Red Boat Haiku

Thin skim of sea ice
and a red boat is still docked,
tethered to summer.


Notes
Poetry exercise. Take a picture. Then describe what you see, simply, in one short line. Make sure you place the kireji, the twist in the middle at line two; you are looking for a break in logic, the shift that alters a reader's mental picture. Complete the idea. 17 syllables: 5/7/5. Voila: Haiku.

Every day

Every day

I pull myself together;

every day,

I fall apart.

"Open outside!"

-for Morag

We'd agreed we'd do a mail exchange, a sort of "object writing;" we'd each send to the other an assemblage of objects designed to tell a story.   "Like messages in a bottle that are released into the ocean, [object writing reveals itself] to someone who is willing to unpack the sealed contents," read instructions we'd picked up from Anne West's book, Mapping the Intelligence of Artistic Work.

It had been raining for days the week I bundled my package off to Winnipeg, and so I didn't go outdoors, as I'd wished, to pick up leaves or twigs or stones or rosehips, or the fragment of a paper wasp's nest clinging to a bush that I'd wanted to send to my friend Morag. Instead, I cannibalized my office desk, the stickers and pictures and items I'd gathered there, along with a few printer's tools. I felt lost, divided, frustrated, separated from the air and earth and world, overwhelmed by duties and words. I imagined Morag would understand, if anyone would, how unhoused I felt, how astray.

As indeed she did.

A couple of weeks later, at my place at the table, when I arrived home, was a small bubble-wrapped package. OPEN OUTSIDE it said.  And so I did, although it was dark, and the stars too far off to see by.

After walking about a bit, I came back indoors with the dog to see what I could see, the scent of sea and wind and grilling sausages clinging to us.

Inside the package was another one, a clear plastic bag stuffed full of things. Crumbles of black earth fell out as I removed several items: a small cotton sack, a fragment of a poem, and a packet of items bundled together and tied with a knot.

I undid the knot and pulled out a pen, a seed pod, a bundle of roots, bits of earth, a small weaving that featured a few stitches at one end, a rough canvas swatch containing four needles, a strip of brown paper, a swatch of olive green fabric, a crumpled leaf, an unmarked label.  The writing was there, but what did it say? What would I say? I was stumped for a time.

The next morning I sat and read the fragment of poem--
(Oh people of the word, you always think words will save you.)

I was looking for a clue. What may I make of these disparate things? How do they speak? What did they mean?  I reread the words:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save

so much has been destroyed

I have cast my lot with those

who, age after age persevere,

with no extraordinary power

to reconstitute the world.

--Adrienne Rich

The message was clear, and yet for a long time I could not hear it. Could not understand it. Could not find my fate in these bits of earth or swatches of cloth, of needles and thread. Could not figure out what I was to do, ought to do, with this small collection of things.

Still, the packet haunted me and altered my imagination. Once it arrived I began to see differently, to mark form and shape and knot and handwork. Now and then, words failed me, but that wasn't a disaster. What I was after was a shape in the light, another kind of composition, a way of rendering aside from, instead of in words. 

Weeks passed.
I drew out the packet again. This time its message seemed transparent, lucid, manifest: 

Here am I. Take me, make something; make me; look at your hands.
What will you do now?

Hope angles this way--here, over there--outside!

Cast the seeds in the earth and then do other things.
In time you will see what comes up.
.
Why had I been so puzzled before?

I had had to take the time to see as if from the point of view of objects, not language. To be elsewhere, otherwise, to make some things, to go outside.

Thank you, Morag.

II. And again 

Here's something else those objects say (I hear them as they whisper in the dark):

We are newly rooted
no, we are uprooted
bound
unbound
lost.

The seeds have been 
severed from the root

Our earth is scattered:
these are the threads of my life.

I need someone else to stitch them
to write the words,
to persevere,
to hold fast to 
whatever is
outside. 

 

Our Beauty so Fleeting

Our 

beauty

 so 

fleeting

Voces paginarum/ Shouting words

Voces paginarum*

The words speak

to me

they leap

up and dance and

then

so do I.

SIT DOWN!

the teacher says.

READ SILENTLY:

DON’T MOVE YOUR LIPS.

READ TO YOURSELF.

