The use of visual/concrete spacing of the words of the poem naturally impacts how the reader understands it: whether intentionally equivocal or not, if “my self ” physically resembles in the state described “snow falling,” the likeliest interpretation is this self is, and continues to be, the falling snow itself. ! While it may be untrue that there can be a self separate from all other things, and while the tension and fear that accompany our usual way of perceiving ourselves as such is painful, nevertheless the loss of all boundaries between inside and outside is tantamount to terror: before the absence of a self, the individual feels fear, performs supplication, experiences torture, and maybe, just maybe, ecstasy. But, it is fraught with dangers. We must be forced to recognize that we are the Void looking at itself, talking to itself, “being” itself, and so we cringe more often than not and step back from the precipice: !
!
!
!
mirror my face where i left it
Reassurance. I’m intact. The mirror doesn’t lie. I am indivisible and there. Just like yesterday and the day before yesterday. Palpable, fleshy form that will continue on and on. Yet, there is always foreboding. Am “I” a substantive? No. If not, what am I; how do I explain to myself what I am? This non-substantive requires consensus, a socially constructed and construed and agreed upon convention. (“A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass.” [The Postmodern Condition A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1979]). Yet, I am my own absence, darkness, and what I cast is an umbrage, from the Latin umbra, a phantom, a ghost; un-real, shadowy (from late 14th Century English, shadewy, transitory, fleeting). Or, where my boundary ends is what I am. As Mr. Boldman writes: !
!
!
!
i end in shadow
Robert Boldman ends the first section where it began: ! !
! !
! !
! !
Jan. 1 The corpse of the crow whitens the snow
It’s all circular, cyclical, turning and returning. The wheel of life in Tibetan thanka. The beginning is death. Mr. Boldman stresses this paradox by using chiaroscuro (disambiguation) in the strong contrast between Jan. 1, the beginning, juxtaposed with the corpse, the end, and again in the stiff, frozen black of the crow’s corpse against the white of the snow.