Fragments Moving Toward a Whole
Dear Readers,
Something new this week-more image than explication. I’ve always been a lover of the unexpected juxtaposition. In my early days as a poet I was heavily influenced by the French surrealists. I loved Apollinaire and Desnos, but especially I loved André Breton. I have literally almost drowned in his poem, “Free Union,” many times.
French surrealists often didn't try to make any sense in their poems. It was up to the reader to make meaning, and in the early days of surrealism that act wasn’t encouraged. The goal was to pierce the constructed narrative of a stable reality through art grounded in chaos. Narrative was passé, and the desire for it a mark of conformity to bourgeois ideals that valued security and meaning over the direct experience of riding a tiger’s back while crossing a river of stars.
As I developed as a poet, I came to appreciate the Spanish surrealists more-Lorca, Jimenez, Machado-who channeled the electric current of images swirling in the ethos into works of emotional depth that was sometimes lacking in the French.
Anyway, my point in telling you this is that I am starting a new project here on Substack, “Fragments Moving Toward a Whole,” in which I will share fragments of the hundreds of unfinished poems in my journals without trying to perfect them into something I consider finished.
When I was a young writer I was so free. Images poured out of me with abandon. I turned the tap off quite a bit when I began to study poetry formally. I don’t regret that, but now that I’ve acquired some skill in the craft, I’d like to return to that deep and holy well where images are born, bloody and raw, and channel them down a serpentine river to find fulfillment in the ocean. I’m hoping by juxtaposing these bits of poems, some new creations will be born through foolish leaps over chasms we all thought were impenetrable.
I encourage you to read these fragments with surrealist eyes like Dali, listen with the ears of a wild donkey scrambling up a mountainside, throw yourself into them like a river of starlight, think- what would Desnos do?
I like this idea of not abandoning these words. Just because something is a fragment, doesn’t mean it isn’t whole. We just can’t see the invisible parts until our inner senses open.
That is your task, if you choose it, dear reader. Holy, holy, holy. Whole.
Part I
“What is rain?” the boy asked his mother,
looking out through the old glass windowpanes
that rattled when the wind blew from the northeast.
In spring there were daffodils across the street.
They burst out of the earth in clumps
near the edge of the marsh out back, some
wandered into the marsh and learned
the underground secrets of water.
The house was yellow and made people smile
when they biked past, even though they were
pedalling uphill. Honeybees lived there
and the attic hummed with sweet ghosts
who loved when rain drummed on the shingles.
“Rain is water falling from the sky,”
the boy’s mother told him.
“What is water?” he asked.
There was always another question.
His mother answered, she always did,
but he didn’t remember what she told him.
In the end, it was all about remembering
how to be held by water.
Part II
A woman is trying to cross a river.
Everything she owns tied up in a bright cloth
strung on her back. The cloth sings
about all she’s leaving behind-
birds at dawn on the mountain,
the sound of rocks in the stream
tumbled by water.
Part III
It is the rainy season but the rain hasn’t come.
The mud holes on the way to the beach have dried up,
but the smell of rain is still present in the exhaling philodendrons,
in the rotting core of a monkeypod tree,
fallen guavas on the roadside.
She is wondering if a place names itself,
or if a name finds the place where it belongs.
Waipi’o means the Land of Curving Water.
All day she crosses streams and rivers with no shoes,
bathes in the river, reaches under rocks for prawns.
There is always the sound of the waterfall.
One night she saw four balls of fire rise up from the sea.
She was alone in the ironwoods.
There was no way to explain what she saw,
so she just watched it, fire arcing back and forth for hours.
She has little notion of how this night will later
curve back to her, of how in just a few weeks
she’ll be unable to remember a time
when the rain hasn’t always been falling.
Part IV: Your Grief Honors the Water
This could be about the women
sitting on the salt pond’s shore, more in
then out of the water,
or the old yellow dog sleeping by the dunes
who looks up every now and then
to smile at passing clouds,
and the voices of his family
clustered together on the small beach:
three sisters,
a father with a striped sailor shirt
and a sailing skiff,
a mother who passes out sandwiches,
or it could be about a woman
in the hospital
in a coma now,
or a monarch in a cocoon,
or a sister sitting by a hospital bed
who doesn’t believe in the afterlife.
This sister pleads with the woman in the coma
to return to this life,
the one where minnows nibble dead skin off your legs
if you sit long enough in the shallows, more in-
then out. A few more steps in legs lift from bottom
almost without effort.
Could it really be that easy to float?
Kō aloha la ea,
Concentrate on love by way of the light,
Jen
What do you think of this new project? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Did you find yourself taking an unexpected leap? Let me know!