This selection from my forthcoming little mess of little little poems, A Few Words on the Way, is from the final, winter section of the seasonal sequence that makes up about the first half of the collection. In each of the previous little bits I've released, I've tried to catch your interest by getting into some of the context underlying the genres and worldviews I'm exploring or through which I'm seeing the world in these pieces. Not sure whether that's the best promotional strategy or not, to be honest, as I've never been really gifted at putting myself forward and am, when not standing in front of a classroom or other audience, actually quite shy and socially awkward.
In terms of contextualizing today's selection, I think I'll just focus on a single piece, “a tanka for my daughter, or maybe for the goddess Kali.” Strictly speaking, a tanka is a haiku in the standard 5-7-5 syllabic measure with a 7-7 couplet attached, there generally being some sort of thematic or narrative pivot in the juncture between haiku and couplet. It's a less common form, but one that I enjoy playing with from time to time. This particular piece also touches upon Hindu thought, something foreign to both the culture in which I live and the cultures from which the poetic forms and main influences on these poems arise, but one in which I was immersed when this poem was written, through teaching both the Bhagavad Gita and an abridgment of the great Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (of which the Gita is a small part). While this is hardly the place or a long discussion of the Hindu pantheon, I'll just say that one of the figures in that endlessly fascinating and ever-shifting collection of gods, demons, and beings for whom there is no English translations, has long been the goddess Kali, associated most closely with death and, more broadly, with the ever-repeating cycle of birth, life, and death that is not completely incompatible with the Taoist notion of arising and subsiding, which I discussed in a previous post and that is central to the thought world underlying the haiku tradition.
Kali's visual depiction is gorgeous. She often appears in her multi-armed form, long tongue snaking out of her open mouth, wearing a necklace of severed heads, her hands red with blood, feet not touching the earth but rather beating out the rhythm of her dance on the bodies and sometimes even on the heads of the slain, her hands bloody. Incidentally, the root kal- in Sanskrit signifies both death and time. A central facet of Hindu thought, as well, is that the divine in all its forms—and these can be both plural and singular simultaneously—is immanent in all things and all people, and in the Cosmos itself. That is, while you may worship the god(s), it/they is/are also you, were you only able to see beyond the illusion of your own alienation, your own isolated separateness from everything and everyone else: your own internalized binaries. But of course, from the perspective of a parent, this vision of a perennially immanent embodiment of divine time/death can lead down some interesting roads ...
From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Winter'
failing sight—hillside
disassembles itself: stars
and snowflakes
broken beer bottle
reflected constellation
one dirty mitten
talking to myself
the blizzard's reply
melts on my tongue
cook fire hemmed in close
by knee-deep snow, naked birch—
thin light, long shadows
a tanka for my daughter, or maybe for the goddess Kali:
from unseen cloud birth
white slow drift down to her tongue
pink dissolution—
snowplow chunks like faded skulls
don't quite burst beneath her feet
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