Saved by a Poem by Kim Rosen

Author:Kim Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2012-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Third Chamber of Memory: The Wave

Now that the poem is learned by heart, it is flowing. This can be a wonderful time in your relationship. The poem is rising to meet you. You are diving to find it. Nothing is taken for granted. Like a young romance, there is no certainty, no routine, no habitual way of being together. Insights blossom spontaneously each time you and the poem meet.

Here, even though you know the words, you have to find them again every time you say them. You cannot rest in the known for long. The next phrase does not arise unless you live toward it completely, igniting it from your direct, personal experience of the line before. There is a sense of living on the edge because you don’t know if the next line will emerge from your memory or leave you stranded. And it doesn’t come unless you’re completely present.

But the poem’s wave motion is in you—the flow of the language, the cadence, the contours of the terrain. Like knowing almost all of a song, the rhythm and sense continue even when memory fails to come up with the words. How many times have I found myself singing with gusto, “I’ve been working on the railroad all the livelong day, I’ve been working on the railroad da di-da da da da da!”

In this phase, I like to work with the poem when I’m in motion. One of my favorite practices is to speak the freshly learned poems while walking or working out, often to music. You might think that this would make it more difficult to concentrate. However, there is some surprising benefit to distracting the busy mind. The sound and the movement so overwhelm the mind that it lets go, relaxes, and allows the poem to slip in and take root. At times I’ll even work with fairly loud dance music. The rhythms within the music help me to hear drumbeats in the poem I might not have noticed. And the centrality of the music grips my attention so the poem can slip in, free of the hypervigilant surveillance of my mind. When I decided to learn Dr. Seuss’s Happy Birthday to You, my friends at the gym used to get a kick out of seeing me arrange the pages on the magazine rack of the step machine, put in my earphones, and begin climbing, my lips moving a mile a minute with words like, “And the Drummers who drum and the Strummers who strum / Are followed by Zummers who come as they zum!”

Some of the most ecstatic moments I’ve known have come when I am alone in nature speaking a poem that is in the Third Chamber of Memory. “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” is a Gnostic gospel, written around A.D. 300 in the voice of the divine feminine. In a translation by Jane Hirshfield, it is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I have ever encountered. Many lines of the long poem bring

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