Diving into the Rapture that is Starfall in the Temple

Starfall in the Temple from Blue Light Press by Prartho Sereno is a masterful poetry collection offering both gravitas and levity. The Dresser sees this as a work of a generous teacher and wise elder. It could be the poetry that saves your life or sanity. It could be the poetry that makes you happy for being in this chaotic world.

 

TABLE OF CORRESPONDENCES

 

The underwater tug we call ebb tide

the seaweed knows as longing

 

The lilac we’ve deemed common

is known to the bee as Rapture of the Deep

 

These clouds we’ve named cumulus

the sky praises as bread

 

The ones we’ve come to know as raven

appear to the moon as flickers of grief

 

What we call wind in the tule grass

is known to the earth as the happiness

too delicate to name

 

“Table of Correspondences,” the prologue poem, sets the tone for our human needs and feelings in counterbalance with what happens in nature and the cosmos. Things aren’t always as they present. Rapture of the  Deep, which can happen to divers breathing in gases under elevated pressure and may alter their judgment, offers a metaphoric warning that what (e.g., stimulants like drugs, alcohol, the beauty of nature)  may make us happy may also have other consequences.

 

Starfall is a collection set with 75 pages of poetry divided into three unnamed sections. Section I introduces the reader to the narrator, her spirituality (Buddhism), and the cosmos as interpreted by scientists of our time (e.g., Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawkings) and others, such as her grandson and classic film star Charlie Chaplin. The poem “Negative Capability” occurs in this section instilling the notion that artists can find beauty and deal with imperfection in the face of challenging situations. In this excerpt, Sereno discloses how one painter was coping with the devastating Paradise fire:

 

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY [excerpt]

 

It’s fire season in California and I’m on the downtown.

library lawn thinking about 80-mile-an-hour winds.

I’m thinking about the traffic jam out of Paradise

and the artist who lost everything, but learned,

she said, to paint with her eyes.

 

Could we call this ability to paint with the eyes a Rapture of the Deep? Perhaps.

 

Section II emphasizes the call to movement. It begins with reference to the Sanskrit mantra Charaiveti which means keep going. Chanting this mantra is reportedly how Gautama Buddha ended his sermons. The reference to this mantra appears in “Seafarers,” the first poem of Section II. The Dresser is immensely impressed by the artfulness of this poem.

 

SEAFARERS

 

We come to love the heron

for his artful tucking-in of tribulations,

the morning cloud for her coolheaded

midwifery of the sun.

 

We are grateful for the way the sea

goes gray in tune with the sky.

Nothing more asked of us

neither from above nor below.

 

For the way the ship moves

like a sage through the narrows,

its engines grinding: Charaiveti, charaiveti…

Keep going, its only song.

 

We see it briefly now—we never were

the passenger. Nor are we the ship.

Only this flux and flow, a conjuring

the oscillation of sunlight on sea.

 

As a poem set on the sea, it embodies Rapture of the Deep. Also, the heron of this poem whose “artful tucking-in of tribulations” is a stand-in for the artist experiencing Negative Capability.

 

Section III features what is or was after movement stops—Bardo (the in between  state of existence—death versus rebirth) as well as grief and personal reckoning. The last poem of the collection “The Temple Master Takes His Leave,” puts the narrator in touch with her late spiritual master through a series of koan like stanzas. The last image is of her dropping pebbles into a bottomless well.

 

THE TEMPLE MASTER TAKES HIS LEAVE [an excerpt]

 

now

all

my

questions

will

be

pebbles

dropped

into

a

bottomless

well:

 

not

 

one

 

plunk

 

 

Need the Dresser say this is another instance of Rapture of the Deep and this time it’s bound with a comic touch by ending with the onomatopoeic word plunk.

 

Prartho Sereno provides so much to love in this volume. She is good at painting pictures as well as singing into the ear:

 

THE MYSTERY SCHOOL OF RHYME [excerpt]

 

Tell me it ain’t monumental; tell me it’s just accidental:

          rapture, capture

                   womb and tomb

                             ease and trees, trees and breeze

try, cry, lie, die…

          all the notes on the road to why.

 

If the Rapture of the Deep of Starfall in the Temple alters one’s perception of the world but also gets that person through to another state of existence and a different way to cope, let’s surrender and fall into this deep current that bodes well being.