KAWEAH GAP, SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK: 2003

mdbrantingham (59)in #poetry • 6 years ago

#poem #writing #nature #hiking

6 years ago in #poetry by mdbrantingham (59)

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cryptosharon (69) 6 years ago

Whoops, I didn't understand the last and most important line. What does it mean?

Keening howls like fingers call

I don't know what "keening" or "fingers" mean there (or what they're referring to).

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mdbrantingham (59) 6 years ago (edited)

Keening is a strange word that is almost obsolete in English. It describes a sound that is piercing and eerie and is associated with sadness/lament. I wrote this on a night when I was very isolated, backpacking deep in the highcountry of the Sierras. On previous trips I had normally hiked with my brother, and you will see references to "we" in earlier poems like the Whitney Summit one [https://steemit.com/poetry/@mdbrantingham/whitney-summit-sequoia-national-park-1988].

As we grew older, we grew apart, and on this trip I was alone and I wanted to tell him that I missed him, but I felt like it was sort of prohibited by fate, that that would never happen because of the way life is, that there are just some things about life that you can never fix.

Then the solitary cry of a coyote lifted up into the air from beyond the ridgeline. It reached like slender fingers through the air and wrapped my heart because it reminded me of times when my brother had been with me. So not literal fingers, but sort of spiritual fingers of sound and emotion.

Years later I learned that the name of the place, Kaweah (a Yokut indian word), refers to the cry of a crow or coyote. Just crazy.

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zameena-zen (53) 6 years ago

Dipping into your words to be suspended between two mantles of star and rock. "The moon indifferent"...what a beautiful line, it embodies the spirit of Japanese "mono no aware"

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mdbrantingham (59) 6 years ago (edited)

When I'm writing poetry, I write for myself. I know that I understand it and that is good enough for me. I don't try to make it explicit for a reader, so I usually feel that my poetry must just seem a little simplistic to most readers.

I've never felt that this poem is particularly good for reading, because the sounds aren't there. It has no rhythm or rhyme. I wanted it to have a neutral sound without patterns so that it would mimic the quiet of the forest night, a serenity in the first half of the poem to match the natural setting I was in -- just short lines of simple images and memories to set up the climax.

I'm dyslexic, which probably isn't common for a writer, and I think I'm hypersensitive to anagrams. Moon > mono. The indifference of things, or the indifference of the forest that night that was filled with the lonely cry of a coyote when the moon came up. I was 40 miles into the backcountry and alone. It created a strange mixture of fear and brotherhood - a strong pathos.

I'm not some kind of Japanese scholar, I don't read kanji but I did learn hiragana back in the stone age and "mono no aware" had stuck with me for some reason, especially since "no aware" (in English) conjures "no mind" (mushin) by simple coincidence. Mono from the Greek also plays into it. All of that has a very weird fractured mirror effect on my native-English mind, adding meanings and associations that aren't really meant to be there.

The coyote set this off in my head. I stayed up all night writing on a pad under the full moon's light and I tried to embed that into the poem. It knocks me out that you saw it in the text.

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zameena-zen (53) 6 years ago

It is very special to hear your approach to poetry as well as your relationship to language (which I find very interesting and would read an entire post about your dyslexia and what that means with regards to your writing and connection to language); knowing details like those are a privilege for the reader and adds even greater depth to your writing. Your poetry doesn't strike me as simple; I am personally not one for word gymnastics nor emptying the entire dictionary onto a page and find that the most emotive and moving work comes from subtlety of prose - movement in restraint is how I like to think of it, like ballet...a haiku? I feel the "humaness" in your work, and by that I mean that your writing allows me to come to a deeper understanding of my being as living, breathing life that is beyond the understanding of the mind...and I think all great art does this.

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