Category: Poets

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.

The child’s first step,

as awesome as an earthquake.

The first time you rode a bike,

wallowing up the sidewalk.

The first spanking when your heart

went on a journey all alone.

When they called you crybaby

or poor or fatty or crazy

and made you into an alien,

you drank their acid

and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets

you did not do it with a banner,

you did it with only a hat to

cover your heart.

You did not fondle the weakness inside you

though it was there.

Your courage was a small coal

that you kept swallowing.

If your buddy saved you

and died himself in so doing,

then his courage was not courage,

it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,

then you did it alone,

getting a transfusion from the fire,

picking the scabs off your heart,

then wringing it out like a sock.

Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,

you gave it a back rub

and then you covered it with a blanket

and after it had slept a while

it woke to the wings of the roses

and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion

your courage will still be shown in the little ways,

each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,

those you love will live in a fever of love,

and you’ll bargain with the calendar

and at the last moment

when death opens the back door

you’ll put on your carpet slippers

and stride out.


from Anne Sexton The Awful Rowing Toward God

Because courage comes in so many forms we often fail to recognize it when we see. Most of us, though, have felt the hot coal of courage as we swallow in anticipation, though mine seems more like a watermelon right now, and most of us have “picked the scabs off” our heart as we relive all the mistakes we have made in a relationship gone bad.

Luckily, though, it doesn’t take too much courage to face what life throws at us because most of the time we have no choice but to face it. Walk or be left behind forever. Endure the bullets and bombs or die. Face the despair of divorce or live the rest of your life unloving and unloved.

So we get up and face life, do the best we can, and hopefully appear brave enough to to those who most love us.

Hopefully when I get old I will be ready to put on my slippers and stride out the back door into forever, though I somehow doubt it. Until then, I expect each spring to seem just a little more beautiful than the ones before. I may even be able to love those around me just a little more, though I’m sure Gavin, like my daughter once did, will say, “Patah, please don’t yell my name like that during the game.” or “Patah, you’re hugging me too tight.”

P.S. Thanks to Ted at the Evil Empire I have been able to work mainly in OS X for the last two days. I almost believe that my writing has gotten a little better with the new version of Office X.

Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home

translated by Burton Watson is one of my favorite recent acquisitions.

Somehow I find it strangely comforting that I share so many thoughts in common with a “Buddhist poet-priest” born in 1118. In this sense, at least, the soul does, indeed, seem eternal, and mankind, no matter what its heritage, shares common feelings and emotions.

I seldom snowshoe or cross-country ski alone, but I often experience feelings of being strangely alone when I’m in the mountains. Perhaps it is the fact that we often travel trails that have not been broken by anyone else or perhaps it is merely the aesthetics of snow stretching out seemingly forever, but, for whatever the reason, I have been attracted to this feeling of being “alone” in the snow-covered mountains for many years now.

How timely
the delight
of this snowfall,
obliterating the mountain trail
just when I wanted to be alone!

Though the snow-covered mountains covered in a comforting blanket of beauty seem strangely suited to meditation, the biting wind can quickly bring you back to experience the reality of a harsh, and at times unforgiving, reality.

In a mountain village
when I’m lost in the dark
of the mind’s dreaming,
the sound of the wind
blows me to brightness.

Considering how easy it is to get lost in the wanderings of the mind, all its fears and doubts, it does, indeed, seem strangely comforting to be directly caught by the moment, to see things directly and in new ways.

And, then, there is always the sense of relief at leaving the world behind. Since even cell phones don’t reach the mountains where we ski, there is little danger of the real world intruding on our reveries.

Not stopping to mark the trail,
let me push even deeper
into the mountain!
Perhaps there’s a place
where bad news can never reach me!

Cold Mountain

One of the first glimpses we get of Japhy in Dharma Bums is in this early scene:

A peacefuller scene I never saw than when, in that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting crosslegged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, "Ray, come in," and bent his eyes again to the script.

"What you doing?"

"Translating Han Shan’s great poem called ‘Cold Mountain‘ written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings."

Naturally, being the inquisitive type, I wanted to see if there was such a poet and, if there was such a poet, had Snyder actually written translations of his poems.

Sure enough, the poems were right there at the beginning of New Nature: New and Selected Poems
“Cold Mountain Poems”

Here’s an excerpt from Snyder’s introduction to the poems. I found the last line quoted particularly relevant for the translation I have chosen to cite.

Kanzan, or Han-shan, "Cold Mountain " takes his name from where he lived. He is a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits. When he talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state of mind … They became Immortals and you sometimes run onto them today in the skidrows, orchards, hobojungles, and logging camps of America.

There are several poems in the section, but here is a representative one that seems to fit with Kerouac’s portrayal of Japhy in the novel.

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place—
Bird-paths, but no trails for men.
What’s beyond the yard?
White clouds clinging to vague rocks.
Now I’ve lived here—how many years—
Again and again, spring and winter pass.
Go tell families with silverware and cars
"What’s the use of all that noise and money?"

