Had a new realization today about one of my favorite lines of poetry:
In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”
I’ve got this quote pinned to my corkboard, along with some other clippings I find inspiring, reassuring. They’re there to glance at when mornings start off on the wrong foot, when days start tripped up with my heart and throat corseted and confined, yesterday’s lingering slips and tomorrow’s worries front-of-mind. Things to pull me back into time and space and duty.
I love those last few lines of Gary Snyder’s “I Went into the Maverick Bar” — a simple little poem about about taking a night off and seeking some out-of-place consolation.
It ends with a scene of heading back down the highway, back home (and as I picture it) rolling under wide-open moon-glow western skies, windows down and a dark ridge looming.
Today, after years of imagining the destination — of a river-bottom camp, still-quiet save water-splash and coyote-calls where the poet put words to half-lit paper on a beer-buzzed night — I looked at the word “bluffs” a new way.
And I realized that there was a double meaning here. Two kinds of bluffs cast a shadow on his ride: There are the solid ones, no doubt, stacks of loose earth cleaved by water and time. And then there are the other kinds of bluffs, the kind we all must make — the feints, the hides, the little lies, gambles, trade-offs — that obscure guiding starlight, dim the journey, quell the call.
This he references early on, gently:
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.
No big deal, of course. No big deal. Just another night, another job, another round of laughing it off with the boys, of hiding the tells, the marks and scars of another life lived, another weird self, one in thrall of art, or poetry. Another night in denial, fear-muted, dumb-tongued, clenching unarticulated madcap beatific vision.
Shadow-bluffs are a part of life. No way around it. We all have to get by and get along. But so far — in the end, and if only with snuck minutes and stolen days — I always need to find the way back to myself, back to “what is to be done.”
Thank you, Gary Snyder, for the reminder. I’ll keep it close, for days when I need it most.
