A Teahouse Garden

There were five stages leading up to this poem:

1. a visit to the Bloedel Preserve, a botanical garden on Bainbridge Island off Seattle;
2. photos I took there which suggested to me a wormhole in the glass of the teahouse;
3. making a freeform list of words and concepts;
4. summarizing what I wanted to say;
5. the backstory on Japanese philosophies of gardening;
6. the poem

3 FREEFORM

Skies vine our limbs with lines
And crystalize our eyes
Canopies refine the mind’s dim synonyms
As ocean warms our small low limbs,
Light with mold and flow,
Flowing stones and
Holes in time
Rise and colorize
The canopies of clouds
Which rhyme the skies
With stories in the stones.
Rivers rush through leaves
That flame and blush
The limbs of trees with moss,
Pure land sucked inside
The axis of the streaming sky,
Night flowing loss,
Borrowed scenery and accidents of time
The hojo of the streaming glass
Flaps and vortices invisible to us
Wormholes
Where dimensions slow
In Fibonacci swirls
Across the axis of the streaming sky
And shape the cortex of the world
From accidents of space
And the mudra’s winding lakes.

4 SUMMARY

Reading about Yeats’ obsessions with gyres and religious systems, out of which came his simple lyrical poems, I realized he filled in the spaces between the colder theories with human emotions.

So this poem comes out of occasional dips into gardens (the Bloedel Preserve of Richard Haag and Thomas Church, Wharton’s house, The Mount, Beatrix Farrand’s Dumbarton Oaks, Sugimoto’s Hirshhorn, Eyrignac Manor, Eleanor Perenyi’s writings) and my attempt to turn their metallic myths as soft as flowers.

Garden designers are called niwa shi, “garden masters,” in Japan. Poets have to replace their Linnaean geometries with emotions that don’t require vocabularies.

Although Nabokov constantly talked about chess novels, which worked out chess problems with characters, as Goethe used physics as a formula for his novel, Elective Affinities, Nabokov used what Beethoven called “false fugues,” plots that superficially mentioned chess (Sebastian Knight, The Luzhin Defense), but that never followed the patterns of a game beyond a few superficial references.

My own quantum poems similarly follow broad scientific outlines but replace the specifics with softer emotions.

Walking around the Bloedel Preserve on Bainbridge Island brought back our times at other gardens, but the roots of the poem started only after I had decided not to pay any attention to the ideas.

But here are some of those ideas.

There are certain folds of space, wormholes where the surface of objects are disrupted, revealing the gears, the wizard behind the screen. These breaches in the fabric of time gather around complexities, groupings of objects. They are quantum synapses, junctions in the mind. You see them in the chaos of a Jackson Pollack painting, in fractal shapes, in musical cat’s cradles that have no ties to the structure of the piece, in explosions of language in poetry or prose, in Finnegan’s fall from the ladder in Joyce’s finnegans wake. These anomalies hint at deeper layers. The geometric patterns of Japanese gardens have these hidden metaphors which evoke Buddhist cosmology.

5 THE BACKSTORY

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
–As You Like It

One principle of Hindu-Buddhist cosmology is a vision of the physical universe as alternating mountains and oceans grouped around Mt. Sumeru, the central axis of the world. The arrangement of stones and islands in the pond of Rokuon-ji Temple (the Golden Pavilion) evoke this cosmology, as do the sands and stones of the Bloedel Reserve. The Byodo-In Temple in Kaneohe Bay on Oahu is an imitation of this temple and its setting, ringed by misted mountains.

There are maelstroms in time when the massing of objects weighs down the scaffold of gravity, and space collapses in on itself.

On earth, glacial rivers disappear into the ice. There are waterfalls in the middle of the ocean. There is liquefaction of soil in earthquakes, where soil in Iceland turns into silt that deliquesces into bellows of existence below the surface.

In space, the cosmic energy grid breaks down and matter is fused into particles smaller than atoms in black holes. The illusion of space can no longer sustain the smoke of shape, the thermal patterns of air that mimic the shadows of things. The metaphor of Fibonacci helices (branching in trees, swirls of palm canopies and pineapples) are the latent recurrence sequences invoked by the cosmology of stone gardens.

A typical cumulus cloud weighs around 1.4 billion pounds, yet it looks aerated, as frothy as air itself. The elutriated foam of the sky seems as fragile as ocean spume, but is in fact a cripplingly dense cortex, a circuitry of gyri and sulci, accumulated synapses of mountain folds and synclines, Precambrian thrust faults of tongues, drumlins, furrows, basins, domes, troughs, alluvial and volcanic formations, erratics, coulees, defiles, and chasms of the air.

This feathery trellis, imitated by our mind’s neural cosmologies, appears when flaws in its symmetry create holes: rips, roues, moulins, underwater cataracts, cracks in the electric grid. This energy trellis (which, again, our mind parallels) sustains the relationships which underlie visible forces like orbits, gravities, strange attractors which we don’t understand.