From Arriving to Having Arrived — and Then What?

[Image: “Stay Put,” by photographer Akiva Shapero. Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). In their different ways, the couple in this photo struck me as iconically impatient and dissatisfied with their setting: looking elsewhere, apparently trembling with a desire to get moving — elsewhere, anywhere — and, in any case, physically there but psychically adrift.]

From whiskey river:

Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Watchful Waiting
(excerpt)

It’s where you are in your imagination
That’s important, for the life of simply staying where you are
Is a shadow’s life, that leaves you by yourself, alone and scared.
Why can’t we just move on? The light up ahead is soft
And seems to beckon us, glowing with a promise of beginning
Once again, as if there were still time.

(John Koethe [source])

…and:

Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me
(excerpt)

…I’m the one into whose
arms you fall when you fall through all of space. The one
who tells you infinity is another hoax. I’m the being
who has no manners, or mannerisms. I have no style.
I settle on nothing; I decide nothing. This is not
a final place. There is no such place. I am the being
who whistles to you and distracts you from self-absorption.
I am the mosquito in your ear, an iridescent fly, a lightning bug.
This clearing is full of false lights, flickers that stop
when you look. I’m the being that’s tricky because you
try to make me conform to your senses. You
have no senses here. You have nothing.

(Alice Notley [source])

Not from whiskey river:

If the place I wanted to arrive at could only be reached by a ladder, I would give up trying to arrive at it. For the place I really have to reach is where I must already be.

What is reachable by a ladder doesn’t interest me.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein [source])

Sledding in Wichita

As cars pass, laboring through the slush,
a boy, bundled against the stiff wind
in his snow suit, gloves, and scarf,
leans on his upright toboggan,
waiting his turn atop
the snow-packed overpass—
the highest point in town.
First one car exits, and then another,
each creeping down the icy ramp.
The brown grass pokes through
the two grooves carved in the short hill.
As the second car fishtails to a stop at the bottom,
brake lights glowing on the dirty snow,
the boy’s turn comes.
His trip to the bottom is swift—
only a second or two—
and he bails out just before the curb.
It’s not much, but it’s sledding in Wichita.

(Casey Pycior [source])

…and:

An Interview

Yes, I’ve been in Rome, at least two times,
though on second thought it probably was
three or maybe five. When was the last?
That’s easy, for I remember it exactly—
at least what it was like when I first left.
You mean a part of you remains in Rome?

Not really, for when I was first in Rome
I was truly there. That ended the second time,
though I only realized it when I first left.
So when you were in Rome your last time was
consumed by thoughts of leaving? Not exactly.
As time went on, I came around at last,

thinking: obsess about leaving and nothing lasts;
I’ll end up never having been in Rome.
Yet back then did you know just what exactly
it meant to be in Rome during that time
you thought about leaving, even if it was
then you saw what you’d lose if you had left?

Even at the time when I first left
I’d no idea. But you’re not saying the last
you saw of Rome was your third visit, for wasn’t
it earlier that you felt you’d never leave Rome?
No, all that happened there my second time,
though to this day I feel about Rome exactly

what I felt from the first. What that means exactly
is hard to say, for perhaps I never left,
since after all, my being there the first time
didn’t involve my leaving. Tell me then, at last,
was it once or twice? were you really in Rome?
Why certainly—I’m sure, I know I was,

and on top of that you might even say I was
there time and again, everything there exactly
just the same, or like my last time in Rome,
me feeling as if I’d never really left.
But tell me now precisely, was the last
you saw of Rome indeed that second time?

To be exact, it happened the very first time
that I saw Rome, darkness falling as I left
causing me to see what simply couldn’t last.

(Oskar Pastior, translated by Peter Filkins [source])

…and:

Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty

What struck me first was their panic.

Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars—

and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that—dead—
their own feathers blowing, clotting

in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.

She had pushed her head through the space
between bars—to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back

of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.

She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car—strained
to see what happened beyond.

That is the chicken I want to be.

(Jane Mead [source])