poetry – Page 2 – alive in the sea of information

gazing in reverence

Walking the Owens River waking Mt. Tom. Robin L. Chandler, 2023

Tracing the way back home here,

I might round North Mountain

on roads hung along cliffwalls,

timbers rising in switchbacks,

or I could take the watercourse

way winding and circling back,

level lakes broad and brimming,

crystalline depths clear and deep

beyond shorelines all lone grace

and long islands of lush brocade.

Gazing on and on in reverence

across realms so boundless away,

I come to the twin rivers that flow through together.

Two springs sharing one source,

they follow gorges and canyons

to merge at mountain headlands

and cascade on, scouring sand out and mounding dunes

below peaks that loom over islands swelling into hills,

whitewater carrying cliffs away in a tumble of rocks,

a marshy tangle of fallen trees glistening in the waves.

Following along the south bank that crosses out front,

the snaking north cliff that looms behind, I’m soon

lost in thick forests, the nature of dusk and dawn in full view,

and for bearings, I trust myself to the star-filled night skies.

Poem 36 by Hsien Ling-yun (385 – 433) a buddhist poet who loved mountains and streams

from Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China

Translated by David Hinton

Mountain Home

Mt. Morrison & Owens River in April 2022 and February 2023, Robin L. Chandler.

Vast and majestic, mountains embrace your shadow;

Broad and deep, rivers harbor your voice.

T’ao Ch’ien

Home Again Among Fields and Gardens

Nothing like all the others, even as a child,

rooted in such love for hills and mountains,

I stumbled into their net of dust, that one

departure a blunder lasting thirteen years.

But a tethered bird longs for its old forest,

and a pond fish its deep waters — so now,

my southern outlines cleared, I nurture

simplicity among these fields and gardens,

home again. I’ve got nearly two acres here,

and four or five rooms in this thatch hut,

elms and willows shading the eaves in back,

and in front, peach and plum spread wide.

Villages lost across mist-and-haze distances,

kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,

dogs bark deep among back roads out here,

and roosters crow from mulberry treetops.

No confusion within these gates, no dust,

my empty home harbors idleness to spare.

Back again: after so long caged in that trap,

I’ve returned to occurrence coming of itself.

*****

T’ao Ch’ien (365 – 427)

The rise of wilderness poetry in the early 5th century C.E. was part of a profound new engagement with wilderness that arose among Chinese artist-intellectuals for several reasons: the recent loss of northern China to “barbarians,” forcing China’s artist-intellectuals to emigrate with the government, settling in the southeast where they were enthralled by a new landscape of serenely beautiful mountains…..born into the educated aristocracy, T’ao was expected to take his proper place in the Confucian order by serving in the government. Accordingly, he took a number of government positions. But he had little patience for the constraints and dangers of official life, and little interest in its superficial rewards, so he finally broke free and returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on the family farm at his ancestral village of Ch’ai-sang (Mulberry-Bramble), just northwest of the famous Thatch-Hut (Lu) Mountain…..this was not a romantic return to the bucolic, but to a life in which the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan was the very texture of everyday experience. This outline of T’ao Ch’ien’s life became a central organizing myth in the Chinese tradition: artist-intellecuals over millennia admired and imitated the way T’ao lived out his life as a recluse, though it meant enduring considerable poverty and hardship…..this commitment, so central to the rivers-and-mountains tradition in poetry, was the one honorable alternative to government service for the artist-intellectual class…..represented a commitment to a more spiritually fulfilling life in which one inhabits the wilderness cosmology in the most immediate day-to-day way…..if Tao’s poems seem bland, a quality much admired in them by the Sung Dynasty poets, it’s because they are never animated by the struggle for understanding. Instead they begin with the deepest wisdom.

Verse, poem, and biography from Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China translated by David Hinton

outside laws

“During the more than thirty years that I did not make my home in Kentucky, much that I did not like about life in my home state (the cruel racist exploitation and oppression that continued from slavery into the present day, the disenfranchisement of poor and/or hillbilly people, the relentless assault on nature) was swiftly becoming the norm everywhere. Throughout our nation the dehumanization of poor people, the destruction of nature for capitalist development, the disenfranchisement of people of color, especially, African-Americans, the resurgence of white supremacy and with plantation culture has become an accepted way of life. Yet returning to my home state all the years that I was living away, I found there essential remnants of a culture of belonging, a sense of the meaning and vitality of geographical place (p.23) .”

