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Rua*: An Elegy in Holes
My journal propped to the day you fell around the earth, dropped to a point I can only approximate anymore with a secondhand map, some tacks, and a string to slice away the pudding skin of memory, I prop these skin-thin proofs in my aperture casement, watch you drop through my hunger by layers like when we excavated the neighbor’s sandbox, made the hole so deep we could map every sheet of clay, stand tip-toed, arms raised against the grave, voice leveled into soil, and still hide from the world, though Mom still managed to find us, conjugating our name in the breeze—she must have mapped our desire from the womb, known we’d eventually start digging holes to contain the fire licking our bones, the lust that’s propped me in the window of your first Auckland flat to watch you unpack—shirts, slacks, socks, shoes, suits, the nightly routine you’ve worn so long it’s threadbare at the knees—to air the ethereal between us with a length of mist, foreign soil, and mid-summer breeze, the line you’ll hang memories on after rain until they're dry enough to take notes on, to slide into your billfold beside NZ dollars creased in thirds, ridges grimy with the island’s fingerprints, like my camera lens, blurred by the hands of Māori kids who’ve dropped into the hole we dug and propped themselves against the walls, their fingers plugging the dike of memory to keep me from wrapping the world in spools of secondhand wind.
*Māori: (noun) hole, pit, burrow, chasm, grave, store (for provisions), abyss.
This one is over my head.
ReplyDeleteBut there is great language here: pudding-skin of memory, conjugating names, etc.
The man who sealed us had just returned from a mission to NZ. He told us a story about the Maoris that I barely remember; I was too caught up in the suspense of the moment as I knelt there.
I'm glad the language pressed you, Luisa, and I appreciate your response. I've been wondering how this might read to someone who's not me and you give me some idea, though I also wonder if you could clarify for me what you might mean by "This one is over my head." Am I pressing my readers too far, moving this experience beyond accessibility?
ReplyDeleteIt's just that I can't parse it easily. I am left with the impression of one of those many-cubbied shadowboxes with different bits of memorabilia arranged within.
ReplyDeleteSomething like this:
http://www.artchixstudio.com/gallery/images/gassemblage_shadowbox_jack.jpg
(Sorry the link isn't pretty; I am HTML illiterate.)
I like the little bits that I can make out--they are striking and evocative--but I can't make sense of the whole.
Note: As I read through this again, I made a slight revision. Where it now says "the line you'll hang memories on after rain until they're dry enough to take notes on" before said "the you'll hang your skin on after rain until it's dry enough to take notes on."
ReplyDeleteLuisa:
ReplyDeleteI think the shadowbox description is apt, especially here where I'm playing with memories, talking to a former self. And even though I wrote this, I sometimes feel much the same way as you do: sensing flashes of something evocative, but not quite able to make sense of the whole.
Maybe that's part of the fragmentariness of memory. Whatever the case, I'm glad for your comments because they're helped me take another look at what's going on and to see my language and imagery in a new light (even if we're both still grasping to put a finger on the poem).
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ReplyDeleteI can't parse it either but I blame that on my chaotic environment. I can't give it a fair shake today no matter how many times I stop by apparently....
I too have some difficulty following this poem, although the language is very beautiful. My suspicion is that a paragraph isn't the best way to present it, because paragraphs are best suited for scanning really fast, whereas stanzas are most helpful for when every word in the line is special and is meant to be savored. As a reader, my immediate reaction to reading the first few lines and realizing that the meaning was very dense and that the images were so different from one another.. I was very intimidated. I thought, "Oh, I have to work so hard to understand these first few lines and I still have the rest of the paragraph yet to read!" I managed to soldier on though.
ReplyDeleteI think a better way to present it would be in stanza form with each portion of memory in its own stanza, and maybe slightly hanging over into the next stanza to tie it together. There's the part that you seem to talk about your journal, then a part about your mother, then a part about traveling, and cameras. You could also play around with indenting it in different ways to evoke the wandering way that memory can work(this may not be possible on webpages). Hmm.. wandering.. like your travels to foreign lands? I think stanzas would be less intimidating, and more helpful. I know that poets sometimes revel in obscurity, but you also want to give your reader just enough help that they feel they can keep reading. (This is charitable in a literary sense.)
I too like "the pudding skin of memory", as it evokes the idea of revisiting something that has grown a little old. It also makes me think of brain surgery.
I don't understand this:
"made the hole so deep we could map every sheet of clay".. No, actually, now I do, because I can see that "clay" started with "cl". On your blog the typeface used made the cl merge together and looked to me like "day", so I was very confused. You might want to consider changing your font so that all the letters are distinct.
"the line you’ll hang memories on after rain until they're dry enough to take notes on" - That's a neat comparison between writing a journal and doing laundry. Very cool.
"to keep me from wrapping the world in spools of secondhand wind" - I like this. I think you mean that they didn't want you to take pictures of them. But I'm not sure why you chose the word "wind" here. Maybe a second memory is being compared to getting one's second wind?
Thanks for sharing this!
I think it is neat that you end talking about cameras and images, which also are associated with making memories and bringing back memories.
Michaela:
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate your generous and substantial comment. After posting this last week and getting the comments I did from Luisa and Th., I returned to my original copy and started reworking things to make the poem, as you so aptly express, more charitable.
I like how you use that word because that's an idea I've been mulling over a lot lately (though I haven't expressed it using the notion of charity, but I think the idea is apt)---how to both press and sustain my readers with my language, because I see encouraging others beyond conventional views with language (this where some poets get too obscure and self-serving) and sustaining their faith in words as acts of rhetorical compassion, acts of charity.
I'll definitely return to my revisions with your thoughts in mind, especially the ones about form and especially since you've confirmed the channel my thoughts have been taking about the poem over the past week or so.