Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back poet Jason Ryberg with three elegant poems about journeys. Two are tanka, descended from the Japanese poetic tradition, consisting of five lines with a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7. While the three-line haiku (5-7-5) ends with a turn that changes the focus of the poem, the tanka adds two more lines after that pivotal shift, giving the poet space to reflect on the image presented.
The first poem, “(empty)(Tanka),” concerns the nightly flow of dreams and where its currents take the dreamer. The dreamer’s bed is seen as a boat, entering the river at night, to end up somewhere else by morning. Jason makes masterful use of enjambment to pull us breathlessly onward, creating a sense of motion contained in a fixed formal structure.
“Western Sky” is also a tanka. This time the narrator travels at night on a train through the desert. Looking up at the stars he finds his “mind becomes a diamond.” This entrancing imagery connotes a sharpening of mental faculties, awareness, and senses. It also recalls the kinship man has with the stars. As Carl Sagan once said, “We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
The final poem, “Midnight Ride,” is a bit longer and possesses a strong, abstract visual element, some lines being quite long and others as short as a single monosyllabic word. Here the bed is not a boat, nor is it a train, but a “horse-drawn wagon with either no/ driver or one who clearly has been possessed by too/ many spirits…” One might remember the scene in Dracula when the Count sends a carriage to bring the unsuspecting Jonathan Harkness to his home in the mountains. In contrast to that ill-fated traveler, our narrator is grateful for moonlight and in awe of the wonders of the dark garden. The villain is secondary, almost inconsequential, in the midst of revelation. Is this surrender or is it the way to understanding and making peace with the darker parts of the psyche?
Read Jason’s evocative poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two books of. poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets), (Back of the Class Press, 2024).
He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters