A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH ENCOUNTER

I have a great affection for European poetry - Fernando Pessoa's, George Seferis', WB Yeats' and more - but Czeslaw Milosz' poems stand out because they are, to me, most accessible. Pessoa's are sometimes much too cynical, Seferis', mythological, and Yeat's, historical - for my understanding, but Milosz's poetry makes it a point to gently take my hand and lead my way through the first few lines even if it leaves me afterwards at a certain point of reference.

Which makes Milosz's poems, like Pablo Neruda's before him, interestingly interactive. They usually tell me, at a certain point of reference, Reader, from hereon, you're on your own.

In the great valley of poetry, being alone to distinguish the mountain from the hill, the grass from the weeds, while doing the trail within is an incredible experience. And if a poem draws the reader up front and right unto it's title, then like Milosz's Encounter it becomes harder still not to stand out and be remembered.

So, here's that poem -

Encounter*

We were riding through frozen hills in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rust of pebble -
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

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I divide this poem into two parts. Life and death; space and time. The first part, life and space, are found in the first four lines - with each line possessing a very strong sense of motion, from here to there, bespeaking the essence of living: riding; rising; running; pointing. A reading of these first four lines is like watching a reel of a vintage film, one that jumps from one action to the other to signify a very simple whole. In very simple words, the first four lines tell a complete story that is very demonstrative and explicit.

The second part, or the last five lines, starkly changes the poem's appearance because it speaks of the other end and essense of being: death, in time. The narrator reveals the story of the first four lines in some distant past (a product of memory, a representation of time) in such a melancholic and dark tone that sounds more like a confession, not of misery but mystery, because he appears to be in a place with no restrictions of space and time. The narrator, therefore - at least, to me - was the one who pointed to the hare, and while reflecting on the wonders of the past impresses the greater wonders of his non-present.

In all its symbolism, the narrator contemplates on the past, like Proust, with things remembered clearly. But unlike Proust, there were no hints of pain. He was in awe.

And so was I, while not of this state, but at least of this poem.
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*trans. by Milosz and Lillian Vallee
from "The Collected Poems 1931-1987"