01-27-2024, 03:56 AM
Hi Tim.
This feels a bit overwritten now, and your original “goal, to write about the experience of consulting the I Ching” seems to have fallen by the wayside (not least with the introduction of Catholic indulgences.) That said, the last four line work well.
Maybe you’d consider something like “I Ching in the Waiting Room” as a title? (Gives a context which you then don’t need to incorporate into the body of the poem.)
A December diagnosis
It’s strange, but I’m disappointed.
A two month interval
absorbing my mortality
has left me desiring nothing more
than the next question.
I throw my wheat pennies,
calculate my corporeal future ………… struggle with ‘calculate’ – it may be the right term, but it hits the wrong note, for me.
in the broken or unbroken
lines of a scribbled hexagram:
I find myself in a ravine. …………….. I think you need to unpack this a bit. I keep wondering if the ‘ravine’ is from an I Ching text, or your own personal metaphor.
I must follow it to the end,
filling the low places
until I can move on.
Beyond the ravine a meadow …….same problem as with ‘ravine’
where dragons have fought.
I step over the splashes
of yellow and black blood
to the shore of a lake
to where a mountain struggles
with Heaven, and the question
of the next second. …………… not sure how well the repeat of ‘question’ works, but losing the mountain’s struggle was too much!
I close the book and shuffle
into the nephrologist’s office.
Best, Knot
.
This feels a bit overwritten now, and your original “goal, to write about the experience of consulting the I Ching” seems to have fallen by the wayside (not least with the introduction of Catholic indulgences.) That said, the last four line work well.
Maybe you’d consider something like “I Ching in the Waiting Room” as a title? (Gives a context which you then don’t need to incorporate into the body of the poem.)
A December diagnosis
It’s strange, but I’m disappointed.
A two month interval
absorbing my mortality
has left me desiring nothing more
than the next question.
I throw my wheat pennies,
calculate my corporeal future ………… struggle with ‘calculate’ – it may be the right term, but it hits the wrong note, for me.
in the broken or unbroken
lines of a scribbled hexagram:
I find myself in a ravine. …………….. I think you need to unpack this a bit. I keep wondering if the ‘ravine’ is from an I Ching text, or your own personal metaphor.
I must follow it to the end,
filling the low places
until I can move on.
Beyond the ravine a meadow …….same problem as with ‘ravine’
where dragons have fought.
I step over the splashes
of yellow and black blood
to the shore of a lake
to where a mountain struggles
with Heaven, and the question
of the next second. …………… not sure how well the repeat of ‘question’ works, but losing the mountain’s struggle was too much!
I close the book and shuffle
into the nephrologist’s office.
Best, Knot
.