[Image: “Sunset after Hurricane Ian, Jacksonville Beach, Florida,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Why All This Music?
(excerpt). . . It’s 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T’ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we’d have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
. . . From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
— for such (in part) is the life of T’ang Yin.
He’s been dreaming. And now he’s going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That’s all. That’s his poem.
He’s writing:
Rain on the river.
(Albert Goldbarth [source; also see the note at the foot of this post])
…and:
The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.
(Wislawa Szymborska [source])
…and:
Solitude (I)
I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
came at me with their lights.
My name, my girls, my job, all
slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,
further and further away. I was a nobody:
a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.
The headlights of the oncoming cars
bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick
of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.
The seconds grew and grew — making more room for me —
stretching huge as hospitals.
I almost felt that I could rest
and take a breath
before the crash.
Then something caught: some helpful sand
or a well-timed gust of wind. The car
snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.
A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,
spinning away in the darkness.
And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt
and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow
to see what was left of me.
(Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Robertson [source])
From elsewhere:
It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are… The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.
(Solvej Balle. translated by Barbara J. Haveland [source])
…and:
A Beautiful House with a Hot Tub and Pool
I miss my magnolias, miss my maples, think
Where did they go?, think, Oh yes, to the past,
that place where everything goes and can I visit?
No, but also Yes. And can I stay away? Also Yes,
but also No. And in the same way that languages
only get simpler, people only get sadder. Yesterday
at the dentist I thought Thank God for nitrous oxide
and I thought Thank God for Dr. Rachel drilling away
in my tooth but wanting nothing she does to hurt me.
I wish that were true all the time. That we all wanted
nothing we did to hurt anyone at all. My friend
with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him,
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really
my trees, but companion trees, offering me their flowers
and then their leaves, offering me their oxygen
in exchange for my carbon dioxide, not exactly grateful
for my copious applications of neem oil to kill
the parasites invading their branches but flourishing
in the absence of those pests, the flowers
and leaves all I really wanted in return. I miss
my companion trees, my flowering Jane,
my flowering Brown Beauty, my flowering Star,
my leafy red maples, scarlet and feathery
all summer. My friend’s companion animal is licking
my face and my friend asks Could you be content
anywhere? And I say Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but then I think Is that true? Of course it’s easy
to be content at my handsome friend’s beautiful house,
by his heated pool, in what might be a physical manifestation
of contentment if ever there was one. So I think it again
on the subway, think it again writing e-mails, think it again
making breakfast: Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but alas sadly: No. It’s not true. I can’t be content here
in my uncomfortable present, in my uncomfortable chair,
on the uncomfortable subway, at this uncomfortable desk,
in this uncomfortable classroom. But oddly, I am content
to visit the past, to say Hello everything I’ve lost,
to say I wish you could come here to the present,
my lost companion trees. I wish you could meet
everything I’ve found.(Jason Schneiderman [source])
__________
About Albert Goldbarth’s “Why All This Music?”: the poem as it appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of The Georgia Review has this, um, sui generis subtitle:
Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems (with a little verbal glue in non-poem form in italics)
The poem spans some 14 pages in that issue; in context, this excerpt apparently stands as Goldbarth’s hypothetical reply to a question from Walt Whitman (as it appeared in Leaves of Grass): “Who need be afraid of the merge?”
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