Excerpt from bell hook‘s Belonging: A Culture of Place in the essay Kentucky is My Fate (2009)

“In ring composition, the narrative appears to meander away into a digression (the point of departure from the main narrative being marked by a formulaic line or stock scene), although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end to be a circle, since the narration will return to the precise point in the action from which it had strayed, that return marked by the repetition of the very formulaic line or scene that had indicated the point of departure…..interlocked narratives, each nested within another in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls (p.13)…..so we will leave our wanderer there and not bother him with all this history, the vast chain of events that has brought him back to the coastline where all the myths began, because, as we know, obscurity has its uses, too: can be as solid and productive, as concrete and real, as illumination is. We do not want to distract him. Now it is time for this exile to set upon his great work, a book that will begin with an account of a technique that is as old as Homer, known as ring composition: a wandering technique that yet always finds its way home, a technique which, with its sunny Mediterranean assumption that there is indeed a connection between all things, the German Jew Erich Auerbach – no doubt forgivably just now, given the awful and twisted route that has brought him here, the dark road, which yet, as he will one day finally admit, made his book possible – considers a little too good to be true (p.113).”

Excerpts from Daniel Mendelsohn‘s book Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2020).

lenticularis

Lenticular clouds above Mono Lake. Robin L. Chandler, 2022.

harsh winter wind

again and again

soul deep snowfall

holding earth

shades of black and gray

among barren landscapes

the mind may know

a springtime of green coming

still in the present

the inescapable now

bitter cold buries secrets

put away

all promises of resurrection

Poem 62. from Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place by bell hooks

C = 2 π r

Where we lived, the settlers build their houses. Where

we drew fresh water, the oil companies sucked oil.

Where deer ran in countless numbers, we have a new

mall. Where the healing plants thrived; the river is

burning. Now, a fence cuts the road home. Next the sky

will be tethered, and we will pay for air.

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo

endurance and faith

faith & endurance — endurance and faith. Robin L. Chandler, 2020.

The sun sets on the last July Saturday and I listen to a fado lament sung by Ercilia Costa and read Winter a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:

“And now I am ready to keep running

When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death,

I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest

Where, beyond every essence, a new essence waits.”

when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d

On Sunday my Dad, Kenneth Hinds Chandler, passed away, and today I honor my “centurion:” a life that spanned our American Century. In addition to being a loving husband, father, brother, uncle, grandfather, great-grandfather, and friend to the many that loved him, he was a farmer, soldier, administrator, fisherman, hiker, artist and avid reader of history.

When I was six we began tramping together, sharing the spaces and places of American History from New England to Virginia: Plymouth to Williamsburg; Boston Harbor to Yorktown; and Gettysburg to Bull Run. Walking in his footsteps history came alive and helped guide me to my career as an archivist.

So, ‘tis not strange, in this time of sorrow to reach for Walt Whitman and his elegy to President Abraham Lincoln in the Spring of 1865:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the

night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

Late Saturday afternoon, walking my neighborhood, and thinking about my Dad, I chanced upon a beautiful lilac bush blooming in the fullness of this Spring. And oh I shall mourn with ever-returning Spring. Farewell Dad. Thank you for bringing me into this world…for taking the risk of having a child…for taking the time to teach me about integrity…for devoting your life to giving me a home where I could grow and learn and dream of the person I would become and the worlds I would explore. You put me on the road of life and set an example for me as I met life’s challenges. Farewell Dad. I love you, until we meet again.

Equinox

Michelmas 2018 — St. Helena Fall 2018. Robin L. Chandler, 2018.

“In a world without forest streams from which to drink, where shall I find forest streams from which to drink?”

From the poem In a World Without Forests by Dick Allen, Zen Master

Tramping alongside the Maacama, I rejoice to still find water flowing towards the Russian River. End of September, the air is dusty; golden fields are baked; creeks are typically dry; and the fear of fire haunts all of us who love California’s rolling hills and rivers. Almost a year ago, firestorms besieged Sonoma County, this beautiful place, displacing and forever changing the lives of humans and animals. I am grateful for all lives saved and mourn for all who lost their homes and loved ones. I am grateful for this yet babbling creek. The cup is yet half full. Little daylight remaining, a great blue heron soars by me settling alongside the quiet creek bank searching for the last catch. In the East, St. Helena soars, sheltering the vineyards below where harvest has begun. Equinox. I whisper a prayer “may we live in balance and at peace for one year more.”