Walking Tree

I asked my granddaughter "Who is that?"

She said, "That's a tree."

"What are those in its branches?"

"They're caccoons. You can see, the caterpillar is still in one of them. The other one is opened the butterfly has hatched."

Then pointing to the one on the right,

"In this one the caterpillar is still changing. And the tree has feet like a bird."

watermarks

sweltering -

part of me is rising

to the clouds

moss and ferns

in the great forest I

pause

cleaning the pool

I leave the wasp

to drown

fog forever

as I cross the field gulls

begin to squabble

steamy windows

in the cafe we share

each others breath

The Summer King - Poems Joanna Preston

The Summer King was in 2008 the initial winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award. Since publication it has gone on to win the 2010 Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize.

I was fortunate enough to be present at the premier or early exposure of a good number of these poems. This was as part of a small gathering of poetic obsessive-compulsives (The Lost Friday Salon) who gathered once a month in an upstairs room of the now demolished Christchurch restaurant Mainstreet. How long ago this was speaks to the long genesis and honing of this collection, and to how difficult it is to get such fine collection into print.

Much of Joanna's collection explores the undercurrents of archetype and myth that rise up in and around us. Her language is economical and speaks always with an ear for the sounds as well as the rhetoric that will advance the poem.

A measure of that economy is the poem "The Hill Paddock". I hear in it echoes of that Yiddish theatre song, carried over into English as 'Donna Donna.' That song, which begins and ends as follows, presents in fable form a wryly elegiac world-view.

On a wagon bound for market
There's a calf with a mournful eye.
High above him there's a swallow
Winging swiftly through the sky.

Calves are easily bound and slaughtered
Never knowing the reason why.
But whoever treasures freedom,
Like the swallow has learned to fly

Preston's account gives the elegiac view another turn of the screw. She suggests an innocence/freedom that is now only something 'longed for'.

Searching for the missing calf

in the brittle light of winter afternoon

we found instead

a tuft of bloodied feathers

fluttering in the ryegrass

as though they could remember flight,

and longed for it.

The Yiddish plea to Adonai is supplanted with a condition which, while still clinging to the fabulous, is darkly godless.

She takes those mythic currents and their associated faiths, then knots and cuts the umbilical. Prayers go unanswered.'

The final and darkest poem in the collection is Parable of the Drought. It presents a rural Australian retelling of Abraham's obedience to God in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Only in this poem the injunction the father takes his son into the wilderness. Whether he is provoked by despair, delusion or both, there comes no angel to countermand that sacrifice.

He slid his fingers into the boy's hair

- just like a wether, he thought, just like a ewe -

He watched until the boy's eyes

lost their brilliance - the same brittle blue

as the sky that even now

refuses to cloud

In the opening title poem and at the close The Summer King sees the knife at work. What runs between is as sharply formed. There is much affection for home ground, places and people are recalled with brittle tenderness. In the poem Gloves:

Great Grandmother's gloves were kept for funerals,

in tissue paper, limp as something stillborn.

She drew them on slowly, the grey silk

of the other self she wore.

From there to another expression of bloody mortality may be no more than turning a leaf. In The Bull Sale:

in the centre of it all - a god

in bull's form, his forehead a thick plate

of bone, hard as a butcher's block.

Despite these blows both present and impending she also could . . .'wish you Angels, whistling.'

A Million Bright Things at Riverbend

With poetry as the drug, it was flashforward and flashback time at Riverbend Books on the 22nd of June with the launch of the 2010 Queensland Poetry Festival Programme and the CD A Million Bright Things,which stuffs into one little lunchbox sound-bites of some of the tastiest bits of the 2009 Queensland Poetry Festival.

To launch A Million Bright Things festival committee members each took to the stage with a selection from this tough and tender train ride of an anthology. It's not just a word ride. The way each poet leans into their voice takes it above that. Music also has a thing or two to say.

