A Favorite Tanka

My favorite tanka are widespread, so I thought by looking in an anthology I could honestly say I found a present favorite, and I did in Brian Tasker's 2001 In the Ship's Wake, published by Iron Press in England. The following tanka by Tom Clausen is on page 32:

wanting my old life
when I wanted my present life:
stirring the soup she made
as a cold rain
falls outside

The situation in this tanka is one that many of us can recognize, and that is what makes for its psychological immediacy. Yes, I know what he means! Yes, I have felt that way before! The greener grass on the other side often begins to fade. Desires realized often lose much of their punch. The speaker in Tom's poem is not fully rejecting the comforts of love or domesticity--after all, he is stirring the soup his wife or mistress or intimate companion has made for him. The soup must be too hot, and that is why he stirs it. But stirring soup is not only for the tongue--it is for the mind too. The stirring of the hot soup is the thinking process, and that process relates to the first two lines in the tanka. At least for now, for the time being, the speaker wants his old life back--that old life when he was not tied down by bourgeois routine or when he was not burdened with the responsibilities of a commitment or even the sameness of that commitment.

Time continues to work beautifully through the tanka, past, present, and contemplating a future return to that long-ago period when life's chill had not set it. Stirring can be circular--we move from present to past and then to some idyllic reverberations on waves of memory. Or the stirring can be up and down when what was once uppermost becomes less, when what one yearned for had seemed the height of living only to become a low sameness. One sits before one's bowl and contemplates what had been and is now lost or how the bright world has become dimmed to the point of eternal yearning. Of course, the nature image of the cold rain is a synecdoche of the speaker's present life.

Everything in the tanka falls into place naturally: repetitions of words in the first two lines, inner and out, hot and cold, movement and stasis. There is Tom's tanka no awkward struggling to find unusual connections. We face the human condition, something left for us to puzzle our way through. And the solution is more dilemma than anything else, for the speaker does not wish to abandon his woman, for he is there, stirring the hot soup she made for him. He appreciates her effort, of course, but he feels the added ambiguity of the desire to return to the life that once was.

Tom's poem continues to move me no matter how often I read it.

~ Stanford Goldstein (Japan)

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