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 | Limits of Spectacle Lake by T. Clear

                        LIMITS OF SPECTACLE LAKE

                        — in memory, Walter James Clear, 1918–1966 

                               When the sun had slipped behind the hills
                               I said, let’s go back. Forget this business
                               of lures and lines and casting so far
                               the eye could hardly follow the thread
                               out to snag a rainbow’s lip. Afraid
                               we’d lose our way and soon our boat
                               would spin and sink. There we’d sit
                               eye to eye with a million fish.

                               When I was eight I caught my limit.
                               But not before my father turned the boat
                               to shore and let out one last line for luck.
                               I held that rod for all the hope left
                               reeling in the depths. I pulled
                               trout from tangled, churning light
                               slipping underhand.

                               I don’t know who was more the spectacle—
                               the lake, me, or my father guiding the pole
                               between my unbelieving hands. Somehow
                               he trusted in the end of all filtering light.
                               When he died the next winter,
                               I remembered six fish
                               laid out on a plank.

                               Eye to eye with the dead, in the wake
                               of the boat, I learned the limits,
                               the last ripple of life in a dying fish.

                               T.Clear

Somehow. . . 

I met T. Clear online some three or more years ago. 'T' stands for Therese; she prefers to be called 'T'. Last year we met - hooray - in person, in Seattle. I'd arrived at her Brandon Street home a little ahead of her and was waiting on the curb when she returned from her day's work at Melinda's glass studio. We took one glance at each other, laughed wholeheartedly and fell immediately into conversation - not a smidge of 'first-time-meeting' awkwardness. After dropping our various bits of paraphernalia inside the house we headed for the woods T so often writes about on her blog - http://premium-t.blogspot.co.nz/  (a place she seems to visit in all weathers and at any time of day or night!). I imagine by now she'd be capable of walking those forest tracks blind-folded, guided by the sound of her footfall on moss, lichen and tree root, the owls' call or the faint scuffle indicating the presence of eagles as they rummage in their ramshackle eyrie atop their chosen alder. A living-sculpture-of-a-tree in an unexpected clearing, this gnarly-barked giant is not only home to a pair of these majestic birds but also custodian to a diligently-tended, knot-shaped altar of unusual offerings. 

I'm sure I have several of you to thank for my online introduction to T (thank you!). Much-loved poets Theodore Roethke and Seamus Heaney surely had a part to play in our meeting, too. (She and I might have posted Roethke's 'Waking' on the same day/in the same week some years back? Who knows how these connections happen?)  

I dithered at length over which of T's fine poems to post here today. Initially I'd asked her if for permission to post Pond; it was all pretty much typed up and ready to go when the news came in that Seamus Heaney had passed away (oh, sorrowful day). Given the respect and tender regard both T and I have for Seamus Heaney and his work, I decided to hold Pond for another time and instead post Limit of Spectacle Lake. My sense is this would be her preferred poem for this week, too. (She is away at the moment so I'm acting on faith here). 

T - woman, artist, mother, friend, chef, musician, poet - has a rare and exceptional capacity for not shying away from the gritty, dazzling and oft-times shocking realities of life and death. I admire her greatly for this and, too, for the ways in which her poems engage fearlessly with Truth - her own and the collective's. Hers are tenacious poems, poems that ask questions, that mine, probe and penetrate with deep integrity; the same can be said of Seamus Heaney's work. There are times when, reading T's poems, I sense his presence in the room, too. 

Seamus Heaney is considered my many to be one of the great Fathers of Poetry. I commend T's homage to him and her late husband, Mark - Seamus Heaney on the Bathroom Wall - to you. You will notice that today's Limit of Spectacle Lake is dedicated to her late father, Walter James Clear - another reason why I chose this poem instead of Pond for today. 

A suite of six of T's poems were recently published online in the journal Cascadia Review - do visit this site to read them? Several of my favorites are there, including Abandoned Apple Orchard, Earthquake with Forty Pianos and Pond.   

. . . he trusted in the end of all filtering light - T. Clear 
(Photographs/paintings by CB) 

In closing (and by way of a bio) an excerpt from T's blog --- 

"Driving today, after work, in dimming light along Lake Washington, the blue bruised water ruckled-up in the wind, the maples and alders side of the road in every shade of red/orange/yellow.  A swathe of rainbow to the north, a concentrated lump of color sitting just at the horizon. The sky beyond: velvet charcoal.

I kept shouting:
"I live here!"

I've driven that stretch of road so many times, it's easy to take it for granted. Easy to admit to a certain ordinariness in what is never ordinary, never the same from day to day, from hour to hour.

