Tuesday Poem - Fire by Melissa Green

Following on from last week's Water, Melissa's Fire. . . (thank you for permission to post these here, M - and, in time, your Earth and Air, too.) -


                      v Fire

                      Father, I'm dizzy in shimmering August, rising new
                      As summer's mistress from a field of corn. She now
                      Is married to the heat-swept grain. Her ripening breast
                      Is a thicket, bright with blood-berries, her body dressed
                      In flame. The red god of the salamander sandals her foot,
                      A monarch touches her lip, her coppery hands fit
                      Petals in a chain. She knows she has chosen to burn
                      At noon, as nature intends. The thrust maize, unborn,
                      Has made her heavy and drugged as a bee. A tawny wood-
                      Dove sleepily croons what her tongue cannot: the subtle wound
                      That too much plenty makes. She doesn't know that winter
                      Ravages, that grief and habitual wind will tint her
                      Skin and break the tender stalk of her body. She stands
                      Impaled by arrows of afternoon light until thunder stuns
                      Her - she slips like smoke into shade, behind the burning stones.


                      Melissa Green 

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

   

For more Tuesday Poems please click on the quill -

This week's editor is NZ N. Island poet Renee Laing with the poem Gaudeamus Igitur
by John Stone. 




***

I typed up Melissa's poem on the plane between Dunedin and Christchurch, scheduling it to post while I'm in the air between Singapore and Frankfurt. I am en-route to Spain, will have three days in Barcelona (Gaudi - at last) before crossing the sea to Santa Eulalia Des Rui, a small village on the island of Ibiza (one of the Baleriacs). For the first time ever, I've felt a wee bit nervous about traveling alone - probably because I don't speak a word of Catalan or Spanish and I don't expect my years of Latin are likely to help one bit. . . I'll be fine once I'm there, I'm sure. It makes me appreciate my children's intrepidness (is there such a word?) when it comes to foreign travel. My daughter has been giving me lots of encouragements. So begins another chapter of what will inevitably be a significant and altering time. . . 

Books I have in my hand luggage? Mr g by Alan Lightman.  Also his book of essays titled A Sense of The Mysterious - Science And The Human Spirit, Finuala Dowling's Homemaking For The Down At Heart (a wonderfully eclectic and eccentric cast of characters - i.e the title is, I think, misleading as the book is not nearly as domestic as it suggests; it's set in Kalk Bay, Cape Town, the fishing village I spent a chunk of time in when I returned to SA over Christmas) and the Rough Guide to Barcelona. 

More from me once I've landed. . .  

PS. John B - I am playing with a post on Venus and the traps. . . ; )

What do you see?

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

Flight Time

A community of intricately-carved wooden angels fly close to the ceiling in the entrance-way to my friend Katherine's house in Kalk Bay, Cape Town. Katherine's house is home to many angels - these here, and others besides. . .  Are not each and every of us surrounded by these 'custodians of the spirit'? Now more than ever, I like to think so.

For some reason this vid. insists on being here in this teeny-tiny format (not sure why this is).

To view it on a regular scale, I invite you to visit my Vimeo page. 

Thank you, Katherine



And a deep bow of love and respect to women everywhere this International Women's Day.

Tuesday Poem - Surprising The Quarry by Kay Mackenzie-Cooke

                 SURPRISING THE QUARRY
          
                 The joints of this house click - still sending signals -

                 where Hicks* sent the first message in morse

                 across the harbour, an ordinary afternoon closes in.

                 We are here to find inspiration wherever  

                 - the bath-tub that stands, feet apart,

                 or the toilet window Harbour Cone peers into.

                 Claire’s stacked paintings against the walls;

                 inside-out windows. The house knows

                 only what it once contained. White butterflies

                 twirl in four p.m. light. What can we add?

                 That here today the moment is still being born;

                 birds silenced by the flick of a switch-blade claw;

                 hills unmoved even as oar-shaped clouds row 

                 in an easterly direction. All expressed with weapons

                 of our own choosing - lead or pastel. Time will always

                 claim its quarry; a favourite singer’s voice

                 forced to travel through a smoke-damaged throat

                 is a de-capitated voice. But great for singing the blues.

