shortly after, he stews in the pot of time. What could these images mean in the context of the poem?
Exploration #2: What is the poem’s narrator’s attitude toward memories and what she’s done?
Exploration #3: What could the image of the “freshet fountain” mean in comparison/contrast to the ocean?
Exploration #4: Count the number of references to things Japanese – for the heck of it.
For your interest, the two Japanese terms:
Okimura means the island far out in the sea, sometimes treated as synonymous with Atlantis.
Gassho is a ritual gesture where one presses one’s hands together in front of the face or chest as a sigh of greeting or reverence. The gesture is of particular significance in Zen practice.
Your Monday Poet, Jack Pine Savage
Your Monday Poet, Jack Pine Savage
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