TUESDAY POEM | The Blue Snake by Margaret Atwood

                       

                       THE BLUE SNAKE 

                       The snake winds through your head
                       into the temple which stands on a hill
                       and is not much visited now.

                       Toppled stones clutter the paving
                       where the blue snake swims towards you,
                       dry in the dry air,
                       blue as a vein or a fading bruise.
                       It looks at you from the side of its head
                       as snakes do. It flickers.

                       What does it know
                       that it needs to tell you?
                       What do you need to be told?
                     
                       You are surprised to hear it speak.
                       It has the voice of a flute
                       when you first blow into it,
                       long and breathless; it has an old voice,
                       like the blue stars, liked the unborn,
                       the voice of things beginning and ceasing.

                       As you listen, you grow heavier.
                       It asks you why you are here,
                       and you can't answer.

                       It begins to glow,
                       it's almost transparent now,
                       you can see the spine
                       with its many pairs of delicate ribs
                       unrolling like a feather.

                       This has gone far enough,
                       you think, and turn away.
                       It isn't what you came for.

                       Behind you the snake dissolves
                       and flows into the rock.

                       On the plain below you is a river
                       you know you must follow home.

                       Margaret Atwood
                           from her collection Interlunar, first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1988

Photograph by Michael Melford, National Geographic with aerial support by Lighthawk

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is UK-based writer, Belinda Hollyer

with Saturday, Ocean Creek 

a spatially vast and haunting poem by Fred D'Aguiar 

                                "Sometimes the morning shakes itself from its moorings

                                To this world and lifts skywards with a fighter jet's roar,

                                Everyone lucky enough to be up and about looks to the east. . . "

(Belinda has - lucky us - posted a second Fred D'Aguiar poem on her blog.  The Rose of Toulouse and Saturday, Ocean Creek exhort me to look at familiar things differently.

For more Tuesday Poetry - a whole lot more - please click on the quill.

TUESDAY POEM | Rachel van Blankenship reads her poem SLACK TIDE

I was struck by the crisp originality of Rachel van Blankenship's writing from the moment I first encountered it. As tends to happen out here in the blogosphere, Rachel and I met by chance (or magical intention?) on several mutual friends' blogs - Rebecca Loudon's (Radish King), Angella Lister's, Melissa Green's and Marylinn Kelly's. Rachel's comments were consistently exacting, lyrical, empathic and distinct; they carried the succinctness and musicality of poetry. Let's just say I 'heard' her voice long before I actually heard her voice? The obvious thing to do was to follow the trail that led to her blog. I was wowed and have been a regular reader ever since.  

   It was no surprise to discover that Rachel is not only a poet and artist, but a singer, too. As I mentioned in last week's Tuesday Poem post, we had the great pleasure of meeting last month and of spending 'real' time together in Phoenix, her new home town. (I've just realised it was exactly a month ago today, Rachel. Happy synchronicity.) So, yes, on Sunday 14 April, Rachel and I spent a good many hours walking and talking our way through our separate stories and histories at the Phoenix Botanical Gardens - an altogether other-worldly place. The following afternoon, we met up again and during the hour and a half or so we had available to us (I had to catch a shuttle to the airport and she and her partner Pat were meeting up for a rare Monday evening concert), Rachel agreed to my making a recording of her reading a poem she had completed the night before - Slack Tide. And here it is today in another iteration. 

There's something about Rachel's poetry that 'escapes the page'. Her words break free of tethers to occupy an independent, aural - airborne - space.  

Photograph - Rachel van Blankenship (Butterfly House, Phoenix Botanical Gardens)

Rachel's reading brings to mind an article I read some time ago on Adrienne Rich and her poetry - 

"She believed in the power of art, not only its beauty and necessity but also the real, raw, actual power of it. She agitated for poetry 'as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall. That kind of language.'

And she wrote that kind of language. From the heart and the mind. From the gut and the crotch. She pulled us into the deep waters of her own darkest reckoning and made us understand that the reckoning was ours too. The ferocity of her vision was matched only by the tenderness at its root. . . " from Adrienne Rich's Kind of Language by Cheryl Strayed (NY Times)



'The ferocity of her vision was matched only by the tenderness at its root. . .' She's writing here about you, too, Rach. 

