WaGon

“Turnum outknaves all three” sent me back to my 2023 dream post “Narrative Reasoning,” which begins with a quote from Turnus and ends with a green book that I at first took for a Quran. As I reread that post and its comments, my attention was arrested by a comment from WanderingGondola that said (ellipsis in the original), “Green as with, say . . . a door?”

The beginning of each part of her handle seemed to jump out, and I saw WaGon. Wagon, I thought, Are there any poems about wagons? I bet someone’s written a poem about a wagon. William Carlos Williams? No, that’s a wheelbarrow. Why such a train of thought should have been triggered by seeing a name I see virtually every day, I don’t know, but it happened very quickly and spontaneously, and before I knew it I was typing wagon poem into the Google search bar, with no idea what to expect.

The first result was part of a poem by the Muslim poet Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks under the title “A Great Wagon”:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”

doesn’t make any sense.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

“The door is round and open.” The comment that led me to this poem was about a green door, and round green doors have been a sync theme. See for example “The Wizard at the green door.”

The repeated line “Don’t go back to sleep” reminded me of an email I received from WG last month that said, among a great many other things, “It’s time to wake up, Mr. Tychonievich. Wake up and smell the May flowers” — followed by a parenthetical acknowledgment that it was actually June at the time, not May. And that made me think of something from the previous June, posted in “Joan: Look out the window. Come over to the window”:

Joan: Look out the window.

Joe: No. My eyes are closed, and I'm going back to sleep.

Joan: Don't go to sleep now, Joe. Come look at the snow.

Joe: Snow? It's only October. I know there's no snow. Leave me alone.

October is the wrong time of year for snow, just as June is the wrong month for May flowers.

Don’t worry, Rumi, or Joan. I have no intention of going back to sleep.