Jonathan McKeown
The Same River Twice
Live as if you were living already for the second time … – Viktor Frankl
It’s a long scenic drive from Sydney to Yarrangobilly Caves in the Snowy Mountains. My wife and I are enjoying the short hiatus in celebration of our seventh wedding anniversary. On the road we listen to a podcast for a while and then some music, at times simply enjoying the silence between us, the freedom to let our thoughts just wander. Along the way I found myself thinking of a Shinto temple I’d read about: “… Apparently they pull it down and rebuild it every 20 years,” I tell her, “and they’ve been doing that for over 1300 years!” “Sounds very Sisyphean,” she says. “I didn’t get that sense of it,” I said. “They use completely new building materials every time – the timber being carefully selected and cut from the ancient forest in which the temple is situated.” “So it’s a kind of ritual of renewal?” “Yes, I think so. But what I find interesting is that the ritual offers this liminal moment every 20 years, a kind of break in the continuity of things that reveals the invisible, non-material reality of which the shrine is only an instance; there’s a moment, I imagine, when the shrine does not exist in any visible or material form …”
moonglow
lit windows in the silhouette
of the guest house
hearing night calls
she turns to me
The second day we explore a couple of the wonderful limestone caves and late in the afternoon, despite the cold, strip off our many layers and go down together into the waters of the thermal pool that lies steaming in a chilly valley only a short hike from where we’re staying. Afterward, I cook a Puttanesca while my wife has a hot shower. Over our empty dinner plates she raises her glass of wine: “You know I’ve heard that all the cells in our bodies are completely renewed every 7 years. Weird isn’t it? The people we were when we married no longer exist.” “… And yet here we are …”
backs to the fire a butterscotch schnapps moonrise through the trees her story becoming the river’s
About the Author
Jonathan McKeown currently lives near Cook’s River in Sydney. He works as a plumber. He enjoys reading and walking. His poems have been published in leading journals over the past decade and his first book of haibun, Genesis, was published with Red Moon Press in 2022.