The Orchid Cycle – Part 2

No blossoms and no moon,
and he is drinking sake
all alone!
 
 Temple bells die out.
The fragrant blossoms remain.
A perfect evening!

– Matsuo Basho (1644 –1694) 

 

“One (sultry) night in Bangkok”, a friend of mine who was vacationing in Thailand around the same time I lived there treated me to dinner at the lovely Salatip, one of the outdoor restaurants at the famous 5-star Shangrila hotel. 

The Salatip is a Thai pavilion of solid teak, right out of a fairytale. You can dine inside, among carved pillars aglimmer with gold leaf, or outside on the lawns, with romantic views of the snaking Chao Phraya river, where so much of Bangkok life unfolds… We chose to sit outside in the velvety evening air.

A troupe of Thai classical dancers floated up to us like celestial envoys, and performed right beside our table. I had the distinct impression that Hanuman, the Monkey King, was watching me through the eye-holes in his carved mask, wondering how much I’d paid for a bland imitation of somtam (papaya salad – the best versions of which are sold cheaply on every street corner). Instead of eating, I was wondering how long this dancer had studied his art – probably since childhood (oh, to be that flexible again!)

Some people love the royal treatment: armies of demure waitresses, a Thai corps de ballet. But it made me feel like some West Indies Company captain on (nasty) colonial business, lording it over the heathen Siamese. And it made the food about as memorable as a tired combo from my local Flip Toss & Thai. I wish I could remember the food, but my taste buds only registered the equally celestial prices that my friend, bless his generous heart, would shortly be paying.

But… how I remember the flowers!

Earlier, walking up to the Shangrila’s lobby to meet my friend, I’d passed en entire wall of orchids, more than I’d ever seen in one spot (no pictures, alas), and a wave of indefinable fragrance had almost knocked me over.

There are as many orchid scents as there are orchid species (some 1,000 in Thailand). Some, I’ve heard, suggest rotten meat. But at the Shangrila, only the best: my friend met me in the lobby as I emerged in a daze from a cloud of delicate citrus edged with vanilla. Or was it sun-warmed peach and layers of coconut? Intoxicating.

After some time in Bangkok, I noticed similar massive displays of orchids. It is sheer sensory overload: alien colours, haunting fragrance, shivers. Our winter-numbed Western nostrils and skin never quite recover, and neither do we. After this olfactory seduction, anything seems possible: cheap Rolexes, cross-cultural love…

But back to the subject of haikus. What about the Japanese flower aesthetic? As far as I can tell, it’s the total opposite of the South-East Asian love of riotous colours and gold dust. With the Japanese, it’s all zen restraint and rigorous minimalism (disclaimer: what follows is a bald generalization, and completely true):

A delicate arc of white orchids, set off by the moody obsidian of an antique hand-thrown vase, fronting a cool, black-on-white haiku calligraphy. Naturally, the theme of the haiku matches the season in progress, and the orchid looks as if it grew there spontaneously, as from a mist-shrouded cliff (otherwise, you’re just playing at being Japanese!).

Orchid, stoic vase, spare haiku… in an otherwise empty. Empty. Room.

You could sit here forever in your neat kimono, pondering the perfection of the Tao, your knees and ankles screaming in agony from the highly unzen torture of the Japanese seiza sitting posture (seizure posture, as I like to call it). When times get tough, the Japanese like to gruffly tootle: “Gam-ba-re!” — Keep at it, soldier on!  (the Thais: “Mai pen rai!” — nevermind, no big deal).

Yet orchids are equally happy in a zen pavilion as they are in a gilded restaurant. Nature is perfect, and above our human decorating obsessions! Can my haiku do justice to orchids… is what’s far less certain.

So what’s a haiku? Technically: unrhymed verse containing three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively, in which the last line states the subject of the poem. Sounds easy compared to iambic pentametre (see my last post), but the haiku’s apparent simplicity is its trickiest aspect.

Classical haikus are not always in perfect 5-7-5 because the original, in Japanese, quite naturally loses its Japanese “syllables” once it’s translated into another language. But in the spirit of the novice crouching before the classics and trying to imitate time-honoured forms (minus the seizures!), I’ve stuck to the 5-7-5 in my burnt offerings below. If they fail miserably, at least they’ll get points for being in 5-7-5.

Here’s a good condensed definition of the elusive haiku:

“Since the poem is short, it comes with a bang! The themes also vary (…) but all stay within the norms of nature. A traditional haiku contains a kigo (season word) symbolizing the season in which the poem is set.” (Gary R. Hess).

I do love the “nature requirement”, especially in this age of “nature deficit”! And there’s undeniable pleasure in trying to squeeze maximum ‘bang’ out of few words — which I’ve spectacularly failed at, already, thanks to this very long post!

One last thing: I feel the haiku is where the world of orchids and the world of poetry really enter one another’s houses, to use an astrological expression. I started this post with a couple of haikus by one of the Japanese masters of the form, Matsuo Basho. I love how he pairs flowers with wine and temples — two of my favourite, though regretably uncombinable, pleasures in life (an orchid & wine appreciation party inside a temple… wouldn’t that be fun?)

