Hibernation and Creating Wonder
The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 24
I’ve been hibernating. Curled up for days on end under all the blankets I can find with a big pile of books, a few exquisite chocolate truffles and a couple of cartons of grapefruit juice.
I went to Tahiti the summer before last, and lived on pamplemousse juice (which is like grapefruit juice only green) and pineapple juice and fresh baguette and cheese. Oh, and tuna I brought with me.
The truffles were a Christmas gift.
The cool thing about being in Tahiti despite all the obvious stuff like beauty and sun was that I didn’t recognize things. Things were not familiar. I experienced everything fresh and with wonder.
I thought the small red crabs that were everywhere were the biggest spiders I had ever seen!
That is something two of my favorite poets do. Seamus Heaney and Tomas Tranströmer. They describe stuff we already know, like waking up or walking in the woods but they find new ways to say it without using big complicated words. They also tell little stories, sometimes a five line story but there is some sort of narrative line.
The only thing that is going to work for me as a poet is to do that too. To go all the way out on the being me limb, even when I am being someone else, as in a persona poem.
In that big long profile about John Ashbery in the New Yorker last year or whenever, he talked about how he constructs poems. I do it the same way but lately it hasn’t been working for me.
On New Year’s Eve I stayed at home alone under the covers and watched the moon rise. It took hours but my bed is on the floor and the ballroom has windows to the floor so I was able to stay warm.
I have these pieces of a poem…
Wood smoke and fog, reptiles of the mind, crows flying across the full moon as it sets in the morning, a floating nightclub on the Nile, honey and coarse salt, vervain and mud.
It has something to do with a mad woman I suppose but I am not sure what.
Maybe when I finally arise from hibernation, which I’ll need to do soon, as some boy scout troop is going to start chomping Christmas Trees out front sooner rather than later and all my clothes are dirty, I’ll be able to make some sense of it.
I’ve been hibernating. Curled up for days on end under all the blankets I can find with a big pile of books, a few exquisite chocolate truffles and a couple of cartons of grapefruit juice.
I went to Tahiti the summer before last, and lived on pamplemousse juice (which is like grapefruit juice only green) and pineapple juice and fresh baguette and cheese. Oh, and tuna I brought with me.
The truffles were a Christmas gift.
The cool thing about being in Tahiti despite all the obvious stuff like beauty and sun was that I didn’t recognize things. Things were not familiar. I experienced everything fresh and with wonder.
I thought the small red crabs that were everywhere were the biggest spiders I had ever seen!
That is something two of my favorite poets do. Seamus Heaney and Tomas Tranströmer. They describe stuff we already know, like waking up or walking in the woods but they find new ways to say it without using big complicated words. They also tell little stories, sometimes a five line story but there is some sort of narrative line.
The only thing that is going to work for me as a poet is to do that too. To go all the way out on the being me limb, even when I am being someone else, as in a persona poem.
In that big long profile about John Ashbery in the New Yorker last year or whenever, he talked about how he constructs poems. I do it the same way but lately it hasn’t been working for me.
On New Year’s Eve I stayed at home alone under the covers and watched the moon rise. It took hours but my bed is on the floor and the ballroom has windows to the floor so I was able to stay warm.
I have these pieces of a poem…
Wood smoke and fog, reptiles of the mind, crows flying across the full moon as it sets in the morning, a floating nightclub on the Nile, honey and coarse salt, vervain and mud.
It has something to do with a mad woman I suppose but I am not sure what.
Maybe when I finally arise from hibernation, which I’ll need to do soon, as some boy scout troop is going to start chomping Christmas Trees out front sooner rather than later and all my clothes are dirty, I’ll be able to make some sense of it.
posted by NokoRose at 11:49 AM
1 Comments:
These are all thoughts and ideas to wonder about and to digest; pictures to savour; great descriptions that have added to my day's intake of small wonders. (I enjoy Seamus Heaney too.)
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