(Poem #45 on new numbering scheme)
Joy is not easily correlated with other events. Instead, it arises, as if spontaneously, immanent to the warp and woof of quotidian experience.
(Poem #45 on new numbering scheme)
Joy is not easily correlated with other events. Instead, it arises, as if spontaneously, immanent to the warp and woof of quotidian experience.
(Poem #44 on new numbering scheme)
Some days feel like things are going well. Some days start well but end badly. Some days I dread but end great. Some days are smooth like glass. Some days are bumpy. Some days give joy. Some days don't. Some days suck.
(Poem #43 on new numbering scheme)
Maybe I am becoming a plant. Every Sunday I cut my hair. In the weird fluorescent light, today, in the bathroom, I looked at the floor. Surprisingly, the clippings looked like moss.
(Poem #42 on new numbering scheme)
Small ripples propagate across the brown, cream-colored surface of my morning's coffee, put there by the blowing wind exhaled by my electric fan which perches in my window, bird-like.
(Poem #41 on new numbering scheme)
Perhaps the ground has dried out too much. The last rain was a while ago. So the worm started a trip across the vast sidewalk, its goal uncertain. The sun's so hot. It wriggles; going east.
(Poem #40 on new numbering scheme)
Some say the world is a living thing; Or that it's a clockwork machine. But I don't see it that way. Instead, recursively, the world gives a proof of the theorem that says that we are here.
(Poem #39 on new numbering scheme)
Ví que amaneció nublado pero ya al mediodía se había convertido en día de calor. Una cigarra allá arriba me cantó, "Hola, pues."
– un noneto
[Update: My friend Bob suggested I translate this into English, but retaining the nonnet form. I took the challenge:]
I saw that the morning dawned cloudy but by the middle of the day the weather had changed so it had become a hot day. Then a cicada somewhere up there sang to me "Hello, there."
(Poem #38 on new numbering scheme)
Sometimes at day's end I'm exhausted. I finish work and I walk home. I feel like my mind is dust. I can't even daydream. I find some music. I move one foot... the other, heavy foot.
(Poem #37 on new numbering scheme)
Looking out the window of the train, the stretch of elevated track lends a feeling of flying, as if in slow motion, across cityscapes which seem almost infinite... full of souls.
(Poem #36 on new numbering scheme)
I have been staying on this planet. The planet is sometimes called Earth. I just have a work visa. So, if I stop working I will have to leave. But departures are sometimes very sad.
(Poem #35 on new numbering scheme)
Most people see maps as simply tools, or at best, perhaps metaphors. What if a map is not real? What is it a map of? Imagination's distant spaces manifest and made art.
(Poem #34 on new numbering scheme)
Choosing what to eat is always hard. Lately, sometimes I make oatmeal. I chop up half an apple. I add some cinnamon. After I cook it, it's difficult. I need to try to eat.
(Poem #33 on new numbering scheme)
The conversation began as most. I wanted to point some things out, observations and comments, some inconsistencies, in how we do things. I got angry. I ranted.... Ah, why try?
I’ve decided to take on the challenge I suggested to myself (with encouragement from my friend Bob) a few posts back: I will make a nonnet every day. The last few days I’ve tested, to see if it’s doable, and I have done it. So I have a little stockpile, now, of half-a-dozen nonnets. And I will move forward, and try to make a nonnet every day, and post it. I guess a side-effect of this is that I’m am, tentatively, returning to my old two-posts-a-day pattern, which I abandoned around the time of my cancer diagnosis, 3 years ago.
Counting backwards among the ones posted previously, starting with one last year, I think this would be number 7.
(Poem #32 on new numbering scheme)
Living is what we do till we die. We take on difficult questions, or we simply live each day. We love that children play. We can watch the rain. We can see trees. Then it ends. It's just luck.
Now I have made an “inverted” nonnet. I have no idea if this is a thing that’s been done before. It’s the same as a nonnet, just the other way around. Below, I drew the “blue cicada in a bottle” and originally posted it some years ago.
(Poem #31 on new numbering scheme)
Blue singing cicadas up in the trees have explained to me without using language that summer is not so bad, that it passes in a moment, that the green, breeze-blown leaves caress them.
– a reverse nonnet
One reason I like nonnets is that it’s possible to compose them entirely in my head. They are sufficiently compact and structured that I can hold the whole thing in my “working memory” as I work out each line. Thus, I can do it while walking, which is another pastime of mine that doesn’t always mix well with writing, since this latter usually requires having a keyboard or notepad in front of me.