Having read the master, you are now ready to chuckle indulgently at my attempts. Honour me with your honest critiques, I beg you. Depending on how unforgiving you are, I will either say Gambare! or… Mai pen rai!

Without further ado (save a grateful nod to Javeed Patel’s wonderful photo), here goes.
______________________________________________________________

White orchids, winter.
In-between, a pane of glass—
how did snow get in?

 

Change is slow to come,
each day a blur, work and sleep.
Then suddenly, blooms.

______________________________________________________________

Orchids, backlit (photo: Javeed Patel)

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by poemrunner on April 27, 2012  •  Permalink
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The Orchid Cycle – Part 1

Martin Luther King said that when two friends understand each other totally, their words are soft and strong like an orchid’s perfume. (I’ve nosed into some orchid varieties that have little or no perfume, but… it’s still a lovely quote!)

And how about the sheer evanescence of this beautiful 17th century haiku (in translation) by the great Japanese poet Matsuo Basho:

Orchid breathing incense into butterfly wings

Gosh. Makes me want to rush out to buy those delicately scented Japanese incense sticks that crumble at the slightest pressure, light one, then sit in its whorls with a cup of sencha and dream of a butterfly dreaming of me… 

On my 2nd-last post, I introduced my friend Javeed Patel’s photography along with an old poem about Bougainvillea, and I also hinted at his beautiful ‘orchid series’. To prove that it wasn’t all just a blooming exaggeration, I’ve embarked on a little poetic project called The Orchid Cycle, where you’ll get to see more of Javeed’s wonderful work (yay!) paired with new writings from me.

If all goes according to plan, each of my next 5 or 6 posts will feature a new poem inspired by an orchid photo of Javeed’s, who has graciously allowed me to reproduce some here (he has LOTS – it was tough to choose). As you’ll see, his photos capture the allure and mystery of orchids, their complexity and astounding beauty, at once alien and earthly. My hope is to capture that essence twice, in a fusion of poetry and photography.

(Quick and painless reminder: Javeed’s photos are copyrighted and may not be used or reproduced for any commercial purpose. They appear in my blog with his permission. If you’d like more information about Javeed’s work, please leave me a message so I can put you in touch with him.)

In my first post, I loftily announced that one of my reasons for starting a poetry blog was to nudge myself to write more, more often and more fearlessly (even recklessly). Well, the past month has been a tad… tepid in that respect. It’s time to crank up the poetic heat. Tropical orchids ought to do it!

I’ve always approached writing like waiting for a shooting star. When it finally appears, you can’t scribble the inspiration down fast enough, and all is fine with the world (wine sometimes has a similar effect, plus I may see more than one shooting star). But with that approach, one does tend to waste ridiculously long stretches of time in-between Sightings. Hence The Orchid Cycle. I have the photos — I have their anxious papa waiting on the sidelines to see what I’ll write about them — and I have no excuse. It’s time to write!

Like a novice painter churning out still-lifes of the same bouquet of roses from various angles, at different times of day and with various time-honoured techniques, I’m challenging myself to tackle the subject of orchids through various poetic forms including (gulp) some of the more traditional ones. The ones I never use and from which, to be honest, I usually run away screaming.

Like so many latter-day scribblers, I feel most comfortable writing in free verse. Yet deeeeep down in whatever part of my brain handles poetry, there lives this ghost of a powdery old English prof, like the one in my first-year class, sniffing at me from behind his Pile of Classics and tut-tutting at my incomprehensible fear of poetic metre. As the Artist Currently Known as Shakespeare would say, Be not afraid of rhyme… or something like that.

Imagine my shock as I started picking at metre and rhyme and cursing at the slow process of finding words that rhyme yet also convey the right tone(orchid /morbid was dropped early on), feeling as if I were back in grade school (minus the cursing), to find myself actually enjoying it!

You wouldn’t think the challenge of restricting yourself to a bound set of feet (the poetic kind – not the Chinese kind), of measuring your words out precisely, would be fun, right? But it is, somehow. As was the feeling that I’d left the year 2012 and slipped back into an older time, when people stared at flowers and painted them, or wrote odes to them.

So, without much further ado about nothing, here’s today’s burnt offering, in iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s fave. This is Part 1 of the Orchid Cycle.

_______________________________________________________________

"La nuit" - Orchids (photo: Javeed Patel)

_______________________________________________________________

Orchid
(in iambic pentametre)

 

When all the world but me is blinking sand,
and sleep is still a distant promised land,
I watch the moon-dust settle on your skin
til I forget my thoughts, my fears, my din.

 
How can it be? From twisted, gnarled root,
from one ungainly, spindly, sagging shoot—
such lunar caves, such seas of starlit foam!
where elf or pixie might feel quite at home…


Your palms (or some might say—your parted lips,
your floating collarbone, your leaning hips)
are open, raised as if in song, or praise:
the night is young… but ancient, Nyx’s ways.

