dharma explorer
Posts: 596
(1/10/04 7:54 am) Reply
Arrival/Departure
Found this in the Jan 12th issue of The New Yorker magazine. I'm not crazy about the structure of the poem, but I like what it's saying.
THE ANSWER
Leaving the house,
the house will be
left completely,
from cellar to
attic my absence
entire.
Do I enter the world
the same,
my presence felt
from cloud
to ditch?
Only in departure whole.
Arrival
is always partial.
---Bill Knott
I like it. It makes me ponder the many implications.
In our relationship with anything external, only our absence from the relationship can be finite. Anything short of absence is a gradient shade of gray. There can be "nothing" but there can not be "everything". To be fully existing requires a level of comfort in being absent from the external and fully occupied internally.
A quote from I don't remember where:
"All men die. Few men really live."
---------- The next best thing to playing and winning....is playing and losing
Our existence is always part of a bigger world. So our absence is like a missing jigsaw puzzle, but our presence is a continuation of the bigger picture.
Beautiful poem, though i agree with you about the structure.
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