                 Kay Mackenzie-Cooke

A couple of times a year, I get together with three women friends - Kay, Martha and Penelope (dedicated director of Rosa Mira Books and creator of The Most Unique PR-family In The World - Ratty, Lily The Pink, Isgar and Daisychord) - to workshop poems. We rotate houses (so to speak). Kay wrote Surprising the Quarry one afternoon we'd gathered at 22. She read it aloud to us in the moment; a poem with still-damp wings, it arrived pretty much fully-formed. I love the details she picked up on; the new slant on old things I've grown accustomed to. . . I especially love the opening line 'the joints of this old house click - still sending signals' (they do) and 'What can we add? That today the moment is still being born. . .' Oh, and too, the 'hills unmoved even as oar-shaped clouds row in an easterly direction.'


Kay is a much-loved and -respected Dunedin poet and warm-hearted friend. She identifies deeply with our South Island landscapes (I believe our rivers run in her veins). Kay has published two collections - Made For Weather and Feeding The Dogs. Her third book, Born To A Red-Headed Woman (also the title of her blog) is due out soon. 

*

The joints of my house - no. 22 (built in 1880) - really do click. Like every good man and woman, she has weathered much over the years; there are several chapters to her story. It turns out Kay's poem was prescient. Since returning from South Africa a few weeks ago, I have noticed cracks and signs of stress that were not there before I went away in early December. Two builder friends suggest she's showing signs of earthquake fatigue. . . not uncommon, apparently, even down here, 380 kms South of our sister city, Christchurch. I've been advised to lodge a claim with the Earthquake Commission (which I have done); the next step is to organize an independent assessment from a structural engineer. I'm not sure yet what the implications are. One step at a time. I am humbled all over again by all that our Christchurch friends have endured since September 2010. 


Every time something 'happens' to my house - structurally, esp., - I contemplate its symbolic, metaphoric meaning. Was it Jung who first referred to our psyche as 'a house of many rooms' (I'm paraphrasing)? Jung aside, I have long been interested in the correspondence/correlation between the things that manifest - often simultaneously - in our outer and inner worlds. . . The stories our house/our bodies tell us seem to me parts of the same thing; each has the potential to reveal hidden flaws and fractures, necessary truths? Suffice to say, I am paying attention. 


Staying with my house a moment. She (22 is def. female) was significantly damaged during a bizarre thunderstorm in Dunedin in February 2005. At the time - my personal foundations shaken - I was in the process of separating out from my husband of 19 years. Waterfalls gushed through the roof and into every room. Walls had to be stripped back, relined, re-plastered, repainted. An entire outbuilding collapsed, taking with it my laundry and loo (22 had an outside bathroom in earlier days). One wing had to be completely rebuilt. The crisis gave birth to my beautiful studio - it was as though the house was taking things into her own hands and insisting on this - inviting me to take my place fully in a whole new chapter.  


In honour of this transformative process, I left a wall in my passage 'exposed'. I like the idea of the house wearing this aspect of her history 'on her sleeve' and refer to this as her 'dreaming wall'. In the ensuing years, the wall has become a notebook/sketch pad/ideas board/telephone directory and visitor's 'book'. On my fiftieth birthday, Kay transcribed Surprising the Quarry onto the wall (see pic above). She made me chuckle last night, in her email saying 'yes' to my posting her poem here today. Her response to my telling her about 22's latest malady was this - 'Sorry the old girl is needing hip replacements ... hope it all goes well and is a stress-free process for you guys.' 

*

This is turning into a much longer post than I'd intended. I must be distractible (am supposed to be working on a talk for Thursday - International Women's Day - isn't that the way?!).  


* To add an interesting bit of background to Kay's poems and the house, 'clicks' rhymes with Hicks. . .(Clever Kay ; )). Stanton Hicks lived with his family at 22 in the early years of last century. The photograph below shows him and his friends sitting on the front steps on the harbour side of the house. 


An excerpt from our then-local newspaper, The Witness - "The first concrete evidence of transmitting and receiving Morse messages occurred on September 10, 1908, when two Otago Boys High School pupils, Stanton Hicks and Rawson Stark, sent messages across Otago Harbour between their homes in Ravensbourne and Andersons Bay. . . The Witness reported: "About two years ago the three boys seriously set about the equipment of a wireless station each, but although the conception was somewhat ambitious for boys of 14 and 15 years of age, their equipments were extremely modest comprising one or two small induction coils and battery cells of feeble power.

