Michael A. Vuksta
Kahn’s death in 1974 evoked many poetic comments in memorials given by those who knew him. This is to be expected of someone whose thought and spirit was both far and near from the art of poetry, but whose work attests to the poetic accomplishments in the art of his choosing. In paying my own tribute to a man who I never encountered personally, but whose work has touched my own discovery into expression, I would call upon the words of the poet Gary Snyder:
A Mind Poet
Stays in his house.
The house is empty.
And it has no walls.
The poem is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.
from
As for Poets
He added, in some notes on this poem:”Now we are both in, and outside, the world at once. The only place this can be is the Mind. Ah, what a poem. Its what is, completely, in the past, the present, and future simultaneously, seeing being, being seen.” These words seem quite fitting for a man whose work exists on all parts of the earth and whose spirit remains in the lives of those he has taught.
I might add, in words of my own choosing:
I feel
the silence
when we meet
in between
the busy wind
that blows
from between our lips
or in this case from the tapping of my fingers.