I made this nonnet walking to work.
(Poem #30 on new numbering scheme)
I hate summer, because it's too hot. The sun squashes me, like an ant. The air seems thick, like asphalt. I start missing winter. I could stride quickly. I could shiver. "Ah! So cold, like a ghost."
– a nonnet.
It’s occurred to me I could write a nonnet every day, while walking to work. Am I so ambitious?
I wrote another nonnet. My friend Bob commented that I seem to have a “knack” for them. I don’t know about that, but I enjoy doing them – they are constrained like haiku, and the constraints are syllabic rather than metric (a type of constraint I find more difficult to “do in my head”). The haiku form, nowadays, has a bit of a cliche feel in English, which these nonnets avoid.
(Poem #29 on new numbering scheme)
Consciousness Speculating about my own mind: moments of consciousness might be like little fragments of light; but no, that's wrong. Instead, like so many beans, we toss them up; they begin to fall down.
A nonnet I made.
(Poem #28 on new numbering scheme)
Fifth Season they say Korea has four seasons. I think actually there are five: in mid-summer, the sky hides; and the pouring rain comes; so I dodge rivers; and more rain comes; and humid, sultry air.
This poem is a bit more “trite” than what I normally write. I think adding the rhyming constraint to the regular nonnet form overkills it. Anyway, it’s kind of a “throw away” effort, but in the absence of anything more interesting to post…
(Poem #27 on new numbering scheme)
Walking footsteps striding along like a song one hears in one's own mind, for long seconds, only to prolong themselves among a throng, each wants to belong plunging headlong never wrong, lifelong, strong.
(Poem #26 on new numbering scheme)
I didn't think the sky was so luminous But as the night was just starting I saw An unblackish sort of blue hanging there Like a closing parenthesis in some Overwrought fragment of prose, still starless. I thought the buildings were holding it up But if that was true it would be like glass, Fragile and smooth, but unmoving and cold Yet this dark sky's mood was warm and it spun Above the buildings and trees, just infinite.
– ten lines of some kind of pentameter – not really sure what this is.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
(Poem #25 on new numbering scheme)
I was walking. There was a whirr of wings. A flash of black. A raven spun and landed in front of me. Some years ago I was in Japan, and I saw many ravens. So ravens make me think about Japan in the Summer. But also, I think about death. Aren't there some traditional cultures that associate ravens with death? I wonder about ravens. They are scavenger birds. Carrion-seekers. They must know about death, after all. That's why they tilt their heads like that. People seem to know about death, too. We are carrion-apes who know about death. It's a matter of ecological competence. Is that where clever consciousness comes from?
– some kind of free verse
The picture shows some ravens (crows?) I saw at Hallasan, on Jeju Island, in February, 2011.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
I wrote these little poems. They are attempts at the Welsh traditional short poem form called englynion – specifically, the englyn unodl crwca, or crooked one-line englyn.
(Poem #24 on new numbering scheme)
Sunday looking now out the window, solid gray clouds, drawn just so - i lie down to read. let go of winter, wishing for rain, but no. Monday the puddle of water shines, the morning sun's brightness finds streaks of mud and small cracks; signs like a map's matching patchwork of lines.
These forms are quite restrictive, in the technical sense. I seem to prefer trying to write inside such constraints, sometimes.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
(Poem #23 on new numbering scheme)
Hypnagogia The reek of butterflies and dust woke me from winter's complacent pessimism and showed with grave determination that true intentions are both made and found. Uninteresting. I put my arm out to touch the bookshelf behind my pillow and unindexed archives of better sleep unfolded into gold and copper flags. I counted seven breaths while I focused on disregarding things: body, pain, mind the myriad irrelevancies of being and that bit of twisted string, felt crouching in that spot on the shelf where I'd seen it; imagine it was another whole world.
It has become a bit of a tradition for me to post to my blog from the waiting room at the hospital. I guess I do it partly because sitting in the hospital waiting room is boring, but mostly it’s to remind myself of the time when posting to my blog from my phone was the only way I could do it, because I was in the hospital without a normal internet-connected computer.
I am at the hospital for one of my periodic follow-ups, where they do a CAT scan and look around, to make sure I don’t have any metastasis.
Always here I get a strange feeling of stress-mediated calmness. I think the place evokes that paradoxical mix as it is strongly associated with such intense memories, traumatic but ultimately life affirming. The mental state is similar to something I feel in a temple or church or sacred-seeming place of natural beauty. . . a feeling of sublimity tempered by pathos.
