The Reed of My Life Bends To and Fro Against the Current

The past 48-hours has gone, in order, from dizzying high to depressing low, back up to intoxicating joy and finally settling into...funkiness. The first high was due to the fact that I finally, after three attempts, passed my license test here and am the not-so-proud-but-nonetheless-happy owner of a Japanese driver's license. The low was due to someone wonderful I know losing out on a job opportunity that would have secured their residency in Japan indefinitely. The next high and resulting funkiness is, well, private. I'll make a belligerent post about the license process here in the near future--just not feeling it at this exact moment.

When words fail me I like to turn to poet Philip Levine for perspective. If nothing else, his prose shows me the fantastic possibilities afforded us by this `language` thing.

Gospel
by Philip Levine

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there's
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don't
ask myself what I'm looking for.
I didn't come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I've said to myself,
although it greets me with last year's
dead thistles and this year's
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider's cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I've never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. "Soughing" we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.


--Matt