Towser

If anyone has Pete Townshend's GOLD, listen to "The Sea Refuses No River" followed by "Let My Love Open the Door." The pairing is wonderful, like bookends.

Hook Lines in Songs and Poems

I was just thinking about similarities between songwriting and poetry, and how the important 'hook line' is common to both. I was listening to Pete Townshend's "The Sea Refuses No River". The song builds on the title line over and over, and each time it's introduced it means more, and draws more power to itself. The line hooks you and draws you in.

I'm including two new poems with this post. The hook lines in these poems, I think, are at the end, especially in the first poem. If anyone sees the hook somewhere else, please let me know.


WATCHING THE LILACS IN MARCH

It's true, the world holds its secrets
and reveals them, sure as the taut
buds of the lilacs will hear
the first spring tone and burst

forth, as they say.
Where I come from
love is measured in drops,
maple sap gathering,

the old men distilling
the sweetness inside them.
I found love in the smoke
wreathing from my father's pipe,

in the small gestures he made,
leaning over the bed each morning
to kiss me
into the day.



LIVING THE DAY

Each day we have this chance
to live again, so why not
step out, grateful,
into the light?

Last night I dreamed
I opened a wooden box.
Inside were neat bundles
of sticks--one for each year

of my life? No, one for each
day, there were so many of them,
some dark, some brown as grief,
others the whiteness of wings.

The day opens for each of us.
A crow flies out
from its stickly nest,
fully awake to the world.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)

The Lin Chu Poems

For the past fifteen years I've been working on three sequences of poems called The Lin Chu Poems. Two previous groups were published in Heaven of Small Moments (Broken Jaw Press, 1998) and Singing the Flowers Open (Gaspereau Press, 2001).

The five poems here are from These Poems Aren't Just Sparks Thrown Out on the Road, a book of versions, translations and poems which will be a follow-up to The Deer is Thirsty for the Mountain Stream. The book will include 20 Lin Chu poems, 10 by Feng Chih, 10 by Frederico Garcia Lorca, and 6 each by Rumi and Mirabai. Each section will have a separate introduction.

We need more love poems now, and I think the Lin Chu poems help fill that gap. After a period when there were huge chasms between men and women, it seems that we're looking for connections, conjunctions and mutual ground again.

1

Sometimes I feel you know where I am,
and what I secretly want, and where this love is leading.

I live through days endless as falling snow.
I repeat your name over and over; long to hold your face.

Dark water laps at my feet. My desire helps
fill the wound of a love without resolution.

How long before this love takes even my mind away?
If you truly heard me, you’d be here now.

I can no longer bear the thought of living without you.
If I call up your presence, then surely you will come.


2

We're all drunk in this tavern. Things are happening
at the next table that we know nothing of.

Why should I ask for mercy? Half of what I have
is owned by someone else.

Dear God, I cry out to you in the middle of the night:
"Do you hear me or not?" "Whom did I love before I was born?"

These questions don't get any better
when they're greeted with silence.

There's a Way. I know it; I follow it.
These poems aren't just quartz thrown out on the road.


3

When we leave the last word to love, the dance begins,
the old desires and preoccupations.

Someone said you were talking about me.
My face burns, and I wake up suddenly from a dream.

I've heard that the molecules of our bodies
break up at night and join with the one we love.

I want to come back as a single petal wrung
from your heart, painting the earth red with love.

This abundance, this scent rising from the fields--
Krishna longing for Radha, you walking down the road again


4

When we first met, shooting stars fell across the sky.
What would have happened if you'd decided to stay?

What sort of courage does it take to be who we are?
What kind of music brings out joy instead of grieving?

The water hyacinths seem a little dishevelled.
We're like that sometimes, caught up in the intensities of love.

The pleasures of the day are counted in heartbeats.
Sometimes one glimpse or touch is enough.

The wine we've always wanted is created between us.
We drink all day, and still there is more than we need.


5

I’m given over to the night sometimes. The dark swell
of ocean waves is all I can hear.

The tern returns to her nest, and it is lovely, braided
from the common threads of longing and grief.

I walk a long road where the only voice is the breathing
of the dark.

I wake up in the night; Don’t ever leave me!:
the owls understand that cry.

When we met, my heart turned into a black swan.
Listen to it swimming toward you.

(Lin Chu Poems Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)

A Reply to the Academics

I love how the old Chinese poets cut the mustard and got directly to the point in their poems. One of my favorites is Tao Yuan Ming, who left an official post to return to his farm and write poems. He wrote many poems about solitude, his garden, the inner world. And he tended that inner world with care and intensity.

He wrote about spiritual poverty in a way that seems startling to me. In the end, how much do we need? A bookcase with a dozen books; perhaps a dozen songs; twelve months of the year lived fully. Here's a poem of his in my translation from The Deer is Thirsty for the Mountain Stream.

A REPLY TO THE ACADEMICS

All things have a place to return to at dusk,
but this thin cloud has no resting place;
winds rise and it's gone.
When will I see it again, transparent, filled with light?
The red dawn opens the night mist;
hundreds of birds go about their daily business.
One crow flies out from its stickly nest
and returns just before nightfall.
To live like the others, to follow the accepted roads
is to go cold and hungry inside.
If no one knows how I live,
so what? Grief means nothing to me now.

The next post will include a few ecstatic love poems by Lin Chu. These are new versions, and are similar in tone to some of the Sufi poets, particularly Rumi.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 1992, 2006)