Tag: poetry

First Flights

Tracing the texture of a dream.

Here is a book of time, someone told us, to translate a voice in the heart of the sky. It reminded us forward to the hour of the story inside the essence of the dream through which we flew to the beginning of the word on a current of makers.

Sighing creation, we ran, particles of ourselves in waves at the shore, piling sand into a world we could live in, and we admired the work of our hands until the tide took it back. 

We borrowed the insights of distant lightning to hold back the night, and with wet hands we peeled the dawn to eat it raw, dew dripping from our laughing chins.

The Memory Tower

For Leonora Carrington.

Everything happened after my birth, you said, as you left on the boat of the herons, a new Eve, refusing to be devoured as anybody’s muse. You had spells to cast, self-portraits as alchemy, your spine a hearing trumpet, listening between the worlds; mère, mer; now mother, now sea.

The solar systems of your eyes kindled by your own light, you rode the seventh horse away from the house of fear, passing through the stone door to the land where the serpents sing stories from the well to the pilgrims ascending the memory tower.

El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas, Leonora Carington

***

Inspired by the life and work of artist Leonora Carrington, with phrases borrowed from the titles of her paintings and stories, as well as her interviews. 

Reparations of a Body

Old woman, new art.

Past, present, future: body. It’s a reaching place, this blood house, this mother’s form––out, out, she paints balloon bodies bursting with anxieties of desire, washing together in tides of pink, crimson, vermillion. She paints the sound and the fury of the gaping mouth, wild eyes; body like a net, like a sac, flower petal breasts like octopus arms: reach.  

The images shock. The nerve, to dare production beyond her reproductive years. With a nod to decorum, might she not try creeping around the flesh?

Given her advanced age, wasn’t she supposed to have floated into something ethereal by now? Suffusions of light, passive serenity, reflections on a lake? Flowers would be appropriate. Ripe fruit, perhaps. 

With flamboyant irony, she rejects easy ripeness, preferring instead to quarrel with time, to paint within her bodies the unresolved contradictions of her still-becoming self.

I am about to find the past, she says. I feel it, she says.  I own it forever. 

Her mornings continue in this manner, her mourning still undone.

***

Inspired by Louise Bourgeois, whose life and works are of deep interest to me lately. This morning, I was reading Rosemary Betterton’s article, Louise Bourgeois, ageing, and maternal bodies, published in a 2009 issue of Feminist Review.

Reverb

Sound bodies.

Break in two directions, a fork in the tuner. Between the moment and knowing, this ear: feather, canal, chamber, drum, window. It sounds.

Like? The echo of a summons, an access, a mode, rooted in another rhythm.

––No, not another. Also, here. One sighs out sound through saxophone, another finds what already is, moving hands over strings, keys. Also, hear: wing against air, what enters and exits an alley, the joint between the next step and the road.

What mediates the muttering storm over a body but the tools it makes or finds? All that shatters can also pass: through a body’s channels, into some semblance of harbor–– to these ports of ear, skin, breath. To dig is to become bodily implicated in the soil, mind and mud continually passing through one another, folding into braided bars of birdsong and the cadence of calls back and forth between creatures in and out of doors.

Here is the universe in a time of rain, a song line from the crown to the roots, alive with noise.

***

Inspired by Mary Pinard’s article in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: Alice Oswald, Voice(s) of the Poet-Gardener: Alice Oswald and the Poetry of Acoustic Encounter, particularly Pinard’s reference to Oswald’s “echo-poetics.” The italicized phrases above come from Oswald.  

Soundscapes

Dreaming with echolocation.

I am going with the divers. To immerse myself in their world, so to speak. The landscape: evanescent jellies over shadowy blue-green depths. Spider crabs over brown boulders. Sound bubbles murmuring like echoes of the lost continent. Muffled pings of distant sonar. Voices of the others, recording as I am now. 

We used to play a game in pools. We called it see if you can tell what I am saying. We’d face one another underwater through goggles and the speaker would shout-scream, making exaggerated facial movements. We would interrupt ourselves with eruptions of laughter, come up coughing, decide in unison: try again. 

