A Favorite Tanka

When I first tasted my husband's kiss, it was like clear cool water, the kind that comes fresh out of the side of a mountain. For twenty-six years, he quenched my thirst with his love. After his death, I found this tanka in Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem, No. 2, page 88:

I tasted him
and he tasted good, like the sea,
a wanting
made of salt and wind
and just as vast

~Renee Gregorio
  Corrales, New Mexico

What attracted me to it in the first place was the vitality of the words--how each word held in it the "wanting" that gives the tanka life and at the same time describes and holds within it the great teeming chaotic sea from which life springs. There is a verity of the words to the immediate experience of the poet, and further a verity of her experience with the primeval truth. I think it was the poet Charles Simic who referred to the philosopher 's stone as being the button on his wife's blouse. But even more compelling is the beauty of the language used to convey this truth with the salt and wind taste of flesh and blood.

This is the kind of writing that stirs me to want to write. This is the use of words that creates that hunger from which all things grow.

~ Merrill Ann Gonzales

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