The Answer by Robinson Jeffers

Then what is the answer? ˗ Not to be deluded by dreams.

To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,

and their tyrants come, many times before.

When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose

the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.

To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted

and not wish for evil; and not be duped

By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will

not be fulfilled.

To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear

the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand

Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars

and his history … for contemplation or in fact …

Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,

the greatest beauty is

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,

the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man

Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,

or drown in despair when his days darken.

About to Fly

Some thoughts I penned in the airport before leaving South Korea, after two years of living and teaching there.

So, you sit in a cafe. You speak Korean to the barista; she understands you and you understand her. You do not know when next you will say these words, have the feeling of them on your tongue.

The cafe is average and the coffee bad. It is loud and full of patrons. A young woman spills a drink, rushes for napkins. You have learned to appreciate coffee, both when it’s good, and when its bad just for its presence, hot and bitter.

The cafe is nestled deep in the airport, in the international terminal, past the security check point and immigration, where the officer took away your Alien Registration Card. He asked simply, May I keep this? And you nodded because you expected this, and in fact the process in this bureaucratic country was in this instance surprisingly simple. Still, a filament was broken then, one more strand of the many that tie you here, parting like piano wire under great strain. Many of these lines are stretched taught and you feel their hooks pulling in the muscle of your heart.

These are your last images of this country: a sticky table under globular lights, everyone around you in transit, unmoored, the sunset over the wing of the waiting aircraft. The ceiling of the terminal stretching low into the distance like an inverse runway. Duty free shops lit like upscale bars, egg-shell lamps, all products seemingly false.

Behind you are the green monsoon mountains, furred in pines, and the granite islands heaving from sea-glass breakers. Salt off the sea in the wind. Warm night air and calm sea, swimming naked. Herons and egrets hunting in the damp evening through the green rice paddies. Dish upon dish filling the low tables, pallets of colors and flavors in food, each precise. Coffee and beer and rice wine and liquor. Nights danced down to morning and the hot sun coming. And all those friends, each face and voice distinct, unique.

This is one of those terrible wonderful moments, when its clear that not one of us can be replaced. Not a moment with another person can be replaced. Yet the past persists this way, in flashing clarity of memory, in the deep tug in the heart of your heart.

Remember this. Even this moment, when you feel adrift and countryless, when no one near you will you see again, when you are in transit to another life. Remember the feeling of your friends face against your chest, her hot tears. Remember conversations in the night by the sea, hearing the waves. Remember reading Spanish poetry, remember singing in harmony. Remember friends and friends and friends.

You, lonely and hurting, you have memory, as you fly to another country.

September - Yuba River

Dispatches from Nowhere #6 - The Shark and The Net

“… recently off Australia's coast ... a fishing trawler's net snagged a frilled shark...

… ‘The head on it was like something out of a horror movie. It was quite horrific looking’ …

… Relatively little is known about the frilled shark, whose name refers to its six pairs of gills. The animals are believed to live at depths of between several hundred and several thousand feet. They've rarely been seen in their natural environment, and a rare living specimen, caught in Japan in 2007, died soon after it was put in a large seawater pool...

… nearly all of the rare animal's closest relatives are long extinct …”

‒ Bill Chappell

NPR News

January 21st, 2015

~

I speak this way because it is how you can hear me.

There is only this world, this universe, all its black depths.

Soon I will dissolve – my particles will be in the sea, the land. They will not cease to mourn.

~

For a long time I was in that safe darkness, depth above and below. The unceasing tides that washed over me.

I knew below by the scent: stone, fetid dust, sulphur, cold and food.

I knew above by barbs of light lancing the green-black.

I knew the surge of tide and storm. I knew the moon by its touch not its sight.

I knew space.

I knew loneliness. Because there are few like me now. Those that were have passed out of all memory. The few of us know the horror of rareness. We wane and wane.

~

Now more horrific: I have heard the grating wreckage of coral, I have heard the scream of the whale, the fearful dart of the tuna, who had few fears before. I have heard screaming, and worse I have heard the nets surge toward the surface like a sick tide and leave behind silence.

There is always the hive-like drone that runs through the water, so constant we seem to forget it. It dulls my skin, it makes me unaware. This is perhaps why I was caught in the net. Or perhaps it is that nothing can escape the net, no matter how old, or rare.

~

I know this has happened before – it is a surety in my blood. My family has seen the sea silent and cold, hot and acid and algal. This has happened before. It is not the same as living to feel it.

Perhaps this is why I was caught in the net, why I swim this glass cage. No longer to feel what is happening so acutely.

~

There is no openness here, yet a choking lightness, none of the comforting pressure holding a body, none of the cool dark. Above there is the bright light and then the emptiness of air and beyond of space – thin, lonely.

And there is you. I heard your word ‘horror,’ in the click of your camera, the tone of your voice. Horror and nightmare, you speak this of me. You hive of apes, you clever fleshy virus, you who strip land to bone, kill the sea.

One day you will be rare too, you horror. Someday you will speak into a vastness, an abyssal blackness, and nothing will answer.

I leave you with this.

At Jumunjin Harbor

Early, the squid boats hum toward harbor. They are strung with glass bulbs to attract the cephalopods, like islands broken away from a carnival, like metal-hulled anglerfish. All night they have performed their silent, bright barker's call. Now the orbs dim, lost in the depths of the negative darkness of the coming day. At this distance, one cannot hear the squid in their tanks.

The sea turns a powdery green near shore; further out it is the purple of the sound of the pages of a book as it hits the floor. Across the road from the harbor, the town is tacked into the granite cliffs. Roofs of blue plastic tile, the color of the taste of the sky when it is too high and clear to believe. Cement walls, cracked and silent; paper doors. The pale waves come up and gnaw at the jetty beside the road, the harbor mouth. The squid boats labor through the swell, weighed by their catch.

Mayday. The town wakes, and carries bags down the hill to the fish market.

My story 'The Shrine' is out now in the new Dark Mountain Project anthology, and is also being featured on their blog. You can read it here:

http://dark-mountain.net/blog/the-shrine/