Tassajara, the beautiful Zen centre in California, made it through the fires. This is the first news of pure survival to reach me of late.
There are times when the awareness of mortality . . . of all manner of mortalities . . . is especially keen. We become conscious of our journeys: through life, through cities, through love, across and through and on. What we take with us and what is left behind, who our companions are, and what detours may sway us from our paths -- these are not always our choices.
How we take the journey (and the journeys within it), how we attend, how we interact and whether we choose to attend, interact and perceive -- over these, we have some measures of control.
Thirkield's poem is entitled means evening. What might be darkening? The page that's being read? The view seen? The moment? Something buried beneath the words of verse?
I don't know that I want to know that answers. In this moment, it is enough to accept the invitation to share a moment of Thirkield's journey. His is not the Köln I saw when I was there, but it is, while I am reading, just as real to me as the one I briefly knew.
There are times when the awareness of mortality . . . of all manner of mortalities . . . is especially keen. We become conscious of our journeys: through life, through cities, through love, across and through and on. What we take with us and what is left behind, who our companions are, and what detours may sway us from our paths -- these are not always our choices.
How we take the journey (and the journeys within it), how we attend, how we interact and whether we choose to attend, interact and perceive -- over these, we have some measures of control.
Thirkield's poem is entitled means evening. What might be darkening? The page that's being read? The view seen? The moment? Something buried beneath the words of verse?
I don't know that I want to know that answers. In this moment, it is enough to accept the invitation to share a moment of Thirkield's journey. His is not the Köln I saw when I was there, but it is, while I am reading, just as real to me as the one I briefly knew.
Abend (10:101)
Jonathan Thirkield
In Köln, each triangle picks at the dome; spines work their way, out of the scaffolds and stainless girders, into spires.
A brown even sky with light fixtures in the dents; her mouth overlaid by a few beads of frost on the train window in transit.
The station's metal wrists. Traced white with snow. A ministry of interstice. Of atoms tensed inside a crystal lattice.
The fiberglass shudders. She holds down his knee to steady them. Pins the other against the side rail. You were sleeping.
Are we there?
We pass as two shapes may assume a form of love. If just in passing. In the seats across a slender man bends over a book placed
At his knees. His daughter rests a flashlight on his shoulder, her ear pressed firmly to his jaw. Should he be whispering?
A tree. Lit momentarily in the passing. Train lights. Quickly it grows. Ductile. And cannot hold to its shape. What sound
Now grows with you? I am not standing. In a steel extension of when snow. Was not heavy before metal. But light on one spoon.
The overlook passes. The cathedral arrows. From the small lungs inside her. A coughing; it crowns. To the rounded south.
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