sw00016tdp-4poems

This Day's Poem        (and how this series began)

 4

So He Said


'Cause this well's dry,
Death is nigh.
God knows why.
Good-bye, good-bye.


 tdp110806


=


The following describes how my
This Day's Poem series
began.

*

One day--after having read
Tom Montag's The Big Book
of Ben Zen, I wrote:

         if you want
         to move
         the mountain

         walk around
         to its
         other side

=

Within a day or two, I wrote two variations.

*

if you want to
move the mountain

walk around to
its other side

~

if you want to move the mountain

walk around to its other side

* *


Then I wrote 
Comments of mine on my 08.20.06 entry

-
About "3 Tonalities":

The first one seems to me the most meditative,
even so far as to allow "move" to have a deeper
connotation than one might usually consider.
I get the feeling from it that even the mountain
recognizes the presence of a someone walking
around it, and is pleasantly/ moved by that.
*
The third seems to me the most extroverted. 
My sense of it is that an authoritative speaker
is the source of the words, but also that this
speaker has an air of superiority, an air which
caused me to sense that between the lines
exists an elision, an elision composed of two
punctuation marks and one word: , dummy,
It is as if the speaker is saying to the listener:
You aren't very smart, are you.
*
Now, before I go on, I want to be sure you
know that the implicit purpose--though I
did not conceive of it beforehand/ because
beforehand I thought that what is now
variation 1 would be the only one--of my
presenting the same words in the same order
differently/ is to demonstrate how/ line
breaks/ impact meaning.
*
A poet I know told me variation 2
speaks to him the most powerfully.
I can/not argue with that, for it
is indeed in the middle, being both
somewhat inward-tending and outward-
tending.  It exists in a space where
most humans most often are: a
congenial space.

                    August 25, 2006
                    Brian Arthur Salchert

-

[ May 1, 2007:  Yesterday I decided to include my tonalities as
                          separate poems in the TDP online chapbook.
                          Today I gave them these tdp id's:
                          tdp043007a     tdp043007b      tdp043007c ]


-
Brian A. J. Salchert