I lie down inside the machine and let the acolytes read the signs under my skin.
Update (a few hours later): The signs having been read, the acolytes spoke in short obliquities of long life and long odds overcome. My earth-residency visa has been extended.
I was walking to work yesterday, and lo and behold, the long-lived vacant lot I go past every day was under construction. I was compelled to attempt a poem, which quickly got out of hand. I began with some metrical ambition, but I abandoned it soon enough – it’s really become just some florid prose with line-breaks, I suppose.
(Poem #22 on new numbering scheme)
An Elegy for the Vacant Lot on the Corner of Gobong-ro and Jungang-ro in Ilsan November 2015 i. While mud danced beneath the bulldozer's blades Like a partly remembered stanza by Vicente Huidobro, Or Wallace Stevens, and workmen yelled, I recalled when I had first come to Ilsan, There had been a real estate office in that empty space, I think, where garish decor extolled The virtues of Seoul's burgeoning exurban New Cities, and Yet pyrrhically represented only lowrise ambition, And by shoddy construction presented A forgettable counterexample to upward mobility, so To see that tiny deserted square of land Retaken by the hungry machines, I felt a lamentation rise up inside me, Like the regret one feels upon Realizing that someone, who was once a friend But is no longer a friend, has died. ii. Happy weeds, for many months, for many moons, Flourished in that vacant lot I walk past As I go to work in the afternoons Past the corner of Gobong-ro at Jungang-ro, Providing, for any attentive passers-by, Compelling lessons in ecological succession, as First grass loomed large like summer cornfields, and then woody shrubs appeared while unhappy Men crept out of sight among them late at night to vomit During long, festive weekends, and finally Trees grew tall like warriors amid the city's litter And the buses recklessly zoomed past Like ants bearing leaves for their queen. iii. So, seeing that, I felt sadness, But then in that instant, some rain began, Pulling down yellow and brown leaves from The remaining trees, Arriving gradually but as a comfort Like an old Depeche Mode song, Suggesting a generous ephemerality Of the sort that autumn always brings.
Here is a picture of the lot, bulldozers a-buzzing, from across the street.
What I’m listening to right now.
Depeche Mode, “Nothing.”
Lyrics.
“Nothing”
Sitting target
Sitting waiting
Anticipating
Nothing
Nothing
Life
Is full of surprises
It advertises
Nothing
Nothing
What am I trying to do
What am I trying to say
I’m not trying to tell you anything
You didn’t know
When you woke up today
Sitting target
Sitting praying
God is saying
Nothing
Nothing
Always
Knows the prospects
Learn to expect
Nothing
Nothing
Below is a poem I wrote recently. But its “story” is complicated. I wrote a poem with a similar title when I was in high school, in the same format: formally, a sestina, and with other (efforts at) metrical constraints. The protagonist, Dr Hubert, was the same, in the original, too – he is a character from a fictional world I had created. I suspect that in actual tone, this recent poem is more optimistic than the first version, which I long ago lost (though it still may exist in some box in my Minnesota storage unit, but obviously I don’t have the ability to find it, currently). I was more of a pessimist about humanity as a teenager than I am now, and the character Dr Hubert, in my youth’s conception, was a dystopian anti-hero. Below, on the other hand, he is more of a simple, tragic hero. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, the poem is about disillusionment. “The Collective” is a reference to the Jeres Collective, which was a failed utopian experiment within this world I’d created. I don’t think that was the original name. The similarity between the name of the collective and my own first name is purely phonological coincidence.
(Poem #21 on new numbering scheme)
Dr Hubert On The Beach at Jeres He was lost, alone. His companions were dead. Dr Hubert stood under Mahhalian skies. The man's disconsolate face had turned to gray, And the war, begun and just ended, like gold, Seemed pointless. The billowing clouds threatened rain. There was a ragged pine down the shore. A lie Had started it all. It was pointless. A lie had bloomed, flourished, been nurtured, and now was dead. Days before, with hope and optimism, the rain had relented and the typically wan skies had given way to bright explosions of gold And crimson as the sun rose. Just now, a gray Seagull spun, landed, stepped twice, and pecked at gray bits of sand, searching for insects, that might lie Beneath. Dr Hubert bent and picked up a spent gold shell-casing from the sand. Memento of dead Fellow fighters. He turned and peered at the skies But his memory only showed him the rain Of bullets that hours before, before the rain Diligently washed the sour smell of gray Gunpowder from the cold air, had filled the skies' Dome with pain, useless suffering and death. That lie Had been the false utopia promised by dead Men. Earthly paradise had been a fool's gold. Some of the birches on the hillside had gold leaves, which hung like saddened children as the rain started again finally, pelting the dead vegetation. Their white bark, damp, looked like gray Photographs. He felt tired, now. I want to lie down," he muttered. "The Collective filled our skies With hope for glory. Here in Jeres those skies Instead have been destroyed." A pale egret, gold beak flashing, lands down the beach. "Nature can't lie To us, though. I will take solace in the rain." Born among angels, having fared across gray seas, the idealist peered from among the dead. Under Mahhalian skies, driftwood damp and dead, On gold sands lay. Dr Hubert faced the gray Heavens and chose to lie down in the lucid rain.