"Pocket money being scarce, their ingenuity found vent in unexpected directions. Discarded material and scrap heaps of various workshops in the city were laid under generous tribute. They were indeed like starlings at nesting time, and their school teachers can tell of weirdly distorted pockets and bulging school bags, as odds and ends were being collected and smuggled to safety, until the boys were free from lessons, when they would rush to their respective homes and toil away industriously."  (Continue reading this story here )

Cyril Brandon (17), pictured left, Rawson Stark (17), centre, and Stanton Hicks (16) are shown (on the steps of the Hick's Ravensbourne home) in an Otago Witness photograph with one of their wireless stations.

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill.

This week's editor on the TP hub is UK-based Kiwi writer Belinda Hollyer with the poem Five Quartets by Australian John Tranter. 

PS. Tuesday Poem stats as at 4 March 2012

Speak Softly

"For some people, solitude matters; for some people it is the air that they breathe. And, in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude; it's only recently that we have strangely begun to forget it. . . " 

". . . So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. . . "

Susan Caine

Oh, Gracious Spoon

"I always thought of spoons as the most civil

of the three eating tools as a spoon

can only give or receive

not cut or prod like a knife or fork"

(J musing - 2009)

Tuesday Poem - 4.47AM, Venice

(not exactly Venice, but not any other particular place either) Oil on Canvas  |  2014  |  CB

                             4.47AM, VENICE

                             I have my camera ready but
                             cannot photograph the sound
                             of this marble sky cracking.
                             Ribs of lightning slash
                             the dawn's dull green eyes,
                             craze the lazy glaze of night.

                             The city tosses in her sleep;
                             her dreams dent the deep
                             dark water. Behind the splitting
                             stucco ceilings, ancient bearded
                             thunder. Beneath the smoky wing
                             tips of gulls, bells, basilicas
                             and fleet bare feet usher
                             morning in.

                             CB 2004/12

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill.

This week's editor is Susan Landry with Conceptual Art, a prose poem by Holly Iglesias 

Many Moons

I'm immersed in the kind of thrilling background reading that makes pre-conference preparations a joy. I have two events coming up that will book-end April; the first is in Ibiza and the second in Phoenix, Arizona (with precious days in Boston, Amherst and NYC in between). Such vastly different landscapes, cultures and energies! Before returning home, I'll be spending a week in Portland OR, a day or two in Seattle and then another week in New Mexico with dear friends; we'll slip our shoes off, cross the sacred thresholds of ancient stone pueblos on bare feet, awed in the face of towering mesas and giant telescopes whose clicks and hums sound and resound for many, many miles. We will bow to night skies shot through with stars - 

         ". . . each star has a name and a secret name;

                          the only word we hear from them is their light;

men will never compass in their conceptions the whole of the stars;

                                under a starry sky on a clear night, the hidden power

                            of knowing speaks a language with no name; . . . " 

                                                                                                        The Stars - Vija celmins & Eliot Weinberger

One of the places we intend to visit is The Very Large Array, a radio astronomy observatory anchored in the NM desert. "The antennae are arrayed along the three arms of a Y-shape (each of which measures 21 km/13 miles long. . . " I feel incredibly privileged and yes, over-the moon excited at having the opportunity to do all this.

The working title for my Arizona paper is Small Points of Light. As the title implies, light will be the linking motif. Book- and web-based explorations are taking me to some truly mind-blowing places. What mysteries are contained within and around us. That boundless wonders exist in all corners of the cosmos is no secret, of course, but heavens alive, my friends (heaven is alive, my friends). . . There's no separation between earth and heaven, between 'out there' and 'in here'. 


We live in an extraordinarily complex and eloquent universe. Astronomers tell us we can hear the sound of a black hole singing. 'And what it is singing, and perhaps has been singing for more than two billion years, they say, is B flat -- a B flat that's 57 octaves lower than middle C'; the stars emit and elicit music; our own sun has a voice (you can listen in to it here). New material is constantly coming to light; old premises and new assumptions are being stretched, opened up, affirmed, challenged, revisited and reshaped. Something revelatory is at work, a kind-of 'dying-for-renewal's sake'? It's happening at every moment and on all scales, from the cosmic to the microcosmic and back again. (All this buzz makes BBS a very real danger.) 


