‘One Week’ occupies a certain time and place. The place is Kaukapakapa, the time, seven days spent in silent retreat. The performing subject is this ‘I’, although sometimes it occurs as the letter ‘l’, or as the figure ‘1’: ergo sum.

Thought finds a way into language. The two are not the same thing, just as movement seeing & hearing are not what they might at first appear to be: ‘a poem is empty of everything it does not contain’. It’s as if stuff arrives from out of nowhere. Dancing with the Stars.

The pull is multiple. We do speak and see, our very means of existence, and something in us wants to harness their reception into more or less valid cognitions. Even the way we want to talk about yesterday leaves yesterday straggling far behind. There is seeing—and there is ‘squeezing pink from a tube, haphazardly applied’.

One idea in the poem is that the gift that we poets—we humans—bring is the act of containment, a world—or worlds—for us to inhabit. Riverspell, from which ‘One Week’ is drawn, uses twin columns, like two channels in a river, or a river that sometimes spills its banks or separates into channels before recombining, the many returning to resume one. Accordingly, the prose of ‘One Week’ is contained not only within the order of calendar days but, geographically, within the banks that contain the flow of life.

So tomorrow is surely speculative: ‘early’ and ‘late’ lack a real place in between.

One permutation, an unwarranted one perhaps, is that in ‘Tuesday’ the use of individual letters slip their banks—an interposed medial l delivers itself as world. That ‘l’ is, in ways and at times, synonymous with the subjective ‘I’, something transliterally the ‘one’ that I am, or the numerical figure it imitates: ergo sum. Thus things move in and out of step, clutch, stumble, reassemble, and continue to where it is impossible for them not to arrive.

Of course, in poems one always walks past things, there must be scenery. This may be conceived as balancing abstraction (thoughts, concepts) with concreteness (words, images), as my friend Richard von Sturmer admonishes. It takes the physical form of a fellow meditator musing on a bridge, a compendium of flora, hidden birds, a noontime interview, a column of ants.

A dog barks. That’s it.

john geraets