G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual_ (3)

 MY MALFUNCTIONING INTUITIONS (discussed in yesterday's post) are probably messing with me again, but at a few points The Opening Ritual seemed to be addressing my months-long preoccupation with Heidegger and Hölderlin.

The short poem "Saint Sauveur" is likely written about or inspired by the landscape of the Saint Sauveur mission, the first French Jesuit mission established in North America, in what is now Maine. It begins: "Am I music? is what / the water asks. (It isn't.)" Images of water are followed by references to time: "I wait / for the years/ to drop away from me. / (They don't.)" It ends: 

This is the non-sound

of everything. 

listening.

It's what poetry aspires to.

I did catch the twist on Walter Pater's famous line, "All art aspires to the condition of music," here rearranged to suggest poetry aspires to the condition of silence. Which makes sense. But I also found myself thinking of Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's "The Ister" and the "poets are rivers" idea. Does poetry aspire not simply to silence, but to being holding its breath to listen to the water--the water which is both a locality and a journeying, that is both the past, the present, and the future all at once? (this is all from the post of January 21, 2025.)

All this occurred to me, but I dismissed as an after-effect of reading all that Heidegger in January. But then, in "A Meadowlark in Arrow Rock, Missouri," we have  this passage:

And then: to bleed light, as it were a key.
                Wound wound wound wound!
        The wonder of it, almost but not quite a lock.
                        But it sounds better 
            than Hölderlin Hölderlin Hölderlin!
which is perhaps the more accurate translation.

Wait..what? What is it that can be translated as "wound" but (more accurately) as "Hölderlin"? Whatever is going on here goes to the core themes of (what I now know is) the trilogy: the natural world, worship, healing. But where did Hölderlin come from? How is he a wound?

Then, in "Marching Bear Group," we find "I feel / presenced. To the presence that dwells inside presence, / the presence that wind knows, that breath knows." Don't think that didn't set off little Heidegger-bells in my befogged brain.