(Shouting words,

but

Not for us

a loud clamour and

exclamation

no declamation

no exultation

nor excessive

incantation vocal

ornamentation

no

voices in the head

no

voices not your
own may pass

your

            lips

no

)

KEEP your voice DOWN

(a lady does not shout nor

a gentleman)

(then why when I look

do I see so many

shouting?)

We are not like them those others

who tooth and taste their words

or yours

KEEP your WORDS in your mouth.

KEEP them scrubbed.

Don’t meddle or mix

promiscuously

with other idioms

(lenguas, langues, zungas)

KEEP YOUR TONGUE IN

YOUR MOUTH

lest those others

(les infectes)       you

Stray not with

strange sounds and scents or

savours

Neither dance nor sing nor

poietes be;

don’t

heap up your words:

cinoti,

(I dare you

read that word

quickly

aloud)

in Sanskrit or

any other spraak of

taal

(LEAVE SOME SPACE

lest

MARK MY WORDS

YOU)

not without a little red*

can

never get

clene

again.

Notes on words

*voces paginarum (Latin: voices of the page, or reading (calling out) as it was practiced, for example, in the early middle ages in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.  For Augustine, for example, a text was meant to be followed with the lips, as much as with the eyes. In reading (from Middle English reden and Old High German rattan, to advise), one literally delivers or gives voice to and performs the assemblies noted in the text.  Or as Tim Ingold puts it, “the poetic text is…at once script and score” (Lines, 12).  But today, in school, we are taught that reading thus is bad form; unless we are performing or reading aloud to others to whisper or mouth the words we sight when we “read to ourselves” isn’t done.  The contemporary rule is clear: “read with your eyes, not your mouth”; shut up those words inside yourself, don’t mix insides and outsides; don’t get confused.

Lengua (Spanish: tongue, language)

Langue (French: tongue, language)

Zumba (Old High German: tongue)

Les infectes (French: infected persons; detritus; those who don’t count)

Cinoti from the Sanskrit, meaning to heap up; thought to be related to the Greek verb. poiein, to make, produce or create (poetry and other works of art). 

Poietes (Ancient Greek: poet, maker, creator)

spraak of taal (Dutch: speech (tongue) or tongue (speech))

* “not without a little red” Artaud, writing of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, argues that poiesis does not happen without “a little red blood.”  Here he is making a playful—poetic—link between the expediture of a life lived for poetry and a blood price—poine in ancient Greek, poena in Latin.  The difference one letter makes is at once nothing and everything.

Clene is middle English for what is free from dirt or pollution (but the word clean, in English ultimately comes to us from the Old High German kleini, delicate, dainty, which is thought to be derived from the Greek glainoi, ornaments. Clean is thus never quite properly purged of elements not itself, never unadulterated; never pure.)

Notes on photographs

I took these photos of intertidal creatures in August 2012 on Hakai Beach, on the west coast of Calvert Island, in Central British Columbia.  

The purple and orange starfish are variants of the species Piaster ochraceus, a keystone species on the northwest coast of the Americas.  Predators of common mussels, they prevent overgrowth in mussel beds, and thus help to maintain species diversification on northwest Pacific shores.  

The green tubes are a species of anenome known as aggregating or clonal anenomes.  These creatures may reproduce sexually (two gametes fuse in the water and then settle on a rock) or asexually, by fission, which permits the anenomes to form vast clonal carpets consisting of a single genetic variant that lives as a colony, and is hostile to other colonies. The green colour of these anenomes is supplied by symbiotic algae that live within the cells of the host animal, and contribute to the primary productivity of the intertidal zone. The lessons of such visually noisy interdependence shouldn't be lost on us.

How to See in the Dark

Exercise: to see in the dark

Name some of the tongues that lick your ear
what the glass would see if it had eyes


where the flame leaps when it gutters
how the shadow lingers, draws a line


Note
See what the glass would see if it had eyes is a poetic imperative, a mode of thinking posed by George Oppen, who was a 20th century American poet, anti-militarist, sailor and, for a time, a cabinet-maker and expatriate in Mexico, where, as a one-time member of the Communist Party, he'd fled from persecution from the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. He returned to the US and poetry later in his life; he maintained that writing poetry was a particularly acute form of phenomenological investigation.
A biography and links to some essays and poems may be found here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/george-oppen#poet

See too, Forrest Gander, "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen."
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20761
and Peter Nicholls, "George Oppen in Exile: Mexico and Maritain." http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=317818&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=01&aid=291582

On Getting Lost (Again)

It happened in mid-February, on a sunny, windy weekend afternoon.  We'd been walking on the access road to Taylor's Head Park, along the water.