March 15, 2012

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World’s most famous gecko?

AHHHHH! — FALLING GECKO!!!

Gecko foot (from Wikipedia)

I don’t know about you, but I wish I had soles like that! If you had these “augmented” toes, wouldn’t you enjoy falling from the ceiling onto a soft head of hair?

Lately I’ve been rambling on about (and in imitation of) Bougainvillea bushes, in particular the one that grew on my balcony in Bangkok. But it’s impossible to think of the plant that made me smile every time I laid eyes on it without getting nostalgic about the geckos that made a living and napped in it. Mostly napped, actually. But I suppose napping is a serious — some might say honourable — occupation in geckodom. (Come to think of it, napping is serious business in Thailand, period!).  

Geckos are a family of lizards, ranging in size from your pinkie to a small iguana. They have fabulously adhesive footpads (see above) that allow them to scale and climb any surface in any direction, and stay suspended indefinitely, often directly over your bowl of curry. The largest variety are the Tokay Geckos. You wouldn’t want that dropping on you. Wikipedia gives this alarming fact about them, which thankfully I was never called upon to verify:

When the Tokay bites, it often won’t let go for a few minutes or even up to an hour or more, and it is very difficult to remove without causing it harm . [Eww!]

You hear these biggies a lot at night. They sound like their name — “TOKAY!” or “TUKAE!”, depending on your language. The ones I heard in Thailand made a sound uncannily reminiscent of a very rude phrase that I won’t repeat here.

Whenever I glimpsed a Tokay, I steered clear. But the geckos I saw most often in Thailand (and gladly shared my walls with, like most Thais, because geckos eat a lot of flies and mosquitoes) were the small variety, what you’d call “house geckos”.  They come in all sorts of shades and patterns, sometimes spotted or striated, sometimes plain. Always cute :)

Their eyes are funny, with that bright, fixed glare lizards have, a look that says “yeahhh I’m watching you, you big-bottomed slow poke. If I were bigger, I’d hypnotize you and eat you too. Bye now.” – and zzzp, they’re gone.

Luckily, mine acquired a taste for sticky rice and didn’t do any of the crazy stuff my neighbour’s geckos reportedly did to her, like falling into her hair at night. I think geckos are irresistibly drawn to geckophobes. The best way to become their friend is to think of them as small, flat people who hang out upside down. If you ‘talk’ to them — pucker your mouth up and make kissing sounds — they know where you are, so they’re unlikely to sprint out suddenly from a hiding place (say, your shoes), and you won’t scream like my neighbour did.

Unfortunately I don’t have any photo of my favourite gecko, a little female who learned the trick of grabbing rice — the Thai sticky variety — off my finger. Uncle Duh (yup, that really was his name), the janitor, would stop by sometimes to watch, incredulous, as I demonstrated at lunchtime. Then he’d genially offer to take her off my hands so he could toss her into the fish tank dowstairs, which contained a dragon fish. All you need to know about dragon fish is that they’re huge, always hungry and they have this perpetually nasty snarl on their hooked mouth.

It got to be that everyone in my building knew about this gecko, and everyone back home in Canada, and eventually I had to do the obvious… yes, write a poem about her. I don’t know how many poems and stories have been written on geckos, but you could say this one has gained a following and a reputation.

On the eve of my flight back to Canada, I cried in my empty apartment, sitting there on my empty balcony, with only my Bougainvillea remaining. Naturally I was sad to leave after 2 years, but what triggered the tears was the sight of my gecko hiding under the leaves, annoyed by several days of packing and moving. All the furniture was gone, she had nowhere to skink and hide except the Bougainvillea — who has a cameo role in this poem, by the way, as does my jittery Thai neighbour, oh and also my ex-, indirectly, because he named my gecko, apparently after a Thai country-music star.  

Anyway, sorry for this rambling upside-down post! Talking about geckos makes me lose all sense of up vs. down. I get that fixed, lidless look in my eyes, and a craving for sticky rice followed by a nap in the Bougainvillea…

__________________________________________________________

จิ้งจก ศรีวิลัย เป็นพยาน

The testimony of Sriwilai

 

I, Sriwilai,
gobbler of ants and fruit flies,
expert sunbather and scaler of walls
(and fond of rubbery escapes, if I may say so),
declare the rice-offering human
to be all right.

Some of my half-brothers and various aunties
have ended up in Fish’s gullet,
but I stickily maintain that this human
had nothing to do with it.

He tosses pleasing amounts
of fruit and vegetable peel into the balcony plant box,
notices my rubbery escapes, sings and even
makes chk-chk sounds (in a surprisingly good accent)
whenever I make a display of scuttling across his ceiling.

The previous occupant killed
the Bougainvillea where I’d whiled many a flat afternoon.
But this one—he planted two new bushes, a deep plum shade that brings out my spots quite nicely.

So I have not indulged in falling rubberily
from the ceiling into his hair
the way I sometimes do with humans,
because this one really is all right.

But let me stick to the facts. Nothing in my vertical experience
leads me to think that
my resident human takes part
in feeding Fish. He mostly
hums and chk-chks.