Observations: submerged in this cylindrical ship, we become a collective cyborg. Once called the silent world, it becomes sonorous, an exercise in transduction. Transduce: to alter the physical nature of a signal; to convert variations in one medium into corresponding variations in another medium. Accoustemology: a sonic way of being.

It has been observed that in rural France, the circumference of a village could be defined by the reach of reverberating church bells. 

And what are we doing here? If vision is for surfaces, hearing is for the interior. I think we are all here waiting for the sounds of the bells we missed, that we might gain access to a village we haven’t yet imagined. 

We are listening. We hope that when we hear it, we will know.

***

Inspired by something I was wondering about last night, related to dreams and echolocation, which led me to Stefan Helmreich’s 2007 article in American Ethnologist, An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography. I am intrigued by Helmreich’s idea for an anthropological take on the ecosystem within a submarine.

Muttering Thunder

Music lessons with the rake.

The poet likened gardening to an act of listening. Poets are known to do a lot with the old gardening metaphor, and she resisted this. Nothing was like a garden, not really. Not when you waited. Not when you took its music on its own terms. She called the rake a dew’s harp and her favorite instrument. The method for playing it meant finding what was already there, which is the opposite of working it into something else. 

***

Inspired by the work of Alice Oswald, particularly The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for The Planet.

Plea

From a branch over unknown waters.

If I am to be severed from my first attachments, make me a bridge between relief and this emerging specter, too terrible to name.

Let me accept what may follow this request, including instructions for rooting this body as an anchor in what it dreads––or else I am no link, just a floating possibility.

Let me brace against what may yet be, extending out over the dark deep, to this unknown shore: the craggy, silty, boggy knot of its broiling terror. 

Lend courage to this limb, that I may hold. If I am far from the tree, let my spine be the crossing from the land of none to the place where it might yet be.

This Mourning

Still life with children.

Overheard, in the garden: Peter, put your sword away. 

Now is the time for your attention. 

If this to be a becoming, you cannot hold your guard. 

It is impossible to bend into another body 

while remaining upright. Hold another.

For what?

A dark hour. Then, keep holding. Wait.

***

In mourning, we unknow ourselves. 

This is not an affirmation, 

not a possibility or an idea.

***

What is it, then? 

To stand in grief with any other, 

bodies bowed to collect 

what won’t fit in the borders 

of any one, is to accept 

a constant invitation 

to unknow myself. 

I was never a beginning 

or an end––once or now, 

and will never be. 

Only we are here. 

Hold.

Walking

A lesson in surrender.

Before the iron star,

earthquake snaking 

over the far side of 

dreams, listening for 

butterfly whispers 

in the hard blue of

a desert sky, a child 

holds a foot over a 

knee to examine a 

thorn. For a moment, 

all is the space  between

his hand, his foot,

and the tiny barb. What

follows is a long 

discovery: how 

a body can learn to 

abandon itself to 

pure endurance.

Between Friends

Notes for a feast.

Collect the fallen fruits of old labors by the light of a full moon. Wade in the water to rinse, then pat dry. Meanwhile, dice the insults, the past indignities, the collected impossibilities and memories of grade school wounds, lost pets, and burned skins. Steam gently on low heat. Now return to the bowl of hopes set aside to rise in a dark place. Knead vigorously on a floured surface for the length of three songs, longer if desired. Set to rise again. Cover and repeat. We’ll score it eventually, with some symbol of our own invention. We’ll bake it golden, display it on a special tray, cut into it while it’s still crackling hot, pass out fat slices to all assembled and serve it with the good butter. Mouths water at the dream, but don’t worry, there is bread already made. It’s on the table right now. We won’t be hungry. It is good to be kneading this together, this now and coming communion. May the nourishment of the earth be yours.

***

Inspired by John O’Donohue, who taught me the Celtic term Anam Cara, loosely translated as “soul friend.” And by my soul’s friend. The italicized line above is from O’Donohue’s poem “Beannacht” (Gaelic for “Greetings”).