Combobulation

a poem partially stolen from Morgan Waters (on her birthday)

Photo by Deric on Unsplash

Old growth tangled with new. 
The top leafless branches reaching 
for the pale blue Winter sky. 
The fallen on the forest floor 
rotting beneath the snow. Roots run deep 
and strong in the icy ground.

You wrote that a while back
but it feels even truer now
on your fifty-third birthday,
an auspicious one, to be sure,
what with your newly-installed knee joint
and recovery ahead.

The I Ching reading fits:
your words themselves have pointed me
to hexagram fifty-three—
talk about synchronicity
and numerical hilarity!
Not to mention thematically

Apropos as could be,
advising: keep a steady pace,
keep doing your physio,
and then follow the changing lines
to the grace and beauty of the spring
and dancing all summer long.

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Note: I extracted the first stanza above from a poetic prose piece

Morgan Waters

wrote earlier this year. The stanza thus formatted could be called a “hexastich” of the sort I’ve been writing in connection with my consultations of the I Ching over the past year or so. This time, however, instead of basing the poetry on the consultation, I reversed the process (as I’ve done recently with my similar thievery of material by Megan Youngmee, Jed Moffitt, Troy Putney, Peter Himmelman, and Sam Aureli) and used the syllable counts of the lines (6-8-7-8-9-7) to arrive at a reading of the I Ching, which I then imposed, along with those same syllable counts, on the subsequent stanzas written by me and combining into what I call a Fourfold Oracular-Syllabic Hexastich (or FOSH) — in this case, pointing auspiciously to the 53rd hexagram of the I Ching, “Development (Gradual Progress)” with lines 1 and 5 changing (reflected in the 6 syllables of the one and the 9 syllables of the other) which in turn points to Hexagram 22, “Grace.” If you’d like to delve further into the meaning of these hexagrams and the changing lines, I’d recommend the classic Wilhelm/Baynes translation (pretty easy to come by in used bookstores and libraries but also here) or Paul O’Brien’s more contemporary but also excellent Visionary I Ching.

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The source:

Ode to the older now

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