reading room
Now is a Good Time to Write About Roses
This poem, originally published in Cloud Lake Literary, vol. 5, was inspired by this painting by my friend, Kim Nilsson. The painting in turn called to mind the island setting of one of my favourite short stories, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. The result is a poem about peace, about choosing life even in death.
Now is a Good Time to Write About Roses “He has the face of someone called Esteban.” Gabriel Garcia Márquez, 1968/1972, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” this magnificent stranger, heavy and grand as the ocean that drowned him, though his face is obscured by the seawater’s relics, leaves the village folk breathless the face, scraped of fish bits and flotsam, radiates stainless sincerity, and the scales fall too from the villagers’ eyes it is a face so handsome, your sorrow is transformative suddenly you see how meagre your dreams are, how empty of adjectives your life, how faint your imagination; you long for superlatives, you’re ready to carry that weight this face, your Esteban, your Jesus, your Mary, because or in spite of being a placid death mask, impels you to dig deep for the purest spring water, plant the most colourful flowers in your dry stony courtyards, widen your door, raise your roof, choose jewel-toned paint for the front of your house, bring small, treasured relics out into the sun embark on a life of hard work and consecration; plant roses, live with their heavy scent, their deep blood red, be torn by the thorns; watch the flowers fade and fade again as you await your own withering, and hope against being cut down your whole village becomes a sacred shrine to life, a deathbed for Esteban, as bright as the ocean horizon is deep and dark, as perfumed as the clouds are clean and fresh, as dazzling as the roses that reveal the unseen breeze make this dead stranger your own, be mother and father, sister and brother, weep for all our losses, cry out for the dead of Guernica, Hiroshima, Mariupol, whose heads rest against shattered curbstones and charred doorframes would they not wish their deathbed to be a riot of roses? believe with your heart in all that you do for your living and dead write to me, tell me about your roses
Days of the Dead
November calls me to write from my grey mood, my desire to hibernate with a twice-read tome, cling uselessly to the felt nothing-newness of my late middle age. No. Go outside and look more carefully. Note the fresh-newness that is there in every minute of every day in the world outside my head. Embers. Trees the colour of fire, of bananas, bright against the paste-grey sky.
the laundry goddess
Remembering Wash Mary ‘Mary came to wash for Mother every Monday.’ Emily Carr ‘Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.’ Richard Wilbur Wash Mary’s soul slips in at dawn no showy, blowy thing but true two-handed wingless seraph (the snowflake not the swirl the ash-marked renunciant of the world’s vain glories) baskets, sink and pump arms bare to elbows she bends in work in clouds of steam the copper gleams tub and washboard sweat and suds washboard and tub and she beats the shirts and sheets beats as angel’s wings sound the morning air the wringer wrings the pulley sings the little clothespegs wait the chance to dance Neruda’s proffered gift the wish of labour lightened ask the woman is it light, your load is your value scant though you sing a hymn and set out pure angels to bless the waking bard
Richard Wilbur, former poet laureate of the United States, wrote the fabulously titled ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’, evoking the angels on the clothesline. But what of the ‘rosy hands in rising steam’? What of Emily Carr’s ‘Wash Mary’? Did she, sounding the pulley, think of angels? What of the wringer and washboard, angel killers? Pablo Neruda praised ironing as poetry. The disembodied ‘hands are creating the world’ in the ‘skirmishings of the laundries’. Neruda hoped his gift of poetry would lighten the load of those ‘shuttered hearts’, labouring unsung. Did he ever ask?
This draft of a poem for the washer woman was made of couplets that arose in no particular order, then were cut up and suitably arranged – for now.
Another poem springs from silence
Who can I tell of this sadness? What can I tell of it? It arrives, unattached, on two tears. It blows in like a brown leaf onto a window screen. It rudely intrudes, like the sudden bloody sight of roadkill, asking, why? Where is the story that bid the hidden sadness come? Buried as deep as the artesian well of tears that abhors the empty mind. Don’t forget me! it cries from the earth. Don’t forget the nameless sadness of life; don’t think you’ve figured it all out! Away on a sigh I send sadness off; then sit, puzzled. What is this life after all?