The patio o-
vercast, the mimosa sweats
in its fragile flute,
in the chair beside
me the TLS: ‘utter
fluidity with
absolute resi-
lience’ (Simon Leys on Zhou
Enlai): in a word,
the Dao. Selfless
tyrants and widowers share
the transparency.
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Author: Tom D'Evelyn
Tom D'Evelyn is a private editor and writing tutor in Portland OR and, thanks to the web, across the US and in the UK. He can be reached at tom.develyn@comcast.net. D'Evelyn has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. Before retiring he held positions at The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard University Press, Boston University and Brown University. He ran a literary agency for ten years, publishing books by Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, among others. Before moving to Portland OR he was managing editor at Single Island Press, Portsmouth NH. He blogs at http://tdevelyn.com and other sites.
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We assume the description ‘utter fluidity with absolute resilience’ is inappropriate hyperbole. Yet the poem shows how both tyrants and widowers share ‘transparency’. to me this lends credibility to the phrase ‘ ‘utter fluidity with absolute resilience’. How could a mere human being or a finite poem or a finite human being in a mere poem possibly embody that? For me the poem starts to show the reader how. It is because the mere human being in a finite poem is an opening for the source of being, Tao, Hosana in excelsis, Yhwh, whatever we call it. This helps me read the poem as flow and the reading experience becomes more than reading.
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Wow son of mine not mine! Thank you Stephen!
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Er? ! 🙂 cheers Steve
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You ‘transcend’ me!
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