Latvian Daina, Japanese Haiku, and Armenian Troubadouring

I can tell my story but cannot surround it. Latvian Daina and Japanese Haiku never captured my moment, although I read thousands of them. What surrounds my poetry is my experience which is the same as everyone else’s, yet I have not written about fleeting moments. Rather when I remember a name, a face, a place or a train station or aromance (aroma of romance as I titled one of my books), it is not about the moment that passed but about my reliving, now, through remembrance, of that very moment.

As such, my fleeting moments are reincarnations when I write about them. And then, incarnation is not a moment anymore but a vast space where I once lost myself searching for time.

Time I can freeze, not stop. Freeze it long enough to enjoy it like an icicle hanging from the gutter of my house in January. And then let it melt away, become that drop of water that one day will rain upon a river running North.

… There is no poetry, no life worth living without the pursuit or the beatitude of love. Perhaps that is the only story I can tell by surrounding it, as if Latvian Daina, because what cocoons love also surrounds it with promises that cannot be kept, but can be ignored.  

“Love is not a feeling” I learned more than 50 years ago. Yet I looked for love in all the forms that I was told it exists.  Strangely, love has been  a one-liner like Daina or Haiku. It is often that one line we cannot get out from, escape at midnight when the moon is looking away. That line is a black hole with only a way in. And that one line cannot be un-structured  no matter how many times we change the subject, the tense of the verb, and the caressing of the adjectives.

Love keeps us locked in that line. A line others can read and recite, but a line that means little to us. Because that line never has a period. An end point. Because love is that train station with many stops but infinite kilometers of rail line. We stop at many stations in our search for that end point.

But the rail line never ends.

But there is no end point.

January 17, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2109