Gary Snyder in No Nature

My curiosity piqued, I went another step further to look up Han Shan in one of my Chinese poetry collections. Sure enough, there he was at the beginning of the collection. I found the difference in tone of this translation and Snyder’s interesting.

Man lives his life in a dust bowl,
Just like vermin in the middle of a pot:
All day going round and round,
Never getting out from the inside.
Blessedness is not our lot:
Only nettlesomeness without end.
Time is like a flowing river
One day, we wake up old men.

from Sunflower Splendor edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo

I like both poems, but I’m not surprised that the latter interpretation tends to be more “objective.”

Interestingly, though, each of the eight-line poems ends with a two-line “moral,” something you seldom find in Japanese haikus, and, I must admit, a quality I have come to find particularly appealing. After a long teaching career, I find it more interesting to discover my own morals, if there are ones, rather than being told them by the author.

A War Against Earth

Gary Snyder reminds me more of Edward Abbey than any poet. His poems look at nature, and at life, from radically diverse perspectives. In his preface to No Nature he says, "There is no single or set "nature, either as ‘natural world’ or the ‘nature of things.’ The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional."

Snyder studied Zen at a monastery in Kyoto and Tibetan Buddhism and that is reflected in his poems, but you are also likely to find the loggers attitude reflected in them. His poem entitled "Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students of "Zen." though written in the simple language of a tanka or haiku, celebrates the "polished" "hubs" and "shiny" diesel "stack" of the logging truck, and ends with the simple declaration "There" is no other "life" That simple declaration could easily be made by either a truck driver or a Zen student.

"Call of the Wild" probably isn’t a typical Snyder poem, but it does contain several reoccurring themes. Like most of his poems, it is pro-environmental, and it’s not unusual for him to use native Indian themes. His poems often have a nice sense of humor, which certainly dominates this poem.

The Call Of The Wild

The heavy old man in his bed at night
Hears the Coyote singing
in the back meadow.
All the years he ranched and mined and logged.
A Catholic.
A native Californian.
and the Coyotes howl in his
Eightieth year.
He will call the Government
Trapper
Who uses iron leg-traps on Coyotes,
Tomorrow.
My sons will lose this
Music they have just started
To love.

The ex acid-heads from the cities
Converted to Guru or Swami,
Do penance with shiny
Dopey eyes, and quit eating meat.
In the forests of North America,
The land of Coyote and Eagle,
They dream of India, of
forever blissful sexless highs,
And sleep in oil-heated
Geodesic domes, that
Were stuck like warts
In the woods.

And the Coyote singing
is shut away
for they fear
the call
of the wild.

And they sold their virgin cedar trees,
the tallest trees in miles,
To a logger
Who told them,

"Trees are full of bugs."

The Government finally decided
To wage the war all-out. Defeat
is Un-American.

And they took to the air,
Their women beside them
in bouffant hairdos
putting nail-polish on the
gunship cannon-buttons.

And they never came down,
for they found,
the ground

is pro-Communist. And dirty.
And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

So they bomb and they bomb
Day after day, across the planet
blinding sparrows
breaking the ear-drums of owls
splintering trunks of cherries
twining and looping
deer intestines
in the shaken, dusty, rocks.

All these Americans up in special cities in the sky
Dumping poisons and explosives
Across Asia first,
And next North America,

A war against earth.
When it’s done there’ll be
no place

A Coyote could hide.

envoy

I would like to say
Coyote is forever
Inside you.

But it’s not true.

The Republican in the poem seems pretty predictable, almost stereotypical, but the ironic portrayal of the ex acid-heads and their ignorance of the natural world they claim to be concerned about makes us wonder if anyone in America really cares about "the" "wild" Do Americans all want nature to reflect our reality. Do we all want to remake the world in our own image rather than accept it for what it is?

The lines "And the insects side with the Viet Cong./So they bomb and they bomb" recall the American use of defoliants in Viet Nam to deny the North Vietnamese the ability to deliver arms to the Viet Cong. Unfortunately, in the process all the animals that depended on the jungle were destroyed, and the area still "hasn’t" healed. But, hey, it is war.

In a very real sense, America seems to have declared war on the earth, "Dumping poisons and explosives" on the entire environment in order to remake it into our image of what it should be like and to serve our own purposes. It should be "bug free" and wild animals should be like the wild animals in Disney’s movies, or, at the very least, kept out of our sight.

Snyder, like Abbey, seems to feel that the loss of nature will necessarily bring with it the loss of "coyote," that special spirit inside of us that can only come from our exposure to the real "wild."

Unlike Abbey, though, Snyder is able to view America’s attempts to destroy the environment from a distance, to somehow find ironic humor in these actions. Perhaps it is absurdist humor, but laughing is better than crying, particularly when crying won’t change the situation.

Open Directory – Arts: Literature: Authors: S: Snyder, Gary