There's acapella and accompanied - Jayne Fenton Keane zig-zags through a split jazz vocalese in A Jazz Poem for Miles Davis - Bremen Town Musician saws the fiddle in a heart on high seas song/poem Sailor - Angela Costi makes plaintive vocal ascents from the fluttering gaze text of Grandmother Marouilla's Liturgy - Brianna Carpenter shimmers through a song of unrequited love: Jacqueline - Rob Morris, Shiesh Money and Graham Nunn chug out the grungy partying of Vegemite - Hinemoana Baker & Christine White rise in a bluesy bilingual invocation to shoot from the heart, Talk You Up - and Neil Murray travels through a nostalgic narrative Anywhere Tonight.

Tough and tender meet in the bitter facts when Geoff Goodfellow reads Blue Sky Morning and Barbara Temperton tells us Purl. Tipping more toward the tender, laced with bitter-sweet Jeffrey Harpeng follows with Horse Tale in its reversible jacket mode as Horse Tail. The 'ah so right' continuity of this collection then runs fingers through your hair with quirky sensuality as Zenobia Frost indulges us in the warm indulgence of Bathing with Neil Gaiman.

For those who were at the 2009 festival this CD is a trip back in the Tardis, a chance to meet and re-baptise yourself in the public bathing place of phraseology. For those who weren't there, all you need to do is give it a few more listens and this divine deja vu will be with you also.

--------------------------------------------------------

As preview of the 2010 festival programme there was three guest performers. Darkwing Dubs rapped and rat a tat tatted on our frontal lobes, both left and right for remembering and imagining. Suzanne Jones juxtaposed the fragments of the splintered life. Then there was that diamond among these semi precious stones, Ynes Sanz put on a sequence of plays the size of poems. With lyrical necromancy she called up a collection of blokes and shielas (some still alive) to speak in their unique voices.

As a poker hand the evening was a royal flush. If you have ever felt that poetry events were risky bets, a couple of aces with perhaps a couple a threes, a five and a seven, then Riverbend will relieve that run of misfortune. Put your chips down and enjoy when the next one comes around. There's nobody here to shoot you for playing with a stacked deck.

.

Gritting of teeth over defining haiku

The following is a rant in response 

to the notion of defining haiku.

It is jazz-riff-rhetoric

that teases its theme rather that polish 

the brass door-plates of convention.

Zen Zen Zen!

the monks motorbike   

revs up

On one hand I am irritated with efforts to define haiku.

That means kill the butterfly, shove a pin through its abdomen and put the dead beauty in a museum display case.

On the other hand I have a most beautiful butterfly sitting on my bookshelf.

No formaldehyde or such preservative, so the throrax and abdomen have been eaten away, leaving a gap like some monstrous vagina.

To praise a gruesome image (lets make pacts with the dark things inside us – after all it is the shadows that give form to colour) it means my butterfly cannot now be pinned down.

And to return to the lines in the palm of the hand, they do speak of the bones and muscles underneath, and even speak of the embryo’s first clutching.

My perspective is not so much any belief in being able to convey the butterflyness of the butterfly. My case is that artifacts are a state of mind,

And artifacts may be eaten away like my butterfly.

& so to my non-definition of haiku:

Haiku are a deep faith in language, ritualized in brevity, a belief that the omissions of brevity can contain more than is said, a desperate and joyous attempt to convey the felt in what is seen. Despite their supposed expression of here & now, what you don’t see is what you get. How much of
that is the knotting of our delusions is an inextricable conundrum.

Each haiku is a small anxiety – a hope that connection at a distance is real

cycling
into the motorbikes
backfire

 

Between Words

http://www.modernenglishtanka.com/vol3/MET11_final.html

Turn to page 216.

Dictum

I almost tell the truth

but the words are a little crazy.

I almost tell you I'm crazy

but the words are a little truth.

I tell you the truth is crazy,

well almost,

but the words are little.

