I am awake and just completed reading a wonderful book, The Language of Change, Elements of Therapeutic Communication by Paul Watzlawick. I think I am beginning to comprehend why the format of the book Breast Stroke is challenging for the reader. As Hari Bhajan, the second person to read it, said yesterday, the story, which comes from the blog is "compelling, immediate, raw." We interrrupt that story to insert the poems, which are a right-brain rangy way of looking at things. The poems need to come out of the book, and then, come back in as they choose, like "fairies.". It is odd to realize that what motivated the book, the poems, may have been a framework that disappears. She is suggesting we completely pull the poems out for now. I sit with all of this, this morning, and come to this poem.
Choices
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
for Drago Štambuk
“Choices” copyright �© 2006 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted from Dear Ghosts, with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. www.graywolfpress.org.
