Once something has happened in a person’s life, we can, in some sense, say it is known. But is it really? Can one tally up all the causes and conditions that accumulated and converged to make an event, an incident, happen? Similarly, can one extrapolate into the future and foresee the related impacts of what is thought known? Yet, humans persist to believe in knowing, and to act upon those beliefs. Thus, passes what is taken for knowledge.
Most people can remember “first times.” Memory being what it is, however, the totality of all “first times” is impossible to remember. Take the first time a parent sees an offspring smile. How can this incident be discerned from all the other smiles that come after? Maybe I’m wrong. I do remember my first passionate, adolescent kiss – a kiss so different from any I had engage before from parents and relatives that it staggered me and left me aching for more. I wonder how many readers remember their first kisses, who the person was on the other end of your lips, and what happened when the two sets of lips retreated from one another.
But, as my usual way, I digress. The title of today’s poem – “Last Time Unknown” – is about experiencing last times as opposed to first times. A “last time unknown” is almost always a mystery. We’re all given to say, things like, “I’ll never do that again,” believing that what “that” refers to actually will disappear from our lives. Maybe. Maybe not. Frankly, it’s the “never” intention that causes the trouble. Never is a very long time to hold a belief or to stay true to such a negative statement. Circumstances and situations may change, and the “never” disappears into the new paradigm.
The Last Time Unknown
Graced with ignorance of each last time
for hard breath making lovers sweat
Sheltered from knowing the final
declared, “I love you.”
A first love’s last kiss
remembered in the body
Clouded with truth, a beloved wife rides a train
to no return
All such lost music emerges from the unknown’s realm
Admirable result from a promise kept
emerges as truth from probabilities unknown
The moment the light goes out
a child abed dismantles potentials to the point of one
we antediluvian progeny float abiding in the stream
persist and hover between known and not
offer salutations to our beliefs
try to fashion certainty out of tea leaves
poured from a cooling pot
Beauty’s fresh-turned soil converts to fallow
Ugliness a defect of the eye
living chased by relentless death
dying awaits the unknown final breath
Still deep pool entangles revelations
the unknown’s rotating coils, slack like rope
Hidden within the convolutions, the evening thrush of hope
The unknown pulls the gentle along the passage to disclosures
and in the coils unwinding emergence and exposure
Thunderstorms in the dead of summer
moisten cut grass before the scorching
Ocean’s red-mist sunset sprays unfathomed depths
White and yellow butterflies in orchard extravagance
fruit unknown, ripe or rot
bewildered by what may arise or not
All these remain in the unknowns’ trove
teasing amber honey and champagne
no certainty of witness, glory, or of honest pain
“In six months, I’ll be ninety,” he says not knowing
in three, his heart gives out
“In an hour, we’ll play,” she says not knowing
a bus silences the barking
“In a minute, I’ll be there,” he says, not yet knowing
his fall into the darkening
Just one way to subjugate the splendor of the mysterious unknown
that slouches toward us, a worn and wild beast searching out the known
Treat each flash of life as if alreadyknown
as if already come and gone
Meet each moment as the past
because
one time
any time
it truly is the last
Background
I’ve always been intrigued by the end of things, as you may have noticed, if you have read many of my poems. Ends of relationships, lives, beliefs, and so on, are all equally interesting to me. In addition, the unknown ends of these things spark my interest; note that the terminations of relationships, lives, beliefs, and the rest, usually can’t be predicted, and more often than not, take us by surprise.
Perhaps, for me, the biggest “last time unknown” was when my brother, and only sibling, died completely unexpectedly of cardiac arrest – one of those heart attacks where, as the description goes, “he was dead before he hit the floor." And the last time? The last time I spoke with him? The last time I saw him, laughed with him, told him I loved him? Some such things I can say definitively; others are lost in the whirl of life’s busyness. Did I know “the last time.” Absolutely not.
Exploration #1: Consider an experience of the “last time unknown” that you have had. How invested were you in keeping the person, place, or thing going so it wouldn’t have to end? In contrast, when have you been in a situation in which you hoped the circumstances would end?
Exploration #2: Is the concept of “the unknown” an accurate way to think of life?
Exploration #3: Why does the “unknown” always seem to surprise us? Does it have anything to do with tightly held beliefs and hopes?
Your Monday Poet, Jack Pine Savage
Love the image of the unknown, the mysterious unknown, as a worn and wild beast searching the known. Then you give us a way to handle the beast: treat each flash as if already known, already come and gone. Good to know since the beast wants to devour us with distraction.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you do manage to dodge the beast, don't congratulate yourself. The beast can bite you on the behind as it passed by.
1. The current moment is one I want to continue unraveling as it will. I wanted my Navy enlistment to expire ASAP even though it was the great adventure of my life.
2. What can be known anyway. Do we need to know anything? The great Tao has it covered. Unfasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride.
3. An old man once told me that when he was a youth he worked in a coal mine. Their headlamps were basically stubby candles. Then there was a breakthrough: cadmium headlamps. The old miners hated them. They cursed out the young miners for shining their lights in their eyes. The old guys refused to use the new lights until the company quit buying candles.
Some advances are unnecessary and others make things worse. In the words of Antonin Scalia, "Get over it."
Ah, you know the “beast” quite well. You even caution us to be wary as the beast can nip us in our nethers when we aren’t looking. Having thought about your take on the beast; maybe I should have introduced it earlier in the poem. In any case, it’s clear that you are on intimate terms with the creature. Kudos! Your behind is most likely safe.
DeleteThere are lots of things we don't want to do, but once we've done them, they're the best. I heard something like that from Outward Bound, the outdoors adventure program for inner city young people. The phrase seems to fit your feelings about your time in the Navy. I feel similarly about my years riding around on my two Harleys (not simultaneously), but that was all good, if you don’t count the incident where a guy ran a red light and slammed into my front tire. I cared more about the damage to my bike than any damage to myself, which fortunately was minimal.
I think your comment on #2 very likely can find its alternative form in a squib. And I agree with you that just when we think we “know” something or someone, life smacks us upside our heads. Remind me to discuss Being Time with you some morning over coffee.
Enjoyed your short narrative in response to #3. There is a relationship between the unknown and clinging to beliefs and concepts; they are two sides of the same coin. On the “clinging” side, we try to make life and time stand still; we attempt to throttle them into submission; however, we just make ourselves miserable and miss the enjoyment of the ride, as you so rightly put it.
Aligned with your “get over it,” I also like, “walk it off.”