I Said to the Wanting Creature
I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!
And there is nobody, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence, you will find nothing.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!
Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary
things, and stand firm in that which you are.
Kabir (trans Robert Bly)
what it means
The speaker addresses the part of himself that wants/desires/craves. He says to that part that there is no place “where the soul is less thirsty”: there’s no place where those cravings will go away. Instead of trying to rush off to a better place, know yourself and be content.
why I like the poem
I find the tone of this poem delightful. The speaker chastises himself while being full of wonder. Normally, I’m not a fan of exclamation points, but here the speaker just feels so full of wow! wow! that I didn’t mind them.
craft
This is one of the poems that Dia and I picked for our epiphanic article, so here’s a preview of what we’ll be talking about. This poem follows the five-step model we uncovered for making a powerful poem that centers around an epiphany.
Step 1: ground the speaker in the real world
“There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?”
All of this happens in a real word of rivers, roads, banks, nesting birds.
Step 2: Make a bridge into a whirl
“What is this river you want to cross?”
In this case, he literally uses the word “cross.” It’s a literal crossing, but it’s also a crossing between states of mind, moving to an out-of-body/out of mind experience.
Step 3: The whirl
“There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!And there is nobody, and no mind!”
In this whirl, the entire real world has been erased as well as the body and the mind. We are gone, gone, gone.
Step 4: The epiphany
“Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence, you will find nothing.Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!”
This is what the speaker has now realized: There is no better place. You’ve got make it work right here.
Step 5: Return to the everyday
“Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary
things, and stand firm in that which you are.”
Suddenly another voice enters the poem. It’s like someone has been observing the speaker all this time and now speaks up. The speaker is no longer alone in the ungrounded land of epiphany.
Stay tuned for all the methods we discovered for these 5 steps.