To the best of my wriggly knowledge, he has never
handed over any cousin or uncle,
spotted or plain, to that other human
who feeds Fish.

Nor has he ever chased
any of us away, especially me (perhaps, if I may say so,
because I’ve learned to nab rice grains off his finger
in a lightning-quick, rubbery lunge).

I may be slippery and flat,
but I roundly declare myself to be sane,
of sound mind and sticky footpad,
and I do swear that everything I have said today is the truth.

As we geckos know,
the truth is much like a fruit fly: it never sits still.
Although sometimes, the truth
is rather like a column of ants on the march, stretching on and on,
always taking the same path right under one’s pointy nose. Especially when one is napping in the Bougainvillea,
which I quite look forward to resuming once your Honours are done with me.

As for the humans who ran this place,
who put Fish in his glass prison and fed it whole branches of my extended family,
and who tore out Bougainvilleas with the wrong shade
(including my favourite bush)
well,
one look at them and you just know
they can’t speak a word of gecko (with all due respect to our lingua animalia).

I, Sriwilai, declare everything I have said today
to be the truth, and trust that you all will let the facts
stick for themselves.

 

February 1, 2006

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A little poetry, a little photography

Spring is in the air! 

Just stick your nose outdoors a few seconds, and draw a big fat ffffftt of fresh air into your dusty lungs… now tell me, what better words are there to say it?

Spring is in the air, my lovelies!

When I say it to myself, deliriously — Spring is in the air! – my voice starts to slide irresistibly from speech register to song register. Before I know it, I’m humming John Paul Young’s famous disco hit, Love Is In The Air, happily deforming his lyrics, substituting Spring for Love.

Glorious intoxication. Suddenly I feel 14 again. Or perhaps 24 (34?… yikes), anything seems possible. Because anything IS possible.

Even after the weirdest winter on record, the Winter That Got Cancelled (at least here in Toronto), the  change in the air is palpable — layered with increasingly complex aromas, like a great wine breathing out of its opened bottle.

My house plants, normally a sedate bunch, look like they’re dressing up for a night out on the town. I have half a mind to impose a curfew. The longer days, the warmer light filtering in through the living room window… it’s got them singing John Paul Young too (in a slightly weedier rendition).

“Margueretto”, my Calamondin Orange tree, is glowing with vitality, showing off his ravishingly plump, deep-orange fruit. “Maria Calla”, my Calla Lily, is pushing out a slender, creamy white flower cone, tightly rolled-up like some virgin cigarette, coyly guarding its lemony vanilla scent. “Bob Marley”, my Caribbean Guava plant, is chuckling indulgently at my pruning efforts — for every cut I’ve made, two fat new buds are bulging out in tropical insistence… “Let’s get together and make sweet leaves”, I believe is his motto.

Everywhere I look, bracts are poking out with obscene urgency, immodestly flashing their floral undies. Forgive me — in Springtime, a not-so-young man’s thoughts naturally turn to …. flowers, of course!

It’s been a couple weeks since I posted anything. Today I thought I’d make it special. A good friend of mine, Javeed Patel, has kindly agreed to let me pair some of his floral photography with my poetry. A fellow lover of nature’s beauty, Javeed has travelled widely and has trained his discerning lens on many a flower and plant, as far afield as Kenya, his native Congo, Spain, France, even Zanzibar (or was that just the floral motifs of masterfully carved wooden doors?).

Here in Toronto, every Spring he falls in love with the startling pink explosions of the Red Bud trees (they look good enough to eat, on top of vanilla ice-cream or something!). Javeed also likes to explore the mysterious, almost lunar topography of close-up orchid petals. In fact, his trademark orchid studies have attracted attention at several art shows.

But today, it’s all about the showy exuberance of Bougainvillea. I can’t think of too many other flowers or plants — except perhaps coconut palms and Bird of Paradise — that epitomize the tropics more than the Bougey, and Javeed’s photo was calling out to my poem, and vice versa.

Originally from Brazil and named for French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville in the 18th century, this woody, thorny and expansive vine has since spread its tendrils to all the warmer parts of the world, and is much-loved for its habit of trailing great orgasmic masses of bright flowers (actually the papery bracts, enclosing the small, white ‘true flower’). For such an eye-popping flowering plant, Bougainvillea is curiously devoid of scent. If it were scented, though, I somehow think that would take away from its sheer visual magic.

When I lived in Thailand, I was fortunate enough to have a small but beautifully private balcony looking out onto the busy lane below. I spent tons of time there. There was daily hand-washing to do, sometimes fruit peeling — ohhh, the fruit in Thailand… — or papaya salad-pounding in my clay mortar. Sometimes there was some serious sitting-around-with-a-friend to do, cold beers to suck back, and kooy-kooy to be done (kooy means chat in Thai).