*

This week's editor on the TP hub is Andrew M. Bell

with Sonnet for a Hunter

by Marisa Cappetta

Andrew writes, "Sonnet for a Hunter holds a special appeal since I lived in Western Australia for eight years. The images speak to me. I must confess that I don't entirely understand the poem, but I enjoy the ambiguity. Is the "he" of the poem a man or an animal? Does it matter? The couplet sand coloured luckless/bundles, quivers of musk is a striking image of a helpless ensnared rabbit and the final line locates it succinctly in the arid landscape of inland Australia. . . "

It's Tuesday. You know where to go, what to do. 

TUESDAY POEM | Another Poem of the Gifts by Jorge Luis Borges

                        I want to give thanks to the divine 
                        Labyrinth of causes and effects 
                        For the diversity of beings 
                        That form this singular universe, 
                        For Reason, that will never give up its dream 
                        Of a map of the labyrinth, 
                        For Helen's face and the perseverence of Ulysses, 
                        For love, which lets us see others 
                        As God sees them, 
                        For the solid diamond and the flowing water, 
                        For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals, 
                        For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius, 
                        For Schopenhauer, 
                        Who perhaps deciphered the universe, 
                        For the blazing of fire, 
                        That no man can look at without an ancient wonder, 
                        For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood, 
                        For bread and salt, 
                        For the mystery of the rose 
                        That spends all its color and can not see it, 
                        For certain eves and days of 1955, 
                        For the hard riders who, on the plains, 
                        Drive on the catttle and the dawn, 
                        For mornings in Montevideo, 
                        For the art of friendship, 
                        For Socrates' last day, 
                        For the words spoken one twilight, 
                        For that dream of Islam that embraced 
                        A thousand nights and a night, 
                        For that other dream of Hell, 
                        Of the tower of cleansing fire 
                        And of the celestial spheres, 
                        For Swedenborg, 
                        Who talked with the angels in London streets 
                        For the secret and immemorial rivers 
                        That converge in me, 
                        For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland, 
                        For the sword and harp of the Saxons, 
                        For the sea, which is a shining desert 
                        And a secret code for things we do not know 
                        And an epitaph for the Norsemen, 
                        For the word music of England, 
                        For the word music of Germany, 
                        For gold, that shines in verses, 
                        For epic winter, 
                        For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos, 
                        For Verlaine, innocent as the birds, 
                        For crystal prisms and bronze weights, 
                        For the tiger's stripes, 
                        For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island, 
                        For mornings in Texas, 
                        For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle 
                        And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know, 
                        For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova, 
                        Who, before there was Spanish, had written 
                        All Spanish literature, 
                        For gallant, noble, geometric chess, 
                        For Zeno's tortoise and Royce's map, 
                        For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees, 
                        For speech, which can be taken for wisdom, 
                        For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past, 
                        For habits, 
                        Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror, 
                        For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning, 
                        For night, its darkness and its astronomy, 
                        For the bravery and happiness of others, 
                        For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers 
                        For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem, 
                        For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible 
                        And becomes one with the sum of all created things 
                        And will never reach its last verse 
                        And varies according to its writers 
                        For Frances Haslam, who begged her children's pardon 
                        For dying so slowly, 
                        For the minutes that precede sleep, 
                        For sleep and death, 
                        Those two hidden treasures, 
                        For the intimate gifts I do not mention, 
                        For music, that mysterious form of time.

                        Jorge Luis Borges
                                        translated by Alan Dugan 


". . . Intelligence has little to do with poetry. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom. It's a thing of its own; it has a nature of its own. Undefinable. . . " (lines offered up from a penetrating conversation between Borges and Ronald Christ in The Paris Review)

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Alicia Ponder with the poem Resilience by New Zealand TP poet Keith Westwater. 

It seems mathematics and alignments (or re-alignments) of various kinds are a theme this week.


You might also enjoy checking out our collaborative 3rd birthday poem - SCRATCH - a jazzy piece of improvisation with contributions from 18 of our 30 international poets. . .  


On the subject of collaborating with other writers, here's Borges in the same Paris Review article, ". . . Now, the queer thing is that when we write, and we write mostly humorous stuff—even if the stories are tragic, they are told in a humorous way, or they are told as if the teller hardly understood what he was saying—when we write together, what comes of the writing, if we are successful, and sometimes we are—why not? after all, I'm speaking in the plural, no?—when our writing is successful, then what comes out is something quite different from Bioy Casares's stuff and my stuff, even the jokes are different. So we have created between us a kind of third person; we have somehow begotten a third person that is quite unlike us. . . " Jorge Luis Borges. 