Easy to dismiss the forward-thinking gods who delivered me back to this city that I love, and to whom I say:

thank-you
thank-you
thank-you"

* 

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Helen McKinlay with the poem Matangi Tai - a powerful testament to a vulnerable man, sorely wronged - by Samoan-born poet, novelist and health activist, Sia Figiel -

                        ". . . P.S: Don't go inciting no violence now sis
                                I know you and that heart of yours
                                I can see your salt already boilin' girl
                                But eh, fink of da mens Martin Luther King Jr.
                                And Mahatma Ghandi
                                And taste me in your ocean girl. . . "



Over on the TP hub, Helen writes, "I am always looking for poetry which speaks of the indigenous origins of the poet. Poetry which springs from the poet’s deep love for their homeland; its culture, its beliefs and its values.  Poetry which sometimes bears the scars of conflict, but never bears a grudge…poetry which makes us laugh from the belly and cry from the heart. A few weeks back I found such a poem: Songs of the fat brown woman, and began a search for the poet. . . " 

To read Sia's poem for Matangi Tai and to learn more about her and her work, please click on the quill.  

(Formatting challenges with Blogger today!) 

MOTH

Moth (Persephone) |  Charcoal & Pastel on Paper  |  CB

T., 'your' moth prompted me to go in search of this one.

Photograph - T. Clear

There's a woman and a deity in both - you'll have seen them.  

Tuesday Poem - IT IS ALL ONE WATER*

This time nine months ago, I was working towards an exhibition titled Waters I Have Known. Wanting to share the process and the motivation behind that body of work (a response, initially, to the Deepwater Horizon crisis) I created a companion blog where I could post pics of what was taking shape in the studio along with related texts and web links. Not long before the opening, I felt prompted to open up what had been a more-or-less solo endeavour to you, my wise and generous blog friends.  A magical dialogue ensued: moved by the texts you contributed, I asked permission to incorporate your words in a series of paintings. . . We embarked on an unexpected collaborative journey - a potent and satisfying one. The process did not end there; indeed, our initial exchange (an exploration into our world's oceans and the nature of web communities) illuminated the mysterious nature and multi-fold currents of conversation that pass between us all in the blogosphere and quickly became one of the central themes of the conference paper I presented in Phoenix in May. (*Marylinn Kelly and Penelope Todd agreed to my including their lines in the subtitle and opening paragraph of that presentation. . . ) 

One thing always leads to another and, well. . . the words you contributed to Waters I Have Known have been on another adventure since October 2010 - and since Phoenix.  Some weeks ago The Pachamama Alliance announced a film contest and invited entries from across the globe for their Possible Futures initiative. There are four categories in the competition - Peace and Freedom, Fair Societies, Sustainability and Beyond and Human Fulfillment.  Happily, my 5min film - It Is All One Water - was accepted into the Sustainability and Beyond category. It draws on more of the underwater footage I collected with my friends in Explorers Cove, Antarctica and highlights one of Christina Bryer's exquisitely fragile porcelain forms, one of my humble bamboo boats (right way up, some of the time ; )) and a balletic sea star, Adamussium colbecki.  

Since submitting the movie, I've been caught up in a bunch of other things and have quite forgotten that part of the contest involves entrants notifying their friends on the web (1) that the contest is a-happening and (2) that Voting is open!  In fact, voting closes tomorrow - 19 July - which means willing participants have only a matter of hours in which to rush over to the Possible Futures website and cast their votes. EEK. . . ! (The deadline explains why I'm posting my Tuesday Poem a day early). 

I'm not much good at canvassing and those sorts of things, but am going to be bold for a moment and invite you please to watch It Is All One Water and - if it resonates with you - to follow this link and give it a 'thumbs up'? Thank you. 

http://possiblefuturesfilmcontest.org/film_25651245

*

This is the introductory paragraph I submitted with the vid. . . 

"Painterly and metaphorical in its approach, It Is All One Water addresses the wonder, power & fragility of our world's oceans. 

The ocean is a mighty equalizer – it wraps us around, drawing our continents together. During these times of global disruption, social change and environmental vulnerability, the arts have a key role to play as agents for peace, advocacy and transformation.  This short film carries within it an ethos of 'many as one' and incorporates contributions from a global network of writers, artists, scientists and musicians.'

*

Timothy Cahill recently posted a thoughtful piece about this film on his blog, Art & Document.

And here - posted with huge thanks to you - is our collaborative poem as it features in the vid. -

IT IS ALL ONE WATER

In the wide sound of the sea
the song of a vast adventure

a music that follows 
flight paths of blood 
rushing through veins.

And the roar 
of the sea is the roar
of our planet - salt, 
spray, ice, sand, 
each wave a limb 
of the earth. 

The oceans are hoarders 
of holy mysteries, generous 
to a fault; all heaving movement, 
energy and gorgeousness;
life packed into every inch 
and drop of it; ah, its secrecy! 
The way it carries so much 
of the past, the future 
and present in itself… 

Dream of the sea
and from its edge, gaze 
out to the pencil thin 
line of the horizon 
where sky and water are one 

And the sea? 

How it murmurs. 
How it murmurs. . . 

It is all one water. 
A finger in a tide pool 
brings our shores together.



A collaborative poem by Marylinn Kelly (USA), Therese Clear (USA), Pamela Morrison (NZ), Elisabeth Hanscombe (AUS), Kay McKenzie-Cooke (NZ),  Scott Odom (USA) and Claire Beynon (NZ).

*

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill -