Thursday July 02, 2009
cartography of flesh
In winter, I lose my body. I am all-brain, all-jangled neurotic loops. I pace around the house doing banal daily tasks, wrapped in wool and wool and wool - trying to keep warm. Trying to never be naked. Trying to walk a new path through this hard season. Failing.
I am a bottle of olive oil when you put it in the fridge - my usual sleek green goes solid, cloudy. I won’t pour. I am stuck in the vessel.
I envy the children their easy physicality. Their wholehearted wholeness. Their leaps and wriggles and arms thrown around. When they wash they delight in their lithe little limbs. Unselfconscious. Hyperconscious. All at once. When they dance every part of them in motion.
The body, land beneath my neck, cartography of scars, bruises, scabs. Down in the south there, it bleeds, it bleeds. Terrain of wool and cotton and lycra stretched over hillocks. Tectonic feet. Active seismic activity - steam rising and the grinding of bone against cartilage, against the very central meat of me.
Monday June 29, 2009
the brick factory
They are tearing down the brick factory - the only building in this town I love. I love it more than my own house. I stop to get photos and workmen appear out of nowhere, striding towards me with hands on hips, frowning.
I go *snap! snap!* and I run away.
My friend fell down on a concrete floor and broke his arm in three places. Three places - body, heart, spirit. I couldn’t be with him through five hours of lonely A&E. He said he saw an old Pacific Island pass out. He said he saw a young couple crying, their sick baby limp in their arms. He is scared to walk along the street in case someone jostles him. From this distance, all I can offer him is words. The words dissolve in my mouth, as useless as ash.
The rain is coming down in knives, slicing my face. The sky has been grey for months. Pools of frigid water gather at the bottom of the garden. I have to wade to the sleep out.
I bake too many sweet things because it warms the house and distracts the children. I rescue worms, flooded out of their earth abode by the rain.
I drive through sleet - I can’t see the road. I turn the radio up loud and hope I make it.
I go to a meeting and I take a crayfish and a trout, wrapped in tinfoil, still warm from cooking. They like that, at the meeting.
We suck at the bones, but no one eats the eyes.
Tuesday June 23, 2009
tincture
At eight I learned the word ‘tincture’. I carried the word around on my tongue. I chanted it like holy word, like spell.
Before that, it was just ‘potion’ or sometimes ‘perfume’. Flower petals collected, leaves. Grass with morning dew. Bits of spider web. An old cupboard door for a chopping board. A river rock for pummeling. Old jams jars with creek water. I would cut and crush. Chop and stir. Mix it in with a stick until it was full and frothy. The tang of damp nature.
It’s a tincture. It’s a potion. It’s special perfume.
We were set free for whole mornings, whole afternoons.
Our house made from bamboo. Our tyre swing.
With our pockets full of crackers and boiled lollies, we would go. Across the road, down to the creek.
We found a goat cave high up a mud wall. We’d scramble up and sit, ankle deep in goat shit, on wooden beer crates.
We would try to catch the fresh water crabs, bellycrawling along the creek edge.
I had a real knife. You had a real gun. Chopping vegetation, carving our names into the dirt wall. Shooting slugs into the creek bank.
Aged eight, aged six. Keeping busy, keeping out of Mum’s hair. Shimmying along back fences and stealing fruit.
A swing, a knife, a gun. Acid stomachs from too many sweets and apples. We would stay until it started to get dark, or there was a call across the road from home.
The only other thing was if creekwater came over the rim of a gumboot. A scurry home for dry socks.
Camelia petals gave off an impressive foam. Certain grasses would bleed milk. Breath of heaven for the scent.
It is a tincture. It is a trick. It is a treat.
It is a locket, for locking and hiding down a shirt against a heart. For taking out and opening on the very
rare occasion.
Monday June 15, 2009
Let Birds
By Linda Gregg
Eight deer on the slope
in the summer morning mist.
The night sky blue.
Me like a mare let out to pasture.
The Tao does not console me.
I was given the Way
in the milk of childhood.
Breathing it waking and sleeping.
But now there is no amazing smell
of sperm on my thighs,
no spreading it on my stomach
to show pleasure.
I will never give up longing.
I will let my hair stay long.
The rain proclaims these trees,
the trees tell of the sun.
Let birds, let birds.
Let leaf be passion.
Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be
between us. Let joy.
Let entering. Let rage and calm join.
Let quail come.
Let winter impress you. Let spring.
Allow the ocean to wake in you.
Let the mare in the field
in the summer morning mist
make you whinny. Make you come
to the fence and whinny. Let birds.
