The Archway

Annabella Pitkin

The world alive.

Wet web of plants, pink and lavender

lobelia, hortensia

blossom fat with rain.

Plant sex, plant stems, dead leaves

grass feathers

at the edge of a space marked by mowing.

Dapples of fragrance on this animal skin. Thick wet air where vision moves slow.

Odor, shadow, rooster’s crow.

Vaster than empires, rhizomes grow.

That Greek sailor with the restless mind,

aged by disappointment but not yet wise.

Tennyson gives him an unslaked longing:

“All experience is an arch wherethrough

gleams that untraveled world…”

The world’s your oyster.

Drink deep sailor.

All experience an arch –

where desire moves.

Eating what it finds.

And yet.

The wet world webbed with green. The senses are called indriya, powers.

The poet compares birdsong to water.

Awareness petals into being, each fingertip a flower.

The arch a threshold.

We tremble at the lip, outside ourselves.

The Archway: Genealogy

This poem happens at an intersection of literary lineages, Tibetan and Himalayan, English and American. As a writer, I’ve been asking, what stories echo in the language I live in? What genealogies of thought, archaeologies of knowledge, violence, history? A writer who inspires me is Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen (1895-1977). His verses welcome readers into a Sanskrit and Tibetan kāvya poetics of responsiveness and responsibility, finding partners in the natural world and also in the creations of human culture. Thinking of him, I started with that instant in time when more-than-human life dawns in the senses, and the world appears. At first, that led me to follow English language associations and metaphor through imagination – and suddenly I found myself reminded of a psychology of empire. I recalled Greek myths and Homer’s epics, filtered through the rhythm of English writers like Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), who re-voice Odysseus through the sound of their own desires. I began again. And again I came back to Khunu Lama, to how he imagines bodhicitta, the commitment to enlightenment for the sake of others, as a kind of precious moisture, a dew that saturates speech with compassion, rendering it lovely as birdsong.

Annabella Pitkin is a scholar of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist literature, culture, and intellectual history. She is Associate Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at Lehigh University. Her book Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint (University of Chicago Press, 2022) explores themes of non-attachment, devotion, and memory in the life and work of the Himalayan poet-meditator Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen