Assay

For years I hammered
at a wall around my heart
and when it finally crumbled
I found the being within
was the same as the one
who’d been holding the hammer
all along

Early in the morning of December 18, 2021 the static of light rain fell against my library windows, the world outside dark with sunrise still an hour or two away. My family was still sleeping. As I sat there, I became aware of my reflection in the window, and was surprised to feel love for that being, at once familiar and yet unknown, a being who was apparently meditating in the arms of a bare maple tree outside. My delight became concern as I saw, in this double manifestation of me, an image of the bifurcated sense of self that happens to so many of us as we grow up, an inexplicable distance from the immediacy of our child-mind. How to reunite with this original mind? How to understand our fundamental disposition?

How do we test the integrity of our being?

As if in answer, this poem rose into the morning silence. At first, it was suspended between me and my reflection, a form filling with language. I felt the language begin to respond to my breath. I closed my eyes to listen to each line. When I had finished breathing the poem into being and opened my eyes, it was light, and my reflection sitting in the tree had disappeared.

I wrote the poem down and set it aside. I felt it a private poem, a moment of quiet revelation. A few days later, I sent it to a few close friends who surprised me by sending it back to me, translated into their mother tongues. Those friends sent the poem to a few of their friends, and the poem returned to me in three more languages. The voice artist Paul Holdengraber asked if he could read it on one of his radio programs (Quotomania 141: Ian Boyden). I loved the idea of my poem entering the world through the voice of another. And after Paul’s reading went live, the poem went viral and more and more translations began to pour in.

This poem has always felt sentient. Its disposition is to dismantle the walls between languages. As it drapes itself in the clothing of one language and then another, it comes into a more defined focus and I gain a greater and greater understanding of who this being is. This website is a collection of those translations. As new translations are made, I will add them to the growing list.

I invite you to translate this poem so we can keep watching this being become itself.

 

 

—Ian Boyden