To read this week's Tuesday Poems, click on the quill then make your way down the list of poets on the Left-hand side of the TP page.  

Next week I hope to feature Phoenix-based poet and fellow blogger, Rachel van Blankenship with a spoken rendition of her - paradoxically, taut - poem Slack tide. We had the very wonderful pleasure of meeting (yes, for the first time) in Arizona last month and during the short, sweet time together made a recording of her poem. 

Gratitude for the diversity of beings 

That form this singular universe. . . 

Epilogue | Robert Lowell

                     EPILOGUE

                     Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme -
                     why are they no help to me now
                     I want to make 
                     something imagined, not recalled? 
                     I hear the noise of my own voice: 
                     The painter's vision is not a lens, 
                     it trembles to caress the light. 
                     But sometimes everything I write 
                     with the threadbare art of my eye
                     seems a snapshot, 
                     lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, 
                     heightened from life, 
                     yet paralyzed by fact. 
                     All's misalliance. 
                     Yet why not say what happened? 
                     Pray for the grace of accuracy
                     Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
                     stealing like the tide across a map
                     to his girl solid with yearning.
                     We are poor passing facts, 
                     warned by that to give 
                     each figure in the photograph 
                     his living name. 

                     Robert Lowell 

Kuan Yin | Prayer for the Abuser

                    To those who withhold refuge,

                    I cradle you in safety at the core of my Being.

 

                    To those that cause a child to cry out,

                    I grant you the freedom to express your own choked agony.

 

                    To those that inflict terror,

                    I remind you that you shine with the purity of a thousand suns.

 

                    To those who would confine, suppress, or deny,

                    I offer the limitless expanse of the sky.

 

                     To those who need to cut, slash, or burn,

                     I remind you of the invincibility of Spring.

 

                     To those who cling and grasp,

                     I promise more abundance than you could ever hold onto.

 

                     To those who vent their rage on small children,

                     I return to you your deepest innocence.

 

                     To those who must frighten into submission,

                     I hold you in the bosom of your original mother.

 

                     To those who cause agony to others,

                     I give the gift of free flowing tears.

 

                     To those that deny another's right to be,

                     I remind you that the angels sang in celebration of you on the day of your birth.

 

                     To those who see only division and separateness,

                     I remind you that a part is born only by bisecting a whole.

 

                     For those who have forgotten the tender mercy of a mother's embrace,

                     I send a gentle breeze to caress your brow.

 

                     To those who still feel somehow incomplete,

                     I offer the perfect sanctity of this very moment.

                     Kuan Yin*

 

* Kuan Yin --- Goddess of Mercy and Compassion: 'one who regards, looks on or hears the sounds of the world.' 

_/\_ 

TUESDAY POEM - Chancellor of Shadows by Lance Larson

  

                     CHANCELLOR OF SHADOWS

                     Horses are praying the old-fashioned way, trotting
                     a fenced field at twilight under a towel of moon. 

                     Swans settle on the pond, like five-paragraph essays
                     on beauty. Yes, we all have our rituals, like the skunk

                     stitching one pulsing patch of shadow to the next
                     with the swish of its tail. Not to mention questions.

                     How many broken pies at the bakery dream
                     the forgiveness of hungry mouths? How many

                     weeks till the silverfish tunnels through Chaucer?
                     What if the other life is buried inside this one?

                     A stack of bricks, a work shirt billowing on the line:
                     epics in the making. Each set of doubts, a garden.

                     Like the owl, I want to be paid in mice and falling
                     stars, take my midnights in the middle of the day.

                     LANCE LARSON

For more of Utah-based Lance Larsen's poems, click here  

There is no editor over on the TP hub this week.

No editor on the TP hub this week? Why?

Well, it's our 3rd birthday and we're in creative, celebratory mode!

18 of our 30-strong group of international poets (we hale/hail from at least four continents) will be posting a line or a stanza each day for the coming three weeks. We've decided not to go with any specific theme and instead to play poetry like jazz, improvising with language and rhythm as prompted. . . fun to write and, we imagine, just as much fun to read.

Harvey Molloy tapped out the first two lines this morning; click on the quill for a look-see and then pop back to the Tuesday Poem site every couple of days to watch things take shape.

The completed poem will be posted on Tuesday 24 April.