Below, in the lane, a never-boring play unfolded, with its fascinating cast of characters: sing-songy food hawkers, barefoot monks in the early mornings, stray dogs negotiating fiercely with their passengers (fleas), fresh-faced students on lunch break from the nearby Thai music school, workers delivering teetering pyramids of fresh-cut ice on their scooters, drunken retired policemen arguing politics. I drank all of this in, always secure in the knowledge that my Bougainvillea bush hid me perfectly from view.

The outer wall of my balcony was a squat, ugly colonade that nevertheless supported a lovely, big concrete plant box filled with soil, wide and deep enough to accomodate a fairly large Bougainvillea. In fact, every balcony of my 6-floor apartment building had a Bougainvillea growing from its planter and trailing romantically down, sometimes all the way down to the next balcony below, so that the building sometimes looked like a lost corner of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  

Birds often visited — tiny Scarlet Sapsuckers, zippy Bee-eaters – attracted by the insect life that called my Bougainvillea home. You see, my planter unofficially doubled as a small balcony composter, so all that fruit peel gave rise to a thriving mini-ecosystem of ants, bees, flies, as well as the hungry little geckos that feed on them.

One of the resident geckos in my Bougey bush eventually became semi-tame, venturing out at noon to grab grains of Thai sticky rice proffered on a finger. I also wrote a poem about this character — but that’s for another day. As any gecko sunning itself on a Bougainvillea twig will tell you, you can’t rush these blog posts.

Javeed and I share a love of flowers, the improbable miracle of flowers, the short-lived eternity of flowers. He took this Bougainvillea photo in Kenya, worlds away from my Bangkok specimen. Yet it’s totally familiar to me. How amazing that this plant, sprung from a third, distant continent, has found — with the help of a distracted Frenchman no doubt bent on the more aromatic prizes of the New World (cacao? vanilla?) — a home all over our planet.

Thank you Javeed, and stay tuned for another floral poem… and maybe a gecko poem…

____________________________________________________________

Bougainvillea, Kenya (Photo: Javeed Patel)

____________________________________________________________

เฟื่องฟ้า

bougainvillea

 

Was it the tea leaves
egg shells
incense ash and fruit
peel I fed you without fail
that convinced your shriveled boughs
to splurge green again,

or am I forgetting
the monsoon’s clarion call—
was that it, merely that?

Tiny pink leaves are staging
their first dawn over cold spiky
twigs. Two months ago, the landlords demanded
I rip you out—you were
the wrong colour.

So I offered prayers to you, as people do at every
shrine-studded corner of this city.
First in familiar English and French, then in tentative Thai, so that
you’d hear all of me,
and I burned the best sandalwood I could find
in Bangkok’s Little India.

I touched you every morning,
noted, cajoled each pale bud before
rushing off to class. Was it that?

And when I danced under the glare of my teachers
and the syrupy whir of the crusty ceiling fans, my fingers shaking,
straining to hold a stylized
leaf gesture, I thought of
yours—new and supple—just to keep
going.

What was it
that made you want to rise again, dance again?

September 14, 2004

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HMS Tulipe’s maiden voyage

Hard on the heels (talons?) of last week’s snowy owl sighting-turned-poem (my Mom scored ANOTHER snowy sighting – I’m so jealous! – and again it was an immaculately white owl… perhaps the same one we saw?), I thought I’d continue on the bird theme, by re-posting a poem I’d stuck in a separate “Page” of this blog and that never got properly posted.
 
As majestic as a snowy owl can be, especially if you call it by its wintry-sounding Latin name — Nyctea scandiaca —  I have to say that budgies rank high on my Majesty Index. But not in the way you might think.
 
Yes, a budgie’s little curved beak, which recalls a raptor’s (if you kind of squint hard), can inflict quite a painful welt on invasive noses and fingers. And they can shriek like a mighty eagle if breakfast is late.
 
And yes, when a budgie puffs up contentedly on her comfortable perch, preparing for her 18th afternoon nap in a sunny window, she can almost double in size. The feathers on her head will fluff out to form a bulging, oversized forehead, something like the intimidating sonar-stuffed head of a whale, or maybe one of those “bone-head” dinosaurs like Pachycephalosaurus (… Latin for ‘big-headed dinosaur’).  
 
The prevailing theory is still that birds evolved from dinosaurs, so I used to affectionately call Tulipe, our budgie, my “sweet little modern-day dinosaur”. She could shriek her displeasure (or her fear of the neighbours’ cat on the prowl) like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. Next time you see a parrot or a budgie running or waddling around, ignore the feathers and observe closely: they look absolutely like a miniature T-Rex, all sturdy thighs and fixed glare! You know how Velociraptors and other predatory dinosaurs are always depicted as alarmingly intelligent animals who can figure problems out? We humans share that clever “reptilian” brain with dinosaurs – and birds. Those beaks are more destructive than opposable thumbs (my Mom’s cedar blinds and assorted picture frames bear the scars of Tulipe’s ministrations).
 
But that’s not the majesty I’m getting at here. I had in mind the highly unusual posture that Tulipe took on… in death. 
 
