TUESDAY POEM | Pond by T. Clear

Cup of Water, Cup of Sky  |  CB 2014

                     POND

                          We roamed beyond subdivisions

                          to this rain-brimming vacancy in some

                          city planner’s scheme. Not lovely,

                          but a version of heaven wet enough

                          to lure amorous toads whose eggs

                          we scooped into Folger’s cans.

                          Sloshed home, the rank goo

                          dripping a slithery trail.

                          We set them hatching in a fishbowl,

                          floated bits of boiled romaine.

                                     This is a common story:

                                     a patch of forest slashed in an afternoon,

                                     a clearcut of nettles, salal, bracken.

                                     Tiger lilies in their forgotten glade wrenched, ripped.

                                     Lots flagged, foundations poured.

                          And then into the worm barrel

                          out back, growing less finny each day.

                          Finally springing high enough

                          they leapt beyond borders

                          into what remained of murmuring woods,

                          the decrescendo of frogsong

                          becoming the planet’s

                          inexorable hum.

                          T. Clear

Pond was first published in Cascadia Review in their June 2013 issue, the first of five of T. Clear's poems to appear in the journal over the course of a week - each one finely, tautly-wrought; each one differently atmospheric, graceful and gritty. These are poems in which noise is hushed and the earth's subtler music is allowed to come through.

  

In Holy Week, T writes

                      All was new or new to me

this one line a distillation or container for her ever-alert poet's eye, ear and heart. She writes into and out of our always-in-motion, oft chaotic, ever-renewing world.  

Friend and fellow poet, Melissa Green, posted a comment on the Cascadia site that reiterates these qualities of T's sensibility and voice  - "How wonderful to have a week’s worth of your poems available all at once. Congratulations! So many of your themes are familiar–apple picking, fishing with your father (so moving! the gifts of that day!), a Catholic Easter– but the details of your language color them as yours and no one else’s, and beautifully poignant."  

In her Statement of Place on the Cascadia site, T writes, "I was born in Seattle and have lived joyfully in the Pacific Northwest for fifty-six years. In my travels to other landscapes across the planet, there is always the ache to return to this topography of foothills and craggy peaks, of saltwater and freshwater always in easy reach." 

Please visit the Cascadia Review website to enjoy more of T's poems and click on the quill below for this week's Tuesday Poems

Michelle Elvy is this week's Tuesday Poem editor - and hub-sub editor for the coming three months. She has chosen this year's Takahe prize winning poem Uncoupling by Jac Jenkins -

                                 "Ice clasps its thorny cloak with filigreed

                                  brittle lace against my breast

                                  bone. The pin sticks my skin when I inhale. . . "

Tuesday Poem - Water by Melissa Green

                  

                 v Water

                  Father, I'm drowsy in April's humming sun and think

                  A girl the color of Autumn kneels at the Squanicook's bank,

                  Who is the river's daughter, dressed in driven skins,

                  Who knows a cedar wind at Nissequassick brings

                  The schools of alewife, herring, yellow perch ashore.

                  The place of Salmon roars with light. She steps, sure-

                  Footed onto stone; lithe as a poplar, bends over

                  The water. Wren feathers, shells, seven quills quiver

                  In her sable hair. Her eyes, a spring-fed stream, 

                  Like silica, seek bottom. Deep in her mossy brain,

                  The white-tailed mouse is born. She carries in her supple

                  Body all of spring - a tree frog in the apple,

                  A kit fox dozing in the brush, a brash otter

                  Diving her river-veins - the new, young, utterly

                  Green morning beads her skin. How simply she leans

                  Into understanding, baptized by light and the delicate lines

                  Of shadow from cedar. A goldfinch has flown its ribbed nest,

                  Dusting her cheek with its wing, a hummingbird throbs in her wrist, 

                  She is drenched in waking. Wonder, a long-legged doe,

                  Drinks in deeply, as all instinctive creatures do, 

                  And laughs, leaping the current, printing the field with dew. 

                  Melissa Green 

                     from The Squanicook Eclogues - pg 15. (W.W Norton & Company, Inc., 1987)

Melissa Green - whose 'vision is wonderbursts of wordstruts, inveterately inner, complex and subtle'* - is well-known within our community and beyond. The first time I read The Squanicook Eclogues, I cried. Noisily. Full-heartedly. Aghast at her exquisite, authoritative, passionate command of language, I audaciously imagined I might one day create a suite of paintings in response to these four poems. I made a start with an image-homage to 'v Fire'. 