* Riroriro, Korimako, fly me a line? Pastel on Paper - CB

TUESDAY POEM | TOAST by Thomas McCarthy

  

                        TOAST

                          No lovelier city than all of this.
                          Cork city, your early morning kiss:
                          peeled oranges and white porcelain,
                          midsummer Sunday mists
                          that scatter before breakfast.

                          Mass bells are pealing in every district,
                          in the Latin quarter of St Lukes,
                          the butter quartier of Blackpool.
                          Each brass appeal calls to prayer
                          our scattered books and utensils,

                          the newly blessed who've put on clothes.
                          Why have I been as lucky as this?
                          to have one so meticulous
                          in love, so diffident yet close
                          that the house is charged with kinetic peace.

                          Like a secret lover, I should bring
                          you bowls of fresh roses, knowing
                          that you would show them how to thrive.
                          Lucky it's Sunday, or I'd have
                          to raid the meter for spare shillings!

                          Or, maybe I should wash my filthy socks,
                          fret at the curtains, iron clothes,
                          like you after Sunday breakfast.
                          Normal things run deep, God knows,
                          like love in flat-land, eggs on toast.


                          Thomas McCarthy
                                    Page 416 - The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry




I've had this poem sitting in my Draft folder for many months. I love the line Normal things run deep, God knows and the idea of a house charged with kinetic peace. Thomas McCarthy's poem The Phenomenology of Stones is one I return to often.

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Canberra-based poet P.S. Cottier

with Someone forgot to tell the fish - 'a 'slippery little thing that evades easy categorization'

by fellow Australian Hal Judge

"Someone forgot courtesy and politeness. Someone forgot to rinse off the weed killer. Someone forgot to turn off the billing software. Someone forgot to rent the crowd. Someone forgot to tell the owners of the 4 million cars sold in China. Someone forgot to bring the Zombie-Killing Manual. Someone forgot to tighten the sidestay shackle. Someone forgot to tell Rocky. Someone forgot to strap down the ammo case. Someone forgot to install it. Someone forgot to tell the Arabs it’s our oil under their sand.  Someone forgot to use lube. Someone forgot to tell me about labour pain. Someone forgot to declare 60 share transactions. Someone forgot to plug my biohazard suit. . . " 

To read more and for links to other Tuesday Poets, please click on the quill! 

TUESDAY POEM | XXIX, XLVII & LV by Pablo Neruda

from THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS 
    by Pablo Neruda



                                         XXIX

               ______________________________________

                     What is the distance in round meters
                     between the sun and the oranges?

                     Who wakes up the sun when it falls asleep
                     on its burning bed?

                     Does the earth sing like a cricket
                     in the music of the heavens?

                     Is it true that sadness is thick
                     and melancholy thin?





                                          XLVII

               _____________________________________


                      In the middle of autumn
                      do you hear yellow explosions?

                      By what reason or injustice
                      does the rain weep its joy?

                      Which birds lead the way
                      when the flock takes flight?

                      From what does the hummingbird hang
                      its dazzling symmetry?





                                            LV

                _____________________________________  

           
                      Why don't they send moles
                      and turtles to the moon?

                      Couldn't the animals that engineer
                      hollows and tunnels

                      take charge of
                      these distant inspections?



             

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Robert Sullivan with He Has Superpowers by Daren Kamili 

                      "He's an unsung superhero

                      in the village

                      He can fly

                      breathe underwater

                      walk on hot lovo stones

                      No one knows his secret 

                      except his soulmate

                      Duna

                      Grandmother Eel

                      who lives on the reef. . . "

To enjoy this week's many offerings, please click on the quill! 

                                                      

          

NEW WORK | In Dialogue - The Artist's Room, Dunedin (with Kate Alterio & Olav Nielsen)

I've been busy in the studio this past while - nothing entirely new about that - but here are a few pics of images that have taken shape. These are part of a show titled In Dialogue with work by Kate Alterio, Olav Nielsen and moi. The exhibition with be up for the coming two weeks or so.  If you live in Dunedin, or are visiting, please pop in for a look-see. . .  Thanks, C xo

Palindrome | Hum

Oil on paper

Love the Waters

Oil on paper

Balancing On Air Is No Easy Task

Oil on a book cover

The Stilled Thread of Flight

Oil & steel strings on canvas

Shadow and Shimmer

Oil, charcoal and thread on paper

The Sharp-Flat Cadences of Weather

Oil and thread on paper

Dream of the Sea

Oil and steel strings on canvas

Night Watch ii
Oil and Pastel on Paper