A short essay and some late night thoughts on chapter 80 of the Dao De Jing. I will probably revisit this topic more in the future, and there is still plenty to say on this chapter, especially on the last line, which I am constantly puzzling over. But this is a 5 AM blog post, and while I am all for rigorous thinking there is a time and a place. This might be the place, but it certainly isn’t the time.
This poem is for my cat. Because I really don’t write her enough poems even though I sing her little songs all the time. I came home really late today and she was so happy to see me and I really truly think that this echoes the sentiment of The Cow Song. Every day where you get to witness a beast that is not human is a day I mark as a success. The grey heron I saw today that stood two meters away from me in the snow before taking off so close that I could feel its wings is a close second, but Katie always takes first place.
An esoteric sonnet for today. Esoteric because I’m also not sure what it means, but feel free to put forth your interpretations. Quite frankly, I’m not sure I’m happy with this one, but poems are never really done or perfect and if I’m going to write 365 of these I have to be fine with having a few in there that I’m not super jazzed about. I have had that sentence “A quality of light” noted down in my notebook for a really long time and it’s been itching to find a place to be written. I don’t know if this is actually its place, but it can live here until I find a better one. The rhyme scheme is quite simple, less complex than a “proper” sonnet, but Petrarch can’t tell me what to do because he is, most likely, dead.
I’m starting to understand what JD means when he speaks about the difference between poetry and song writing. It’s really difficult to imagine these responses without music. Maybe it’s the form, although I think I’ve switched it around here slightly. It’s funny that where JD says that many of these early works are poems trying to be songs, and now that I know them as songs, my responses feel like songs trying to be poems. Anyway, this is where we meet the Alpha couple for the first time. So I’m trying to write from the perspective where their story is already complete and we know the whole sordid affair. They don’t yet. Or do they? Maybe they can guess.