Day  6 napowrimo 2009

Sleep - (A tanka)

the cat settles,

curls on the book

open on my lap

Hubble photos of galaxies

the light of blue stars

Day 5: napowrimo 2009

The Weight

there is no blood or keen pain

there are no stigmata pierced by the name of god

my teeth are heavy in the clench of coffee

the weight of weariness is a sandbag barricade

raised heavy on the levee of my cheekbones

my new lens prescription is Hubble without the fix

my new boarder, arthritis, wants to snap my wrist

birthday candles are getting to be a fire risk 

but I'll light them, and wait for the paramedics

to rescue me from the inferno. mostly I want,

want the electric paddles to sizzle through the dark hum

dull as an amplifier cranked up without music 

Let the two hundred . . . clear!    shock of words

three hundred . . . clear! sputter back the pilot light

of hope

Poem 3: napowrimo 2009

The Story in Her Face

Her high cheekbones round as Golgotha

swept clean of suffering, were pinched ruddy

as a child. The light diffused there, today

remains immaculate. Every soul she sees seems

already a a ghost. One would fall

right through a hug, and laugh, or pose.

"Mr Sullen!" How she got the sepia in her voice

is a mystery. But it sounds like it was made

for the shape of her mouth. Hear High German.

Her child flies in the kitchen door full of the fire

that will burn him out. Her mouth is a horizon

seismic at the periphery, seismic with something

yellow. "How deep is that in the flower my tart-sweet?"

"Mama, it is as deep as the water in the old mill stream."

She kneads dough that is already risen,

baked golden. She tastes a palm-rolled ball of that,

because it can rise to the size of the world.

It expands from her palate. Like lens flare it glows

around every thought in her head. Death is less

tangible, at the corner of that.

Her sulllen child is posed on a chair.

She stands behind. He is a hollow space

consumed by the future. You can reach

right through him and touch the why

that is there when he dies.

In pencil on the back of the photo: (Aunty Mary's) 

daughter & grandson died Jan 1922

Horse Tale

 a wild horse

galloping toward me 

granddad’s fingers 

The mantle clock chimes as if it were an omen in a fairy tale. The opening notes of as slow waltz. Blue notes. How beautifully the mermaid dances on pain made out of daggers. How the tin soldier’s lead heart is heavy as ammunition. How the beanstalk winds toward heaven lithe as smoke from a smelter’s chimney. How I listen as my fingers gallop toward my granddaughter, off the table and on out the window. Outside the almost laughter of a kookaburra, the supernatural quardle of magpies and her answering the “h h h oo” welling from the hearts of the doves.

This haibun is from "Four Tellings" a trans-Tasman haibun sequence written by Owen Bullock, Beverley George, Jeffrey Harpeng and Joanna Preston. This collection treats haibun as links in a renga-like sequence. It has also been posted on Haibun Today where "Four Tellings" has also been reviewed by Patricia Prime.

Old Spark

Twenty k from somewhere no longer there,

at least, that is, not the place it once was,

in a garden a heart-fall from Eden,

a comely lass. Well, that’s one summation.

Her photo is peppered with age. With care

her image has outlived her. Now, moss

would smudge her name if any stone stood ten

decades, two wars, three regimes. Elation

 

and none of that, she’s a frayed thread. A glare

on the sodden mound behind her infers

at earth’s roll through space, a mill wheel grinding.

Face on a postcard, is grandfather there,

a bookmark, now unnamed  in old papers? 

He is just an old spark still igniting.

Box Brownie Sky

My father is on the roof and I am

sleeping in my cot. Just a hint of cloud

in the off-white sky. He is looking east

or north toward where he was, is, is not

My father is on the roof and i am

in some room awaiting a name: a cloud

of possibles. My name is to the east

or north. One word at a time. The whole lot

are in closed books. A corrugated roof

offers father as a word. His toolbox

explains. On a closer shed roof barbed-wire,

a hand-split timber fence below. The roof-

line has two words, father and his toolbox.

Overhead one cloud, and below barbed-wire.