Many years ago I read for Rexroth twice. The first time I just showed up at an open mike in his class. I wasn’t going to USB, or any school. The second time was at his invitation, which time I showed up with a guitar player, drummer and sax and flautist. He then invited me to his house to show him more work and talk about poetry. Fond memories.
I would never have thought of beginning a poem with lines from another poet. And better than that, he goes into a gorgeous moment of his own life in the manner of Po Chou and ends with a sense of both fleeting time and the personal eternal. Wow!
"All this will never be again." 😠I feel that. FOMO on a universal scale.
What a beautiful poem.
What a gorgeous and heartfelt scene. Really a touching voice here.
Stunning and heartfelt.
This poem feels like a love letter to time itself, where memory and presence entwine.
The daughter becomes both companion and symbol, a living echo of poetry across centuries.
Nature is not backdrop but pulse swallows, rain, trout, and thunder breathing life into each line.
Every detail glimmers with intimacy: feathers in her hair, starlight on her cheeks, breath in the frost.
The campfire burns as a fragile beacon, a single light against mountains and waterfalls.
Water speaks all night, its manifold voices carrying the continuity of existence.
Yet the poem insists on transience: ten thousand birds sing, ten thousand years revolve, but this moment will never return.
It holds the paradox of eternity and impermanence, binding love to the turning wheel of time.
The tenderness of father and daughter becomes inseparable from the vastness of the earth.
In the end, the poem is both celebration and elegy, luminous with beauty, fragile with loss.
Many years ago I read for Rexroth twice. The first time I just showed up at an open mike in his class. I wasn’t going to USB, or any school. The second time was at his invitation, which time I showed up with a guitar player, drummer and sax and flautist. He then invited me to his house to show him more work and talk about poetry. Fond memories.
Ah, Rexroth. An almost forgotten poet and translator who deserves to be remembered and read. Thanks for this one.
You’re v welcome, my friend 🌻
BEAU.TI.FUL!
I would never have thought of beginning a poem with lines from another poet. And better than that, he goes into a gorgeous moment of his own life in the manner of Po Chou and ends with a sense of both fleeting time and the personal eternal. Wow!
I so appreciate your generous readership, Rochelle🌻
Beautiful & haunting.