11 Oct 2021 – The One, Song 13 – Segment 01 – Choices Passed

Twenty-three years ago (1998) on the Summer Solstice, I set to work writing an epic poem, The One, a segment of which you can read in this post. “Choices Passed” marks 23 years of writing this long piece. Like Homer and Gary Snyder (See “Background” on Gary S. below the poem segment.), this effort has taken at least a quarter of a lifetime . . . and it’s not yet finished. But I may still have time – maybe 17 years, if Gary Snyder’s epic poem took him 40 years to write is any indication. Twenty-three more years would make me almost exactly 94 years old. Quite a few people have reached this age. I may be one of them. That said, I had better hurry up as the estimated useful life of a white, American, female is 80.5 years, to be sort of exact. With that number, I have about nine years to termination, so I’d better get on my hobby horse and ride, baby, ride.

If you are among the small and loyal readers of the Wannaskan Almanac, Monday poetry post, you will recognize The One, from some ago. From 10 August 2020, actually. That was the last post of a segment from this epic poem up to today’s. If you want to refresh your memory, 2020 posts are the way to go. That year saw 16 posts of the poem. I won’t commit to it, but I hope to post several more this year, and on into – ahem – my goal of 9.5 more years. That said, good intentions are – well – good intentions. If I croak before then with the epic left unfinished, perhaps a generous, surviving fellow writer will pick up where I left off. Any takers from the Wannaskan Almanac circle of writers? Wait a minute. I’m practically writing my own eulogy!

With this post, we find our protagonist as an elder being observed by some omniscient third party at a distant future time. Quite a ways in the past, our seeker has just left a white-and-red dragon named End-Maker and his caretaker/companion, a young girl who has some features of a bat – the eee-eee-eee, with wings type.

Please enjoy our return to The One!

Song 13

Choices Passed

Elder steeps inside moon-viewing bowl

Muted yellow lamplight fingers stone path

Unclad feet arouse gray-stone dust vapors

Orion raises up silver secrets

holds the ninth red-orange belt gem centered

One curved pine tree groans against another

Feeling choiceless’ weight snaking narrow night

winding through evening’s whispered discoveries  

Flap Flap forgotten amber flag ripples

across green-blue sheets of light  

then brief flash and streaks of red 

A shelter hut rooted in a deep-grass hummock

Twelve summers below a high flat summit  

words and poems roll off the elder’s fingers  

surface choices passed and those won’t be then

yet over time most deliberations 

unattended due denials, weakness   

thus, no home-nation, no foundation 

instead lost in doubt and consternation

Now aimless walking, yellow finch on branch perching

Asudden a flush of wings, and leaves’ rustling

A near-to-deaf, high-pitched squeaking overhead

Memory jumps to cave, a dog named Argos

a red/white dragon, a girl black-winged

lizard and girl passed with no tomorrows

The rustle of past conclusions slipping

Wing-on-wing, possibilities thinning.

Background

"Mountains and Rivers Without End" is an epic poem by American poet and essayist Gary Snyder. Snyder began writing the thirty-nine poems contained within the epic in 1956, and he published the final version in 1996. The work is divided into four parts, each exploring a different theme. Los Angeles Times critic Michael Ybarra summarized it this way in his 1996 article, "40 Years. One Man. One Vision. One Poem.":

If only he could weave the spiritual power of his beloved West Coast wilderness and the inner realm of the mind into an epic poem. Four decades and 147 pages later he is done. The just-published result: “Mountains and Rivers Without End” (Counterpoint)... 

"He’s one of the few people you can’t meet with and come away the same,” said David Brower, the environmental guru who formed the Friends of the Earth in 1969, with Snyder on its board, after breaking with the Sierra Club. “He reminds us of what the human spirit can do if left to itself.”

Snyder was born in San Francisco and grew up on a dairy farm outside of Seattle. His mother read poems to him before bed (he remembers Poe in particular) and he began composing his own as soon as he learned to write. As a youth he began camping alone, surrounding himself in solitude and the glory of the Earth. “I was forever changed by that place of rock and sky,” he writes of the Cascades in his new book...

In 1956, Snyder caught a freighter to Japan where he moved into a temple in Kyoto to study Zen Buddhism. He stayed until 1969, translating ancient texts from Japanese and Chinese, teaching English, meditating up to 10 hours a day and traveling. All the while he wrote poetry, fusing natural history, Eastern religion and Native American myth into unrhymed verse that celebrates both the corporeal and the spiritual.

The Japan Poetry Review has called him “an anarchistic erotic shamanistic Zen-Kegon-Tantric Buddhist ecological activist poet working for the good of the biosphere.”

Some of that is evident in the new book, an impressionistic diary of the intervening 40 years. It begins with the poem “Endless Streams and Mountains,” the title of another ancient scroll:

Clearing the mind and sliding in

to that created space

A web of waters steaming over rocks,

air misty but not raining,

seeing this land from a boat on a lake

or a broad slow river,

coasting by.

*

Over the course of 39 poems, Snyder hitchhikes up and down the West Coast, eats Chinese food at 4 a.m. in San Francisco, gets a very short haircut before setting off for a long trek in the back country, chants sutras while hiking Mt. Tamalpais with Ginsberg, travels the world and shares blueberries with a bear...

About five years ago he was walking through Manhattan and saw the commotion of the city in a clarifying light that moved him to bring his labors on his epic poem to a close. “OK, I’ve seen enough of the world,” he recalled. “I wasn’t trying to represent the whole world but I was trying to get a sketchy sense of the world. I figured I’d touched enough bases and I just needed to sort it out.”

He took a sabbatical. “I really shut down everything,” he said.

Over the decades he had collected masses of material, which he proceeded to whittle and winnow. Last April, on the 40th anniversary of his fateful tea, Snyder met a few old friends in San Francisco, drank a few cups of bitter brew and declared his poem finished--sort of.