the road from the world behind ends here
by the river
in the canyon
through the ryegrass
by the deer path
receding sun draws a curtain up the stone
still hot as fever on my hands
fingers trace the cupules and grooves
memory in my flesh in my bone
dream-time
gray half-moon billows out
like a blanket in the wind
salmon ghosts thrum the whorls of the river
pebbles click down the mountain
down through the strata
down through the ryegrass
down to the water
the ancient bed
obsidian granite schist basalt
slabs shards shattered spine of the world
protrudes vertebral from the water
shaman shakes the double-headed staff
by the water
in the sunset
in the moonrise
by the ryegrass
in the canyon
oreamnos and white-tail leap from rock
hunters hurl atlatl darts
coyote howls a dark patina
great mother spearpoint pubis
opens arms breasts round as planets
her hips the twin horizons
moon over earth
in the evening
in the morning
by the ryegrass
on the deer path
desiccated bone glitters to dust
becomes sand becomes the river
becomes the soil at the meeting of waters
hearbeats ten millennia old
stretch across worlds
the pulse of a universe
a drum in the firelight
in the spirit-time
on the deer path
through the ryegrass
by the river
twins join hands pinwheel the stars
dance the dance of the water-rhythm
dance the dance of the salmon-thrash
dance the dance of the camas root
dance the dance of the hunters’ hunt
dance the dance of the old moon new
dance the dance of the seasons turning
dance the dance of the mother’s blood
in the spinning
in the embers flying skyward
days and nights flash by
like clapping hands
rocks split and tumble into talus
ryegrass grows then withers
like a woman’s hair
vortex in the water
down and down through earth
through flesh
in the canyon
on the deer path
through the ryegrass
by the half-moon
in the sunset
in the firelight
in the moonrise
by the river
in the firelight
in the moonrise
by the river
Is this a new poem, eM? In order to appreciate it more fully I had to google a bit about the landscape you were describing. But I don't think the photos can really impart that feeling of primeval, eternal vastness and the excitement of the idea that people, human beings, actually walked and worked and lived on the very same hills and rocks that one stands on. It reminded me a bit of the feeling I got in the Judean desert when I was sixteen and spent a week there in a field school. Empty great spaces as far as the eye can see, the pure awe of their beauty, nature unmolested, and yet everywhere signs, remnants, of a thriving, boisterous distant human life from two thousands years ago. No drumbeat, though. Maybe the lonely melancholic melody of a shepherd's flute.
ReplyDeleteNo not new--but an example of the primary reason I go on road trips. I find glittery objects like this one out there.
ReplyDeleteAnd have you found glittery objects in your travels? Not all that glitters is gold, you know. Mostly it is not. How do you know, then?
ReplyDeleteI can't quite explain the process. Something speaks, or wants to tell a story. Sometimes a single line occurs to me, sometimes an entire piece springs forth in full. Mostly I get a kernel, a seed. The seed gestates, sometimes for a long while.
ReplyDeleteI think just listening to what is there works best. Most of my job involves noticing.
Ah, the "kernel". I remember it well. You may consider this a sacrilege but I'm reminded of my friend Alla telling me how she came to make a very dashing two piece outfit for herself. It all started when she found these irresistibly beautiful large buttons in an antic market. She bought them and then considered what to do with them and eventually, the garment was conceived and made.
ReplyDeleteI think most purists would be shocked to learn that a poem can start not from an idea but from a mere image, a flash of a metaphor. Like an author conjuring up a character who then goes looking for an appropriate story fit for that character.
Bingo.
ReplyDeleteAt least in my case.
This one began with me placing my hands where someone else had placed theirs, and the receding sun raising a curtain on the tableau.
I don't have an idea about what I want to say, and then go looking for an image that fits. Whatever image presses itself forward suggests a story and a structure of its own, organically.
"began with me placing my hands where someone else had placed theirs,"
ReplyDeleteAs in "Singularity of Snow":
"I follow the hollow line
of ellipsis point boot-prints
over a crumpled white surface
something was here
now an omission"
It's about memory, a longing, almost rage, to connect with an unrecoverable, unknowable past:
"vortex in the water
down and down through earth ..."
On a light and more irreverent note about images and meanings, take a look at this:
ReplyDeletehttp://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2012/01/three-ladders.html
Unrecoverable, unknowable, but tantalizingly approachable. An ineffable connection is made, or almost made. We cannot define or fix in place this connectivity, but it nonetheless exists in some ephemeral place. When we speak to each other across chasms of our own individual perceptions and experiences, we say to each other, "yes, I understand." And we do, really, in some real sense. This is the magic of language.
ReplyDeleteI love the ladders.
