Poetry with a Fishing Line, Poezie se splávkem

Thursday, June 19, 2025

There’s a reason
why, in so many
of our languages,

the sun—sol,
slunce, soleil—
coils around
two columns:

consonants,
S and L,
which sing
and summon soul,

as if the soul
were the sun of suns,
and soul-centric
the whole cosmos is.

But then there is earth, too,
unmistakably pointing
to something early,
first, former, and before.

But before what,
or before whom?
That’s the crux of the question.

Was there a life—or a death—
before?
One too horrible
or too grand to recall,

or to die—
of knowing?

Sometimes I’m surprised
when I raise my hand
and feel the top—

how much my head
had to grow its own little vent
up there, without asking,
without offering me
even a look—

as if, in doing so,
the head was bowing
to the age,

for letting us play
a jolly part
in the lila,
the spheres’
cosmic
dance—

and thus,
way more piously
than with a tip
of a tilted hat.

—Oh, don’t you also sense
how quietly, with a dash
of intellect, Asian tealeaves
perceptively intuit and tell—

with subtle taste and scent—
a furtive gist, long-withheld
secrets of distant lives
we may have once lived,

which some unsung genius
or spirit of this earth
folded far away
into Camellia sinensis,

named for Georg Kamel,
a Moravian pharmacist,
whose name itself
may descend from jamala—

to bear, to ripen—
or other allied roots
in Arabic or Turkish
for what becomes perfect,

whole, complete,
unfaultable—

So I wonder,
who was the sage
who understood
that deeper poetry,

and accounts of our lives,
are kept inside
those far-off,
detached camellia leaves?

Under the awning of thick
June greenery—joined
by spread-out maples
and ample, splendid oaks—

the road bends and rolls,
coiling to show its gilt,
an intermittent line
stringing me along

as the morning and its
slowly lifting calm
slips out of the fog,

yet all remains too heavy
with the rain that was—
though hardly gone.