I suppose it happened because I was scanning the tracks on the road, looking for the ripped-off gull's wing we'd seen on the walk in, half of its feathers intact. I wanted a picture of it, and I hadn't stopped earlier. I was peering at the road so intently that I lost my place on it, and walked right by the little path that leads off to the parking spot at the end of Old Taylor's Head Road.

Not long after I walked on by, something clicked in my mind. Oops. I've gone past the lot. And so I turned back, but then somehow didn't see where I was supposed to go.

A brief moment of suspension; confusion; growing blankness.  A dense grey rain in my brain.

Oh, I thought, I'm mistaken (another little click in the brain), and I turned around again and headed back up the road the way I'd been going when I felt that I had gone too far.

After awhile, I recognized a distinctly bouffant-topped black spruce I'd photographed a year ago on another winter hike, then a boggy patch to the west, but the stone wall near the Bull's Head trail tipped me off: I'd certainly gone too far.  I knew it.

And so I turned around again, but I must admit I was confused.  I felt stupid, the way I used to feel in kindergarten when I was asked to point to something with my left hand or to turn to the right.  Which was left? Which was right?

Invariably I turned the wrong way, and the teacher said, no, no. Left. Right. What's wrong with you?

What was wrong was that I was dyslexic.  My mother gave me a ring that I wore on my right hand for a time. Asked to turn to the right, I'd check my hands. Right: where the ring is. Turn.

I continued the practice of wearing a permanent "lead ring" into adulthood, so as not to have to confess that I didn't know my left hand from my right.  If asked, left or right, I still have to look at my hands, make a gesture, sense this side of my body or that one to be sure of the direction.

Such care has perhaps made me a decent nautical navigator--I'm rarely complacent about knowing just where I am, and check my bearings often.

But there on the road I felt stumped. Then panicked.  Confused.  I'd lost my bearings in space on a familiar road. I've been here many times and yet, where was I?

Only two directions to go--how did I miss the parked car?  I'd passed it, clearly, but where? And when? And how?

I began to feel not simply stupid, but terrified. I'll admit it; I began to cry.

I ran back down the road, back the way I'd come, back the toward the place I'd been before I knew I'd gotten lost, back towards the water, away from the highway, my heart pounding, fear squeezing my throat.

Nothing was familiar; everything was. Was I going the right way or not? What did it mean that I'd gotten lost?

I felt like I'd never find my way out of this blurry zone, this loosened, fallen state. My mind was gone; I'd lost it; here was definitive proof.  Early onset Alzheimer's.

The more I panicked, the less I knew.  The less I could think.
The less I could think, the more I panicked.

And then there I was, at the path to the car. Surprise! It was here all along?

The map of the world settled down into place but not my heart.

Nor Marike's. When I hadn't come, she'd gone looking for me, back, of course, the way we'd come, to the water.  I'd already passed by while she was down at the car, and so I didn't see her head back out; I didn't hear her call me, and she didn't find me.  Classic slapstick: one goes in the front door just as the other goes out the back, and they miss one another, and run about in circles for hours, shouting.

Except. When I didn't come and didn't come, and her path didn't cross mine, there along the water, she began to imagine that I'd tumbled into the water and been swept out to sea.  She'd come back to the car to try to call out a search crew, and there I was, finally, stupified and ashamed.

Maybe something is wrong with me, I suggested. I didn't really want to confess that I thought I was done for, head all amuck, grey matter leaching, another confused soul peering nearsightedly at the world.

Don't be ridiculous, she snapped, just try to stop being so distracted!  It's that annoying camera; you can't see where you're going because you're too busy looking through it.

I'm hoping she's right. So far, the votes are on the side of distraction, not neurological contraction, though I still have moments when I wonder...

Wait. What was I thinking? Where was I? Am I where I think I am--and what if I'm not?

NOTES
All photos taken at Taylor's Head Park on February 10, 2012, the day in question, as I was walking distractedly.  The whole collection may be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karincope/sets/72157629762847289/
I never did find the clipped gull's wing again. It was probably the wing of a gull cut down by an eagle or a hawk, the wings bitten off as so much useless inedible weight.