Only on a true return could you find that you'd never left

[sovay]

On the first of May, my mother told me about a poet who loved volcanoes and Persephone and had just disappeared on a small island in Japan. It was his passionate belief, she said, that poets should go to dangerous places and bring them back in writing; by the time she heard about him on the radio, he had been missing for three or four days, but they were still hoping that his story would end like one of hers, the goddess he cared so much about, and he would come back with pages like pomegranate seeds in his hands. My mother couldn't remember his name, so I looked him up. Craig Arnold. This afternoon, I found out he has been declared dead. Somewhere I hope someone who knew and loved him is writing him a poem in which Persephone and Pele and the kami of Kuchinoerabujima are listening to their praise singer, or making him into something that can slip into the earth's burning heart and back again. I don't have the right to. I just liked his words. The severed head of Orpheus kept on singing, afterward the way poets do.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

WOW!

I thought you were writing fiction until you gave the link to the news story.

What a marvelous man. I, who am as timid as timid can be, would like to be like him, and would definitely, definitely like to die like him.

I read a story (The House without Windows, by Barbara Follett) when I was in seventh grade about a girl who ran away to nature and became, eventually, a nature spirit. I *loved* it. I felt like I was reading something some other me had written. I found out later that it had actually been written in the 1920s, completed when the author was 11. She vanished in the woods in Maine at 26. I can hold two thoughts in my head at once, and do: that that was a tragedy, and that that was a transfiguration. (The miracles of the Internet turn up this 1966 review of a biography of her.)

So--all honor and victory to Craig Arnold. And thanks for the link to his poem: it is beautiful.