Treetops and gargoyles

I spent this morning responding to and marking papers from an introductory non-fiction writing class I often teach at this time of year. One line really caught my attention in a piece recalling being a child and climbing a favourite tree. The last line was "When you're at the top of the tree, you don't think about the ground."

This afternoon I took the memory of that line off to Cally's Teas, a place I have not had much recent time to sit in and just relax and let the words happen. I started in with that memory, and this is what came out:

From the top of the tree

   is no thought of the ground

No fear of falling in the cuddle

   of gently swaying limbs of last resort

The climb not from, but to

  once done is gone, past concern

What matters is the up here and

   the out there, rarefied

Solitude, alone with the heights

  keeping private company with

    the  

           sky

Which evolved by July 23 into:

Gently swaying limbs of last
resort fold around, cuddle,
erase thoughts of solid ground.

No longer in transition,
no fear of falling from the top
of a climb accomplished, alone,

waiting for the tree to grow, gradually
sprout the next inviting step?
Or whispering, "Feathers. Feathers. Feathers"?

 So imagine my surprise tuning in to Shawna Lemay's blog site, CALM THINGS, and finding her quoting this:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

- William Wordsworth, from The Prelude

I was waiting at Cally's for someone to ask for a poem on a topic of personal interest--and I got a reassuring request from a regular, asking me to write about the surprise one feels after being in a loving relationship for fifty years, having it end in the death of her partner, then finding that she can get that feeling again, with another, even so late in life. I wrote it for her, and for her only.

Then I picked up a line from Sheila Watson's Paris Diary, about a day walking the streets and not conversing with the gargoyles. Again, an image to conjure with. This came out of the hat:

I did not have time

to chat with the gargoyles

on sunny days dark, mad-eyed

crouching witnesses to the passing

scene of busy feet going…

    ... God knows where,

on rainy days grim, spitting

trouble-makers focusing

random drops from above

into malicious streams of cold

discomfort down unsuccessfully

turned collars below.

    What took my time

from chat? Who can recall?

The gargoyles never cared to ask

and my mind wandered.

 

What I do in my Spare Time--Moonwalking EPF Style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLZIFrd2mc

A workshop we had back in September 2013, right at the brightest point of the brightest full moon of the year:


My contribution---

Harvest Moon we call this glow, this ripened

Moon of Gathering that guides our steps,

encourages our taking in,

through eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin

and yet even tonight as she comes to

full bright perfection, joins us

together points our ways along

moon-shadowed paths, because

the moon is made for changing,

ever cycling, waxing, waning—

eternal analogue reminder of

continuity in our

on-again-

off-again 

digital times, 

she styles herself as well

a Moon of Letting Go, 

shifts, begins to perfect her darker, 

shaded other faces.

       Here we gather, 

give and take illumination

collect ourselves, reflect upon, 

       then moon and we

            continue on....

 

Ghazals with Anna Marie

Occasionally and with great pleasure I get a chance to set up a playful exchange with my friend Anna Marie Sewell, and at times another friend, Shayne Golosky-Johnston joins the party. One of us will send off a picture or a recent piece of poetry we have been working at, or just a line or two of found potential. The other takes a line or two, or maybe even just a phrase from that as a prompt and begins something new and sends it back. And back and forth we go, building up from the original.

On Jan 17, I sent Anna Marie and Shayne this:

I was looking through a back issue of prairiefire and found a poem by Erin Noteboom, called "Ghazal beginning with lines by Yannis Ritsos."

One of Noteboom's own lines struck me:

"Learn to walk as if you had a different history"

Care to start there? In Ghazal form (if not mode)?

As, for example:--And I wrote this rather freer than appropriate opening gambit:

Learn to walk as if you had a different history,

Had not been born of immaculate deception.

What would we gladly give for total independence?

Everything but reliance on experience over novelty.

The moon last night shone off icy crust across my walkways

Snow polished to glistening seduction, fixed uncertain fluidity.

If I read the ravens rightly, we live in a permanent joke

But lack the sense of humour to recognize the punch line.

The predictable seasons regularly erase my frames of reference:

From a river frozen over is there an upstream and a down?

The little rituals we make up daily keep us going on and on

Let us call love to account, proclaim our unpolished desire.

I am preoccupied with form. Pattern resolves doubt

when topicality fails and nature hides from metaphor.

Then I revised and tried something a little more "formally" responsible

Jan 18 (3)

Learn to walk as if you had a different history,

The one to come from wellspring and ashes in the making.

What would we gladly give for total independence?

Everything but reliance on experience unforsaken.

The moon last night shone off icy crust across my walkways

Fixed uncertain fluidity, snow polished seduction.

If I read ravens rightly, we live in permanent joke

But lack the sense of humour to recognize the punch line.

Predictable seasons erase my frames of reference:

From a river frozen over is there upstream and down?

Let us call love to account, proclaim unpolished desire;

little rituals we make up daily keep us going.

I am preoccupied with form; when topicality fails

and nature hides from metaphor, doubt seeks out pattern.

Anna Marie took the challenge to heart, and wrote a witty and thoughtfully lush riff on the “ashes in the making.``  You can find it on her January 19 blog entry at  http://prairiepomes.com/ Please go there, appreciate and enjoy, and leave her a comment….

Deciding to try in my own halting way to take a more traditional approach, as did she, I gave it one more try for now, on a riff from hers: “addicted to the blue,” from her couplet

          she never shared her bed with any one addicted to the blue
           consuming smoke, yet she found ashes, in the making.

January 27:  Addicted ghazal:

Against habit, law, life’s lessons, precept, and parent’s rules,,

the rebel strums a twelve-bar tune, addicted to the blue.

Nose to ground, feet mired in mud, cold, wet and tired, by raven’s

sly croak tricked skyward, no longer addicted, to the blue.

What mood is this, an angel’s fete, from Mary’s lap, outreaching,

tricks shepherds from their own true work, addicted by the blue?

Romance passed through puritanical monochrome mind’s eye

an art color blinded, blinkered, addicted to the blue.

Awake to the simpler rude multiplication, hue Dons

a clearer perspective, far from addicted to the blue.


February 18 update:

And speaking of lines that beg to be taken up and thought through, these lines from an Italian songwriter, Claudio Lolli, from his 1980 song "La canzone del Principe Rospo" ("The Frog-Prince Song" translated by my colleague from the University of Alberta Department of Modern Languages, William Anselmi):


Si potrebbe parlare delle parole e della loro strana mania di mettersi ensieme,
basta una penna o una bocca disposta all'amore e niente piu le trattiene,...

One could speak about words and their strange obsession to get together,
you just need a pen or a mouth given to love and nothing holds them back,...

 

That`s as far as we got—or have managed to get so far. But from her blog, apparently Anna Marie has caught the bug.