The poem that follows was my tribute to a wonderful, silly, wise, affectionate, hedonistic, sweetly manipulative, dangerously clever, sweet-smelling (you would be too, if you ate seeds your whole life) and champion-pooper bird, with a very loud set of pipes for her size. She set sail a couple of years ago already.
_____________________________________________________
 

Tulipe the budgie (in life)

 
 
A burial in the woods

She is perfect
sunshine yellow             poised in death
like a ship about to launch from the dock

on its maiden voyage,
pointing forward to the unknown deep                 feet swung back stiffly,
a dreaming figurehead.

This is not
the spirited bird
whose every chirp and languorous stretch of wing
brought us a little closer to the Mystery.

But this shining vessel is the last image of her
that we can still hold
in our hands: still it shimmers with the essence that steered it
so gracefully through this ocean, life

an essence we will stubbornly, joyfully call
“Tulipe”
until we too sail from our harbours 

April 23, 2010

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by poemrunner on February 15, 2012  •  Permalink
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Winter is a snowy owl, surveying the world in silence

Have you ever seen the ghost of the fields?

Yesterday my Mom and I were overcome with excitement when we (actually, she) spotted our first snowy owl, not far from the town of Richmond, south of Ottawa.

We were driving home from the city, crossing the same snow-covered fields we’ve driven through countless times. Viewing conditions were ideal: late afternoon, a cloudless sky, and a dazzling sun slanting down over the flat landscape, drawing out dramatic shadows — and this big, ghostly owl, perched atop a utility pole, against a backdrop of almost painfully blue sky. We had to stop the car – and not just because we’re both bird enthusiasts, but because a snowy owl (thanks to Steph Weinstein for the amazing links she sent me, including this video!) is a bird of unearthly beauty, almost not a bird, almost more of a messenger from the spirit world.  For a good 10 minutes, we sat there in the car, silenced by the owl’s perfect silence. It was like getting a 10-minute lesson in stillness. Now and then, the owl’s majestic head swivelled 180 degrees, smooth as air, quiet as winter, doing nothing else but watching, watching. We knew it could see us, knew it was tolerating our noisy human presence. And we knew that it was not only fine-tuned to its environment, but that it was one with everything around  it. The owl was winter.

In 10 minutes, it’s possible to understand the deadly beauty of winter, just by watching a snowy owl sitting in its perfect white coat of concentration.
__________________________________________________________________________

Snowy owl... Best I could do with my tiny digital camera from that distance

 
 

Snowy owl

How many times
was it just a wooden hydro
pole, rising dumbly over a fallow field mute with snow,
just another empty field you hurtled past at 100km an hour,
the same way you flip past the first
blank pages of a book, in a hurry
to reach the safety of
words?


Yet this time
it is not pressure-treated
but living, pulsing, whisper-gray cedar
pointing its long finger across blinding sundial white, and not a field,
but a thundering stillness, a fastening of blue silence for a world
still unborn, still gripped in the visitor’s obsidian claws,
still swathed in its ghostly
feathers.


Pull over
onto the icy shoulder, kill
the engine of progress, roll down the salt-grimed cataract
of the window, blink, crane your neck, take your first sharp gasp of air.
The mist has parted: perched high up on his cedar, motionless,
a totem births the world out of its ancient, patient dream,
snatches the words from your throat, hushes
the mouse in your heart.

 February 5, 2012 

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by poemrunner on February 5, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by poemrunner on February 5, 2012

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The Next Big List, and why I won’t blog about it

Have you noticed all the blogs built around what is essentially an addiction to Lists?

Must-read booklists… Top 10 Movies… Top 40 Cocktails… 25 Worst Tech Products of the Decade… 10 Countries in 10 Days, etc. Often, the list is herculean — grandiose, fraught with peril, dangerously unrealistic and, for that precise reason, undeniably sexy — proving the blogger is a superhuman worthy of a following.

Along with the List, there’s often a Deadline, by which the List must be Crossed Off or it’s just not worth blogging about and will never grab the attention of the people that really, really matter (TV and film producers). You may have seen these superblogs and may even be following one or two — in which case, forgive me this bit of fun.

Superblogs have super-followings (and who isn’t jealous of that?), yet they often revolve around a single, simplistic, ridiculous-if-it-wasn’t-in-a-blog, yet genius idea. Such as:

The Sausage Diaries: Hitting Every Hotdog Truck in Town Over One Glorious Meaty Month

OR,

“20/12 Vision”– 20 Pieces of Indispensable Technology I Will Go Without Over the Next 12 Months As I Turn Into A 21st Century Luddite

OR,

Ein, Zwei, Drei… FEURE!: Quest Für Zie Best Bier Fests (mit fotografik prüf)

I soon realized that if I wanted this humble poetry blog to earn an instant and rabid following, I’d have to do what many successful bloggers do: invent a ridiculous List of Stuff to Accomplish (read/eat/bake/drink/buy, etc.), set myself an equally ridiculous deadline (like that Julia Childs recipe blog-turned-movie), then blog incessantly and mercilessly about every hilarious hit and miss and every nerve-wracking wrong turn as I heroically slog though The List, to the amazement of my followers (“Unbelievable… he stuck a Shakespearean sonnet in every bathroom stall of every McDonald’s in Toronto… in 1 week!“).

