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Not a Chance Encounter

 

What that Chinese cook said to Dogen in the year 1223:

“Nothing in this universe can ever be concealed.”

 

Don’t look, the sun makes you blind

unless you’re already blind from looking.

A poster bleeds the word red onto a wall.

 

A road going round a giant hill.

So many cranes feathered the sky,

their voices were trembling waves on a river.

 

The sun blinded by the shadow of the world,

the splendor of its rim, a child’s hat in the mud,

an avalanche burying a mountain town.

 

She dropped a knife on the kitchen floor

and streetlights, the endless teeth of a city,

started to devour the night.

 

Eyes and hands and thoughts born from a vast fire.

A sniper learning how to count.

Words crawling across his kill.

 

An old Bible flapping in the back yard.

A blue house without a door.

A rain storm scratching at the horizon.

 

Memory builds a nest full of eclipses

and spiders hatch knowing how to spin webs.

A sandwich falls from a swaying girder.

 

Scientists are running in a pack,

their hands growling.

telescopes chasing them toward the sea.

 

The sun desires to be seen.

Why else would it spend so much time

shining in the brittle sky?

 

A young man stands shirtless by a window,

a red balloon caught in a tree.

An ambulance has crushed a car.

 

To see the sun is waking up.

First, the eyes have to be dragged out of the grave

like fish afraid of drowning.

 

Nothing moves faster than firelight.

Bodies of ash walk about, waiting for the wind.

Waking up is doom’s devotion.




Glenn Halak

levelheaded: Not a Chance Encounter

 

The opening sentence of Glenn Halak’s “Not a Chance Encounter” is difficult to digest on an initial read. The second line causes us to reconsider the first. As a result, while presenting the idea of attentiveness, Halak demands that we heighten our attention.

 

Central to the poem is the relationship between light and dark, the sun’s existence and its being “blinded by the shadow of the world.” Halak’s choice of verbs throughout (bleeds, trembling, blinded, burying, dropped, devour, flapping, scratching, growling, caught, dragged) suggests that, in the epic battle of good and evil, the bad guys, contrary to the popular notion, appear to be winning.

 

Reading a challenging poem can sometimes feel like wandering in the dark. We reach our hands out in search of something to grab hold of. Once we locate an object, we find another, and another, until eventually, we’re able to make sense of the space around us. This natural tendency to make connections comes through when we read poems as well, especially a poem whose title so strongly suggests its contents are intended.

 

Regardless of how the speaker views the world, the poem’s most important message is that that we are going to see it however we want.  We combat randomness with connections, meaninglessness with meaning. For instance, in the third stanza the line “A road going round a giant hill” causes us to envision the “cranes [that] feathered the sky” flying in circles overhead, mirroring the formation below.

 

A few lines later, The “splendor of [the sun’s] rim,” is akin to “a child’s hat in the mud” which is a metaphor for “an avalanche burying a mountain town” not because Halak explicitly tells us these are metaphors, but instead because we want them to be metaphors. We see “the word red [on] a wall” in “a red balloon caught in a tree”; we see that same red reflected in the sirens of an “ambulance [that] has crushed a car”; and we see the sirens as the “firelight” of the poem’s final stanza.

 

 

– The Editors