Amy Clampitt endorsed Melissa's first collection with these words, "Melissa Green is a born, a natural poet, with whose work I've felt a quick affinity, along with an astonished admiration. Who could have supposed that Wilfred Owen would find such a disciple? It is an index of her originality that beginning with his strict and demanding consonances, she has gone her own gravely, sonorously engrossing way, and done so with such winning assurance." Melissa is one of our Tuesday Poets; the poem she posted on her blog today - Statue of a Couple by Czesław Miłosz seems to me an echo of her Water. . . 

*Richard Eberhart

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill. 

This week's editor is Seattle poet, Therese Clear. She has chosen the poem Talking Mean by Paul Hunter

Melissa's Marsh

This time last month, I was in the US. The conference in Arizona had 'happened'; I'd boarded a plane in Phoenix, flown across the continent and landed in Winthrop, Massachusetts - a small seaside town on the outskirts of Boston. Winthrop is home to our dear friend, Melissa Green. Yes, Melissa and I met -  really, truly. In the flesh. She opened her cosy, book-lined apartment to me for the time I was there; four graced days sped past  - it was like being in a waking dream. . .  We talked (heavens, did we talk?!), linked arms and walked along suburban streets, past forsythia, lilac and maple trees, down to her marsh where we sat awhile on her 'silvered pillar', wordless for a time in drizzle-mist; we bussed to the bakery in the rain, drank cappuccino and ate outrageously decadent pastries, and - on Tuesday 10 May, spent a delicious, head-spinning evening in the company of Susan L and Melissa S (see pics below). . . I met Bogey and Turnip (I beg your pardon, Tulip) and went stone-collecting with them and Melissa S on one of Boston's beaches. . . four stretchy days, fully inhabited. 

Melissa G, Susan L & Melissa S - Winthrop, 10 May 2011

Walking on Boston Beach with Melissa S, Bogey & Tulip - 12 May 2011

I took uncharacteristically few photographs during the time I was away; most of the pics I have are from the time in Winthrop. I'll post a handful more here to accompany excerpts from Melissa's finely-wrought meditations on her marsh - evocative word paintings indeed...  

from The Marsh had become my muse  ". . . Lilac are out in great profusion now, and today, as it is not raining, I find I can take my time. I’ve discovered lately on my walks that whereas I used to pass beside the marsh on my way home, inhaling the smells of the sea, hoping to catch sight of a swan or heron in the fragmites bedded on the salt hay, the marsh now has become my destination.

As cold and miserable as the early spring was, even to the middle of May, I would sit on a water-soaked piling at the edge of the tideline, scanning the water for birds, I found I would suddenly hear Mad Maud’s voice scratching quite close to my ear. I would have to leap up, repeating the several lines over and over as I limped home so I would still have them when I got to my desk. It only happened twice that way. I did learn to stuff my coat pockets with a pen and a tiny notebook because it seemed then and seems to me now that being at the marsh on that fallen, silvered piling almost instantaneously frees my mind from its chatter, and the clean language of one of my projects almost dictates itself to me there. . .

". . . Great white meadows are scudding across the sky with speed over the marsh, and the tide as it is coming in is running with whitecaps. The silvered pillar I’m accustomed to sitting on I’ve just discovered is a railroad tie with large rusted iron spikes bent down into the grass. This comfortable, companionable log I’ve been using as my desk is a tie from the Narrow Gauge railway that circumscribed this little seaside town from before the turn of the nineteenth century. . ." (cont.)

"I wanted to see what the light was like and hear the evening birdsong. Low tide is the color of mercury and barely moves. As far as I can see the hummocks of grass are still bright in the softening air, the shade I think of as the pure sargassos of June. The sun which was a disk as flat as any dinner plate has been overrun by a large plume, wing feathers of dark gray clouds. The heron that was bobbing off to the east when I sat down has flown. . .

. . . I wanted to see what the light was like and hear the evening birdsong. It is the quiet that seems so vast, the rills of water between the hummocks of grass are motionless. There are no birds feeding in the marsh and not one breath of wind. I came to---what? Just to be here. Just to look and record the ordinariness and the rarities. I like to scry out changes if I can. It makes me feel part of this tiny portion of the natural world. I have liked the tides. They comfort me with their inevitable, unchanging trustworthiness. . ."

". . . I rejoice at the ever-renewing life of this place, never knowing what I will find. Today it’s abundant with the singing of robins, sparrows, finches, red-winged black birds and mockingbirds, and the gurgling love noises of mating buffleheads. But now I know enough to come here with my notebook, and let my self lean back into the salt air as though it were dense enough to hold me--and perhaps it is--and I begin to write." (Read the full piece here)