Instrumental

A poem partially stolen from Jed Moffitt

How will you feel, what will you do,
when the last bit of instrumental 
value you have on offer
has been appropriated
by an augmented version of 
something that resembles you?

Jed wrote that and I repeat it
to you, dear reader, with an I Ching
twist that could be accused of
being so mechanical,
arbitrary, and devoid of
something that we might call love

that the symbolic image of
the cauldron and supreme good fortune
associated with it
perhaps fall flat when compared
to what an ordinary mind
might come up with in response

rather than filtering it through
a mesh of weird numerology
and ancient Chinese wisdom
recalling Jed’s great kitchen,
with a nine in the second place
recalling a lovely meal.

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Instrumental Versus Relational Value

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Note: I turned

Jed Moffitt

’s opening lines into a hexastichic stanza 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 poems by

Troy Putney

and

Sam Aureli

) and used the syllable counts of Jed’s lines to point to a reading of the I Ching, which I then imposed, along with those same syllable counts, on the subsequesnt stanzas written by me and combining into what I call a Fourfold Hexastich. In this case, pointing to the 50th hexagram of the I Ching, “The Cauldron,” with line 2 changing (reflected in the nine syllables of the second line of each stanza). What does that changing line mean? According to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation:

          Nine in the second place means:
          There is food in the ting [pot].
          My comrades are envious,
          But they cannot harm me.
          Good fortune.

Which made me think of the scene at Jed’s house shown in the above photo.

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