***
I really like this poem. I like the sentiment of the poem. I like the gentleness of it, but the urgency. I like bossy poems that tell you what to do: ‘Wake up! Notice this! Feel this! Remember this! Get your priorities straight, already!’
I do, however, find ‘whinny’ to be an intrinsically comical word, so the effect of the poem falters a little for me there, because I giggle a bit at the idea of being told to whinny…
And yet, I am just the kind of nut-ball who would go up to a horse and ‘whinny’ for the fun of it. Trying to speak horse to the horse who doesn’t speak human.
*neigh!*
Wednesday June 10, 2009
winter greens
The winter garden is not as exciting as the summer garden, but there are still good things to eat - broccoli, spring onions, asian greens, herbs...the garden goes green…
...I eat the bok choy that has started to go to seed, I eat leaves off my red cabbages that are refusing to heart up - when you grow it yourself, you get less fussy and more resistant to waste.
I think if I didn’t have kids, I would eat big bowls of leafy greens steamed in soy sauce with a bit of rice, every night. At least, that’s what I’d eat on the nights I didn’t eat toast.
***
I am wearing 8 layers. Four of them wool. And yes, I am indoors.
***
I typed ‘Morrissey’ yesterday, and my spell-check suggested ‘morosely’.
***
“Poetry is useless, and indispensable.”
- Jean Cocteau
***
When it gets this cold, I recommend carrying a discreet and elegant hip-flask of good whiskey at all times.
Tuesday June 09, 2009
walk
yesterday’s five things ::
::walking is good - i need to do it more
::i want to be light-hearted again, some time soon
::my lemon tree is full of beautiful shiny round lemons - I want to make lemon + orange marmalade this weekend - does anyone have an excellent, no-fail recipe?
:: i love the things my crazy/wonderful friends mail to me - in the last week: new poems from Wellington, Buddhist essays from Paremoremo, haberdashery, Polish bracelets, chocolate, wool from Norway and yesterday - an espresso maker from West Auckland!
:: on the shortest day, I am going to plant enough garlic for all of 2010
Have a lovely day, people. Keep on…
Monday June 08, 2009
pandora’s box
I haven’t been writing in my paper journal in recent weeks - which is usually a sign that things are a little out of kilter. This week I’m going to try to write just five things a day in there, to ease myself back into it. I have to start doing it again, because that is where most of my poems are born.
A friend observed that the blog has featured a lot of lists and list-like poems lately - and she’s right. I think sometimes when the whole is a little too big and confusing, I go back to the naming of parts. Observing the details is more manageable than making sense of the whole.
I feel like life has been one big endurance test lately.
I read somewhere the phrase “we forge ahead blithely, as if plans were guarantees.”
Last week, someone I know mis-used the phrase ‘opening Pandora’s Box’ to mean a box of treasure, a box of joy…
It made me smile.
I know I’m not making a whole lot of sense. Thanks for sticking around to read anyway.
Just five things a day, I will inch back towards myself, towards the writing that always helps me - even when I think I can’t do it.
Tuesday June 02, 2009
Tom for Thom
"And when you get blue
and you’ve lost all your dreams;
there’s nothing like a campfire
and a can o’ beans.”
-Tom Waits
Tuesday May 26, 2009
all in a winter’s day
In the morning, I make lemon muffins and alphabet soup.
Soon after, there are books wrapped in brown paper in my letter box.
I call a friend who has just given birth and she says: “We are so lucky. So very lucky.”
Then, someone I have given birth to wrecks our video-player by inserting small bits of lego.
I make packages to send friends having babies and birthdays.
There’s a knock at the door, and when I answer it there is a huge jack-o-lantern with a candle burning inside, in lieu of a person. “Happy winter” sings a ghostly voice, hiding around the corner. It is Margi - the neighbourhood poet - wearing a cute hat and beaming.
There is red wine and candlelight and a beautiful DVD about Iceland.
There is the ongoing conversation about whether or not to get a pet cat. We want the comfort of the warm fur ball, we don’t want the hassle when we go away. I want to get two girl cats to correct the gender imbalance of our household. I will call them something frivolous and daft, like Flo and Flannery or Bagel and Brioche.
There is a snatched hour of sewing. I am making piles and piles of rabbits. I don’t know why or what for. Call it Lagomorpha therapy.
There is reading in bed with my feet on a hot water bottle. The novel is about a woman who lives in England and likes to read in bed. She has cocoa making facilities in the corner of her bedroom.
I think this is a very good idea.
Monday May 25, 2009
the soothing safety of a lie
"I’ve nothing again people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions. Just so long as they don’t start on about storytelling and honesty, the way some of them do…
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succour, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
-Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