Surely I can pull off a similar stunt even in the normally placid world of poetry? What would you think of:

Classics Rock!
Reading the Great British Poets as They Were Meant to Be Heard: with Led Zeppelin and/or Def Leppard on Top Volume

Or maybe:

5,000 years of Chinese Poetry, 15 Days of Lunar New Year: Pairing Each Dish With a Poem & Reading It In Broken Mandarin Just to Annoy My Relatives

Or this could be fun:

30 Famous Poets I Could’ve (Should’ve) Been Born As:
My Stuff & Their Stuff Mashed Up + Our Composite Portraits

The scary thing: these REALLY COULD WORK, and not only that, but they’d be celebrated as daring, creative. That’s how people like Paris Hilton got “famous for being famous”. The world we inhabit really is that crazy, that deperate for novelty and distraction.

And here’s my one serious thought in this otherwise light-hearted post: I think The Big List sums up modern society’s relentless rush to achieve and accomplish. Once a list is crossed out, we yearn for the next one, then the next one, and we go on crossing things out like this until the Mother of All Lists — our life — is checked and done. Doesn’t life sometimes feel like that?

So I won’t come up with a great bloggable list of 200 poets to imitate in 200 days. No recordings of me reading The Canterbury Tales in authentic Middle English (though I once had a convincing accent, thanks to  a university course in medieval English). No word-a-day for 365 days until it forms a poem on December 31 (too late anyway, it’s already Jan. 29). As fun as it may be to think of the Next Big List that could vault me into super-poet-blogger status, I don’t think it would make me happy.

I’m happiest when I’m focused on the simplicity of everyday life, which defies lists. Henry David Thoreau, the great 19th century American poet, philosopher and naturalist, said it best: As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler. In other words, the list gets smaller, not longer.

Admittedly, it’s tough to follow such simple advice! Especially on a blog, where everything becomes a “statistic” in some great Darwinian blog race. But it can be done, starting here and now, in this simple blog.

Next post: top 10 reasons to keep things simple… don’t miss it.

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by poemrunner on January 29, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by poemrunner on January 29, 2012

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Of mice and coats

Sooner or later, everyone has that moment when they look at their ratty old winter coat for the last time, overcome by an almost physical itch to be rid of it. Just before Christmas I was in that very state of itchy despair as I realized I needed a new winter coat. My old one — a ridiculous, zipperless, over-the- head contraption with skimpy padding — had seen enough winters. It was time.

Lately the temperature in Toronto has been yoyo-ing all over the thermometer. The other day we slid from a daytime high of +8 to an overnight low of -24. My sister and I (we share this house) have noticed that whenever things get really polar outside, we’re not the only ones who feel grateful for a heated home. Some mouse always gets in a sharing mood and decides to make an appearance. I picture it rubbing its little paws together over the warm pilot light of the gas stove. It’s an old house, so I don’t think we’ll ever really be totally free of mice . But as long as our visitor doesn’t leave a “memento” in the kitchen, we tend to turn a blind eye and let it do a little jig or two while we sleep. Live and let live, right? 

Besides, mice have some important lessons to teach us. Which reminds me of a refreshingly unscientific mini-treatise on mice that I discovered in a wonderful book my sister bought me years ago, called Wild Culture: Ecology and Imagination, by Whitney Smith and Christopher Lowry. I wish I could include a link to the chapter on mice, a gem.  I have a copy if anyone needs some good bedtime reading while your mice do the can-can in the kitchen :)

But back to winter coats. My problem with winter coats is this: they either don’t fit me (men’s clothing in North America is HUGE, even in a supposed size S) or they’re stuffed with goose down — an amazing insulating material which I nonetheless avoid out of pity for the geese. We live in a society of limitless choices, right? Try finding a men’s coat that’s small AND warm enough for -20 AND not made of goose down. Is that asking too much? Apparently so.

On a recent December evening, as winter was setting in and I was wondering where I’d find my next coat, I sat sipping tea  in my kitchen… when a mouse made his/her entrance, and an impression on me. I wish him/her well.
___________________________________________________________

Winter coat

 The other evening, I spied the mouse.

Its velvety ears caught my sharp breath before I did:
it shot along the wall           dust ball in a sudden gust
of wind
and was under the fridge by the time I blinked—

but, long enough for me to notice
a new fuzziness
to its tiny weightless body: only hair, yes

but more of it, puffier, fluffier. The mouse had on
his new winter coat
and was good to go.

You wouldn’t go out in winter to dine on the town
without a proper coat—and neither
would a mouse.
My kitchen is a vast city,

with its own dodgy neighbourhoods and finer districts,
its grand thoroughfares and back alleys,
its famed sights, its tourist traps.

I too have sometimes scuttled
along the edge of things, blinded by opulence,
gnawing at beauty.

The difference is my mouse
doesn’t scavenge in piles of musty coats
at the Sally Ann, or claw through the holiday sales racks,

or sniff out online ads
for something that fits, something warm, something kind.

