How on a Monday Morning I Visited Soul through Her Eastern Door

 

Sometimes, or rather more often 

than day admits, 

what we opine, pine, think— 

and what the universe means— 

 

is foam: ephemeral, 

gliding to be rolled 

in spurted rains of mist 

to colossal waves. 

 

So being but a spark, 

a tiny drop, we fathom 

what moves us 

from above, from below, 

 

at times glancing at stars 

we try to map, to plot 

those distant constant lights 

on the face of what we see. 

 

Many strive to rip, to rend 

the common space, its lasting sense; 

some rush to mend the tear, 

repair streaming strings of ancient awe. 

 

Thus we play what we learned, 

practice what we learned to love, 

to hear, to see 

amid ceaseless swirls. 

 

The Chinese 看 (kān) suggests— 

to see and to visit 

may be of the same kith, 

the same ken. 

 

For seeing truly someone, 

or what truly is, 

must be counted 

divine boon, gift: 

 

an intermittent, fragile bridge 

between each passing path 

and life's never-ending resonance. 

 

Sometimes someone we meet
becomes such an opening— 

坎 (kǎn), 

a sill, a door, a window, a lost home. 

 

And even if one is but a drop, 

in that drop, deeper in, 

a staying print: 

刊 (kān), 

 

the ocean, the universe 

you are called to read, 

a font of sacred bliss, of awe, 

ever to be guarded, cared for: 

 

看 (kān), 

and, in this regard, 

even to endure: 

堪 (kān), 

 

transcending 

one's own fleeting drop.

Millennium Meeting beyond Time (Songs before the Gaze) by Vladimir Suchan

 

How Something So Thin and Small Can Catch Something So Large, She Looked at Me as if in Wonder

 

A line on which letters

flow and curl

to catch your breath and eye,

the delicacy of an arachnoid leg,

its sole, ankle, calf, and thigh,

to pin and plot and map

 

with the finest of the rifts

which pull and tie

as if it too sought to compete

with Pallas’ subtile weaving art—

sub tela—written finely—

under a cobweb’s geometric loom

 

for text was once a woven thing,

logos or speech by tekne

was to whirl and twine

rays by rays arrayed

and catch the lightest beat,

heart’s finely strumming pulse.

How the Romantic Orientation of My Poems Had Been Sealed and Set

 

I. Fifty Years Later from Another Continent

 

A funny thing or—to be

more reverent—it’s fair

now to say, after half

a century—how one

sentence of a mere two

or three small words

set the compass

of my life and poems—

 

it must have been in 1976 or 75

in the history class I enjoyed much

till we came to where our current

world and age began and our book

and what we were made to learn

suddenly became all too shallow

and way too grey and hollow

to my mind and innate taste—

 

II. The Classroom at the Ostrov School on the Hill

And by the Street That Used to Be “Of the May Uprising”

But, after 1989, Was Changed Simply into “May Street”

 

But that, at that moment,

had happened yet

when we, little whelps and ducks,

were sitting in a study

generally assigned to botany

with skeletons and samples

of long-dead animals

and our teacher asked:

 

“Could you tell me, guys,

what the Romantic is,

what means and what it does?”

 

III. A Schoolgirl’s Defining Answer: The Annunciation

 

Admittedly, back then I was,

as we say in Czech,

I was still "unkissed"—

that is,

completely innocent of the matter,

 

and yet, naively ambitious,

I raised my hand, hoping

to concoct something smart

 

but before I was called,

my class-fellow Jitka Železná,

“She of Iron Will Be Praised,”

was picked up first—

 

and so she spoke

those fatal words:

“Something very beautiful.”