The next poem I have to tell you from topographical information
about Buffalo.
Its at the Western edge, for those who don't know,
of New York State, on Lake Erie at the mouth of the Niagara
River, which is just a channel that carries the water of Lake
Erie into Lake Ontario.
And across the river from Buffalo is Fort Erie in Canada.
This is a kind of advice poem on how to do a poem, in this case,
how to resist time by trying to focus all one's
energies on the moment.
It's called "Sarit Narai", and that, you'll see,
is a name of someone.
"Now that the light holds on after supper,
why not walk west to the end of Ferry Street
and linger where the ferries used to dock before the bridge
spanned the Niagara?
Why not enlarge the thin verge of the moment with the Sunday
crowd on deck 50 years ago, riding to Fort Erie
and back just for the fun of it.
The wind from the lake ruffles their hair,
as the low sun glances along the water,
just as they left their rooms to join the flow so you
can go back to them for a moment and lead them forward
into the present, where the gulls are gliding,
swinging beneath the bridge in figures that blur as you watch,
and disappear.
And why not call up the boys you used
to see here playing on the boulders in the bridge's shadow
before the fence was put up to stop them.
If one of them lost his footing, his chances were slim,
the push in the channel too hard and heavy, the water of Erie
beginning its headlong, brainless
rush to join the Ontario, as if an extra minute mattered.
Remember the evening you found a crowd here,
waiting beside an ambulance with its motor running
and a squad car, where a woman sat in back, head in her hands,
dark-haired?
Next morning, leafing through the local news,
you found the story, Woman from Thailand,
three years in the States, loses her son, 11, to the Niagara.
Let yourself go if you want to enlarge the moment
and imagine what might have happened
if the boy, Sarit Narai, had been
fished from the river in time.
Try to think of him as your son's best friend in Niagara
school, where friends were scarce, quieting a wildness
you could never manage, the mild manners of Asia
persuasive by mere example.
And what if your daughter admires him even more
and comes to choose him for her life's companion, not
the drab complainer she ended up with?
The word turned left that day on the forking path.
But the path on the right still runs beside it,
though never touching.
A bountiful Buddha smile as he explains to your granddaughters
and grandsons how to climb the eightfold path to freedom.
As gulls like these swoop over the gray stones
and the ferries steam back and forth if you let them.
Freely the crowd on deck empties its mind of thought
and welcomes sensation, the sun and wind.
And then the riders waken to see the skyline of home, beckoning
from a distance as if it missed them.
So they're ready to take up their lives again.
As a ship pulls in, where now, a line of cars
waits in the twilight to pay the bridge toll,
not 30 yards from the spot where the ambulance waited
and the woman cried in the back seat of the car.
After an hour, the crowd moved off, dissolving to families,
to couples musing on twilight pastimes.
For a moment, though, each may have
hesitated to change the subject and appear small-souled.
The midst of sorrow already thinning and fading,
that would have remained if they lived in Eden, the one kingdom,
where the sorrows of others feel like our own.
When Buddha neared Nirvana, one story
goes, he looked back on us as we drowned
in the sea of endless craving, and was filled with pity,
and chose to postpone his bliss till all were saved.
But how can a climb from the world
be managed here when the crowd on the ferry
wants the sunset to linger, and the mother would sell her soul
to get her son back, and the boy still
struggles to grab the slippery rock and pull himself up.
His friends all helping, so he can grow old among them,
an old man looking back on his deeds of kindness.
Now, the few who met him and the many
who never did, but might have, feel the phantom gap
he would have filled, but are ignorant of its cause
and blame their wives, their husbands, their children,
their towns and jobs, and hunt around
for new gospels, new philosophies.
If you see them this evening pacing along the bank, where
once the ferries docked and the Sunday riders lost themselves
awhile in the sway and shimmer, pity their restlessness.
There must be a way to step forward and name
the one they miss, Sarit Narai, in a tone so resonant,
it holds them a moment, beyond loss and longing."