– a sestina
One calendrical observation: I am certain that I wrote the original poem on or near November 3rd, 1982. That’s because November 3rd is St Hubert’s day, which was where the character first got his name. The reason is that November 3rd is the first saints’ day after the commemoration of all the dead (All Saints), Novermber 1 and 2. That’s a bit complicated, but I was trying for some kind of obscure symbolism. The fact that I re-wrote the same poem leading up to Novermber 3rd is thus not entirely coincidence, either. Dr Hubert is an autumnal figure.
Another note: when I went to check on Saint Hubert (patron of mathematicians, among others, which was of keen interest to my 17-year-old self, and marginally relevant to the original conception of the Mahhalian history) at the wikipedia, just now, with the intention of placing a link, I learned that Hubertus was born in Texas. This is, no doubt, a bit of wikivandalism. But it was quite humorous – I have placed a screenshot (because wikivandalism is ephemeral) at right.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
This poem is a nonnet that I made while walking.
(Poem #20 on new numbering scheme)
july's weather first the streets were wet with rain and trees were swinging, wind was taking fierce liberties with scudding clouds and broken umbrellas but then the rain stopped humid air calmed cicadas crafted songs
(Poem #19 on new numbering scheme)
The almost-full, white moon sighs. Riotous, ravenous green spring writhes, a flock of white petals flies, to resist it seems unwise.
I poetized (poeted? poetated?) that while walking home from work. The poem more-or-less follows the pattern of the Welsh poetic forms called englynion. Specifically, it’s an englyn unodl union (according to wikipedia).
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
(Poem #18 on new numbering scheme)
A Morning After 14 days of smog, the sun hurled itself into a sky purplish blue with spring. I am not sleeping so well there are unfulfilled novels populating my dreams.
(Poem #17 on new numbering scheme)
A Soteriology On the subject of grace Forty-eight years passed. Each had a Christmas. But they fell away. They left a raw taste. An empty cup waited. There was no coffee. Just the cream stain showed. It made brown circles. The dawn was coming. So I stepped outside. Rhythms painted my feet. The cold earth took them. Now, small windows burn. The same sun returns. Old snow reflects fire. Later, night awaits. Trees were desolate. Dark gray branches forked. Lavender clouds flew. Magpies scolded me. Breath took the gold sky. The winter air curled. The ground was frozen. I found a brown leaf. Someone picked it up. We all want answers. Nobody will say. So give your own voice. It's metaphysics. Behold the universe. Embed the subject. The self makes the real. Grace is an ether. Grace is ungiven. There is no giver. It is yours. Take it. - (2013-12-25).
(Poem #16 on new numbering scheme)
i want the silence that happens when it's still dark in the morning to take my hand and stay with me along through the day's winds and flights
(Poem #15 on new numbering scheme)
Every Day All the clouds are new the trees all grow old. I will walk alone preferring it that way.
(Poem #14 on new numbering scheme)
at the crest of jeongbal hill the trail levels off among pines i pause no one is around (but i feel the city's there trolling the sky just beyond the trees and rocks) a nearby magpie tilts her head whooshing her blue-green tail feather as if angry or confused while a brown cicada's husk falls discarded from above the air is heavy and flat michelle's ghost touches my cheek i look around unsurprised she asks if i'm not prepared to join her (sometimes she asks things like that or follows me as if no time had passed since) no, i explain, i have things various things still to do like a fish in a deep stream she moves away
What I’m listening to right now
David Lanz, “Green Into Gold.” This song came around randomly on my mp3 player while I was walking home from the hospital this morning. It is from the album Christophori’s Dream, which happens to be Michelle’s “suicide music” – it was what was in the CD player when she took her pills. That’s likely why her ghost visited.