In terms of the body's story - yours and mine - how amazing it is that the heart is being recognized as having its own intelligence; an intelligence and coherence that's independent of - and integral to - our brain's. Science - its nature, purpose and meaning - is being redefined. Spirituality's credence is being received and understood in new ways. Old theories and premises are being tipped on their heads; reality becomes illusion becomes reality. I find this at once invigorating, mind-numbing and humbling. (I carry a measure of wariness re; The Domain Of The Head (TDOTH), or perhaps I could say I have an appreciation for 'Ah-ha-s' accompanied by action; a wish to bring ideas 'to bear' and 'to ground'. This can be easier said than done sometimes. . .)  

(Some of you will know that) Jeannette Winterson is one of my all-time favorite writers - she of the brilliant wit and shimmering imagination. For a long while, I've entertained a fantasy - Jeanette and her partner come to NZ and stay with me at 22 (my home in Dunedin); their visit coincides with cellist Zoe Keating's (who would come with her hubby, cello-baby and cello, of course). . . Some of you might like to hop on over, too, for a reading, a concert or Sunday night scrambled eggs on toast? There's no harm in dreaming, is there? (I'm a great believer in giving voice to our dreams. Speaking them out loud nudges them forwards towards actualization.)


JW has written and recorded a remarkable series for radio, The Inconstant Moon. I invite you to tune in to all ten episodes - The Real Moon, The Invented Moon, The Mad Moon, The Mythic Moon, The Attempted Moon, The Women's Moon, The Earth's Moon, The Magic Moon, The Inconstant Moon and The Mock Moon. 


If you need tempting, here's an excerpt from The Real Moon, the first in this series - 

". . . No water. No wind. Worn mountains. Wasted seas. A rough, dry mineral sphere with a cloudless sky that is black even in bright daylight. Nothing is alive on the moon. Her landscape can be damaged by meteor impact but unlike the earth she watches over, moon cannot evolve or change.  And yet, she's much more than a museum moon, a leftover exhibit of earth's boisterous past; she's a dreaming moon - the place where we still go at night against the busyness of the day. She is still the moon that children point to and animals watch; the moon who rises the tides and mysteriously lights her earth. For all the science, she is still a poet's moon.

Yes, this is the moon - this hurrying, muscular, un-solid un-stillness; this endless wavering in whose engine I, too, am living. . . "

Nereid

On my wanderings through the ether, I came across Nereid - sea nymph - or in this instance, the namesake of one of Neptune's Trojan moons (I'd not heard of a Trojan moon before - had you?) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(astronomy) and, from amongst a great many fine lunar-themed poems, two in particular lingered -

                THE FREEDOM OF THE MOON

                    I’ve tried the new moon tilted in the air
                    Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
                    As you might try a jewel in your hair.
                    I’ve tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
                    Alone, or in one ornament combining
                    With one first water-star almost as shining.

                    I put it shining anywhere I please.
                    By walking slowly on some evening later
                    I’ve pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
                    And brought it over glossy water, greater,
                    And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
                    The color run, all sorts of wonder follow. 

                Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

&

                FULL MOON AND LITTLE FRIEDA


                    A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
                    And you listening.
                    A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
                    A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
                    To tempt a first star to a tremor.

                    Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
                    wreaths of breath -
                    A dark river of blood, many boulders,
                    Balancing unspilled milk.
                    'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

                    The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
                    That points at him amazed.


                 Ted Hughes

I have meandered far and wide this evening. Before signing off, I cannot resist posting this quote from Ted Hughes (from On Thinking - v. rewarding 8.43 min vid. attached): 

". . . There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality; the world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense and which goes on all the time - consciously or unconsciously - like the heartbeat. . . There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers - and evidence to support the answers - out of it. And that process of raid or persuasion, of ambush or dogged hunting or surrender is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we don't somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like fish in the pond of a man who can't fish. . . "Ted Hughes 

"The stars: what are they?

. . . they are spheres of crystal and their movement creates a music in the sky; 

                                                                                       they are fixed and we are moving;

we are fixed and they are moving. . . "

                                                                                           The Stars - Vija celmins & Eliot Weinberger

'Night, All.

~   ~  ~ Deep dreams ~  ~   ~ 

Skirting landfall

          The Peninsula

               When you have nothing more to say, just drive
               For a day all around the peninsula.
               The sky is tall as over a runway,
               The land without marks, so you will not arrive

               But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
               At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
               The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
               And you're in the dark again. Now recall

               The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log.
               That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
               The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
               Islands riding themselves out into the fog.

               And drive back home, still with nothing to say
               Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
               By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
               Water and ground in their extremity. 



               Seamus Heaney 
                      from his collection Door Into The Dark