[Image: “Y Ffordd Hon Ar Gau (Abergavenny, Wales),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river:
Remembering
When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.
(William Stafford [source])
Not from whiskey river:
It Was Like This: You Were Happy
It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?Now it is almost over.
Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.
It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.
It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
…and:
#25: As a young man, I once visited a sage at his home atop a Pennsylvania mountain. He had lived a long life and, he said, was just very, very tired. He requested a favor. Of course, I said. He handed me a small box, black-lacquered but not freshly so — in fact it was quite worn along the edges and corners.
“In this box,” he said, “are the collected truths of the ages. I have never opened it. But I want you to hold onto it for me. Return it to me the next time you visit. If I have already gone, you can return it to whoever lives here then, and they will thank you for it.”
I wondered for decades about that box: why the old man had it in the first place, how he’d come by it, why he’d never opened it — and if he’d never opened it, how did he know it contained anything at all, let alone the “collected truths of the ages.” And what must such truths even be? Were they rendered in a language I could read? Perhaps in a tiny 4-point pictographic script? During those years I spent quite a lot of time in libraries, never passing up an opportunity to possibly learn more about the box — its provenance as an antique, whether other sages might have referred to such a box, and so on. And yes, I’ve still got it. I have not opened it, because if its owner had not cracked that seal, how could I justify doing so?
And yes, I did once tried to return it to the old man. But there was no one at the sage’s residence, and no sign that anyone at all had been living there. The furniture and countertops were dusty, the windows papered over on the inside with twenty-year-old newspapers. I had to cut through the newspaper just to let in enough light to see my way around… I’ve now been here for years — I don’t know how many, exactly.
I received a letter in the mail four days ago from a young man who said he’d heard that a guru of some kind lives on this mountain. He would be visiting the nearby town, he said, and he hoped at least to shake my hand because he’d once read something I’d written, and been deeply moved.
I can’t imagine what he might have read to have that effect, but nevertheless how could I turn him away? He’ll be arriving today, sometime, and frankly I’ve got no talent for hospitality — and no supplies for delivering hospitality if I had the talent… It’s a nice enough day. I’ll be sitting outside on the stone wall when he gets here, perhaps. And now that I think about it, I think after we’ve shaken hands and exchanged a few verbal niceties, I’ll just send him on his way…
…with the worn, lacquered box, and all its truths of the ages. Just to hold onto for me. I’d hate for anything to happen to it.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
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