RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

deities. He invokes the ―Sky Gods‖ covering earth with rainsqualls like lids turning over
and over. Turning to water-deities, the poet-speaker sees a rainbow reflected as
―LAKHS 22 of crystal Buddha Fields‖ in a cow‘s drinking trough. With compressed
syntax, he jumps to another image of water: the perception of the crystal water ―sluicing
off‖ is maintained even to a single droplet ―right on the hair of the arm!‖ Robbins argues
that this parenthetical section of the ―crystal Buddha fields‖ suggests the great Hua-yen
tenet, that the blissful totality of creation exists in the tiniest of its parts. 23 Gazing up at
Antares, one of the brightest stars in our galaxy, and our view of the nighttime sky, the
narrator wavers slightly from the ―bowlful of shochu,‖ then looks up the ―lanes of
Sagittarius‖ to the densest part of the Milky Way galaxy. After praying to the Earth
Mother and ―All / Gods tides capes currents / Flows and spirals of / pool and
powers,‖ the poet asks for peace ―as we hoe the field / let sweet potato grow.‖ Melon and
sweet potato were the few crops that Suwanose‘s small amount of tillable volcanic soil
could support. Contradicting the New Critical standard for universality, the poet‘s
biography intrudes when he asks the gods to ―Bless Masa and me as we marry / at new
moon on the crater / this summer / VIII. 40067.‖ Referring to a journal entry in Earth
House Hold (147), he dates the marriage song to his new wife in August, 40,067 years
after the earliest cave paintings.
On Suwanose, volcanic activity, boiling lakes, smoke plumes, and lava flows are
common occurrences. The inhabitants that Snyder and the Buzoku joined were
33
22 Snyder would have come across the Sanskrit word lakh, a measure of 100,000 units,
during his 1962 travels with his first wife Joanne Kyger, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter
Orlovsky across India (Passage through India).
23 ―In every particle of dust there are present Buddhas without number.‖ ―On the point of
a single hair the whole Buddha land may be seen‖ (Chang. 224, 390.)