I also like the ladders because they are exemplars of this theme. We see the ladders, but they are artifacts of unknowable intent, unknowable unity of perception. Someone placed these ladders, perhaps at random, perhaps with some intention--we cannot know. Yet we personify this image, lend to it our own experience and intent--using words like "together," or "apart." In this common human experience, we obtain a connection and a synthesis.
ReplyDeleteStill, the other is unknowable. Yet we say we know, and are known.
In any case, much more than "nice."
ReplyDeleteand a thunderous silence followed ...
ReplyDeleteIf I may be so bold: The "nice" was not about the poem, as far as I understood. It was about your suggestion that if recited outloud, one can hear the drumbeat. A nice suggestion. A nice idea.
Don't you ever give anybody any credit for thoughtfulness?
Touche, a nice counterpoint to my visceral reactions to the past.I was ungenerous in that. Some things just stick in my craw and make me imalleable.
ReplyDeleteiMmalleable eM
ReplyDeleteGeographic note, pursuant to your earlier post: the site I describe is at the end of a rough dirt track in the Snake River canyon. Some web images depict boulders removed from the original site and erected as nearby highway points of interest. Each of the images in the poem corresponds to an actual image. Following is the shaman with the double-headed staff.
ReplyDeleteI tried to locate a distinct image of the twins (a recurrent motif in aboriginal glyphs) which incorporates also the pinwheel image--which, interestingly enough, resembles a Fibonacci spiral, also a common image in aboriginal art around the world.
http://www.spiriteaglehome.com/nw_arch_images/BuffaloEddy08_13171p_1200.jpg
An even better rendering of a similar image, along with photos of the surrounding landscapes.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cornforthimages.com/Landscape/Washington.htm
This is the website I found in my earlier googling. Amazing sights. Your poem captures the spirit of the place, brings it to vibrating life. The silence. The stillness. All of a sudden, there are sounds, rhythm, and movement, and dancing. Like spirits. Very nice, Señor eM. Can we add it to the pantheon of Duende?
ReplyDelete"The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm...all arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm
ReplyDeleteSo you agree?
ReplyDeleteI've always thought of duende as appearing in the interaction between a performance (as in the quote) and an audience in "an exact present."
ReplyDeleteWithout the spoken performance, can this poem be said to demonstrate it?
Or is it enough that performance is implied, or supplied by the interior voice of the reader?
It could be supplied by the reader's interior voice. It occurred to me but I read the poem over and over again, at different times and caught on to the movement and was in the movement only after a certain number of readings. Of maybe I wasn't reading with the right kind of attention before. I don't know. Anyway, I'm glad I got that sense of regulated wildness of the dance stanza. It's the feeling I get from watching a well performed flamenco dance.
ReplyDeleteThis is, after all, an oral art. I hear the rhythms and colors in my head as I read, and text lends a visual sense of organization, like a map, or musical notation.
ReplyDeleteStill, text is a voice once removed from performance, a more intellectual consideration at a distance from the spoken sounds.
But all are capable of Duende, as Lorca says--though the greatest range is in the performing arts.
A goatish sidebar: Oreamnos is a genus unique to North America. I recognized the stone image immediately. Descendants of these animals populated a sheer and beautiful canyon near my childhood home. They clung to unbelievable precipices and leapt like gray ghosts across the impossible abyss. Their likeness was adopted as a logo by the defunct Great Northern Railway, and I saw that silhouette every day in the dying railroad-and-lumber town where I went to school.
ReplyDeleteThey are gone from that canyon now, shuttled to a wilder wilderness on the western peninsula of this state.
I like goats. I like their independent and obstreperous nature, their individuality, contentious disposition, and those strange oblong irises that speak of an alien intelligence.
I chose to use the genus name instead of "mountain goat" for purely musical reasons. I love the music in words.
For me, always better a goat than a sheep.
Found an image: http://mmbenya.com/wp-content/uploads/mountain-goat.jpg
ReplyDeleteThere was some exchange about goats in the TNR thread I referred you somewhere. I didn't really pay much attention,IR and K2K crossing swords for the umpteenth time.
ReplyDeleteA mountain goat in Hebrew is "Yael" (Nubian ibex). It is a lovely name for a girl. It denotes grace and nimbleness.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Yael2.jpg
What I like most about goats is the cheese.
ReplyDeleteThere was a line, excised from this latest version:
ReplyDelete"dance the dance of the fromage chevre"
Now you are being ironic :)
ReplyDeleteThough of course
much depends on
the concept
of crumpled
goat
cheese,
especially in a salad
with endives and
roasted
walnuts.
I was also entranced with the word-music of "arugula," but couldn't rhythmically work it in.
ReplyDelete"arugula" always reminds me of President Obama. But let's not get political.
ReplyDelete