A mouse knows when it’s time to grow
a new winter coat.

And what a coat! locally sourced,
impeccably tailored, entirely biodegradable,
and heavily discounted.

Sitting alone in my cold kitchen, I covet the mouse’s wealth.
I would like, for just one winter,
to savour the freedom
of a mouse,
happy in his new winter coat, heading out on the town.

December 5, 2011

(comments and critiques always apreciated!)

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by poemrunner on January 21, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by poemrunner on January 21, 2012

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“Amazing Rice” a poem of survival

A BIG Thank You to all my supporters!

You’ve helped get my blog off to a great start! Your wonderful comments are very encouraging, I feel more inspired to write than ever. Chinese/Lunar New Year is just around the corner, so I thought I’d post something about that.

For me, every CNY is different. When I was a child, my father used to make us his special “sweet sticky rice” dessert, full of goodies like dried fruit (maybe not 100% authentic, but he was into Fusion cuisine long before it got trendy!). While we licked our fingers, he’d tell us a story about China. Say, the famines. Or, crushing poverty. Naturally, I always devoured my sticky rice with a big serving of guilt.

In Thailand, I found out people celebrate a New Year 3 times: there’s Jan. 1 of course, then CNY, then the Thai one called Songkran, in mid-April. Bangkok’s large Chinese population always puts on a massive, all-out celebration that lasts the full 15 days. Chinese shopkeepers perform an elaborate “spring-cleaning” that involves scrubbing and hosing down every inch of their store, inside and out, until it’s gleaming. The streets are alive with suds and water… it’s the only time that part of Bangkok looks clean – 2 weeks later, the smog and dust are back.

Food is everywhere during CNY, mountains of it. So, to celebrate the centre of the Chinese culinary universe – RICE – I thought I’d post a poem I wrote recently, on the theme of Amazing Grace. I was thinking of the ordeals the Chinese have endured over the ages — famine, war, occupation, Cultural Revolution, exile, rampant modernization. And to me, Amazing Grace seems to want to contain a part of their story too.

As I started playing around with the lyrics, I realized I also had something to say about growing up half-Chinese in Canada. As a kid, I sometimes craved Western fast food (who didn’t? Thankfully my parents never let me eat much of it). Maybe I craved it sometimes because dinners at our house were not always — how to put it? — happy meals ;)  But rice — neutral, soothing, serene — was often there.
____________________________________________________________

 

Basmati rice, hand & Thai cushion

 

Amazing rice

Amazing rice—
how sweet the smell
that saved a wretched meal

I once craved burgers, yearned
to be a blond…
but now I’m healed.

Amazing rice!
Though small and meek,
you fed humanity,

Like pearly grains we swell
and stick through life’s
adversity.

Amazing rice,
how sweet the paste
that glued each crumbling soul,

I can’t forget your gentle taste,
salvation in a bowl.

October 6, 2011

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by poemrunner on January 15, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by poemrunner on January 15, 2012

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We have our language…

Me, my father and grandmother at her 100th

Here you can see the only son (me) of the eldest son (my father) of a remarkable woman, whose 100th birthday celebration was the occasion for a lot of hand-holding… I wrote this poem soon after. I’m not sure what my Dad will make of this poem, though he would agree it’s a shame I can’t speak Mandarin, let alone  my grandmother’s Nanjing dialect ;) _____________________________________________________________

What cannot be said

Your dialect is even more alien
than my father’s talk-with-his-mouth-full Shanghainese.

So, what other language is left to me
but the one of smiles and moist clasped hands
to tell you that

it is this proud monosyllabic scar that refuses to heal, your surname
—not your husband’s—
that I choose to keep, for you, for all my foremothers?
to tell you that

at times, I too have felt
unnoticed, unpraised, even by you,
that my name too has sometimes been erased, even by me?

My hands know how to ask if, today,
you feel a bit sad
to be 100 only once, because we’ve all had to converge here
from distant cities
—your answer comes in the grasp-ungrasp of fingers
that once ruled the mahjong board.

As soon as I enter your musty room, you’ve read my eyes:
my gift to you is not
the great-grandchild that would have elevated your suffering,
nor even
the cover of marriage… both are comically impossible. Dui bpu-chi,
sorry.

That last-century way you have of laughing and
gaping a little at the same time,
with a tiny knitting together of your Mao-wide brow,
tells me
there are too few days like this in the few that are left to you.

When we grin privately and share a slow level blink,
you know, don’t you, that means
I’m wishing I could have been there to watch you
amaze
your future father‑in‑law with your skill at the mahjong tiles.                 

Perhaps he sensed the male line
would need a quick thinker.

How could he know—how could you?—that all these arts
of war would fail with me, end with me.

We have our language, you and I. Silent, essential,
unburdened by word or name. It is all we have.
And we are fluent in it.

- For Liu Shu-yun 

September 5, 2009

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by poemrunner on January 13, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by poemrunner on January 13, 2012

http://runpoemrun.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/we-have-our-language/

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