My Body Is A Word (2:23min)

direct link to SoundCloud: My Body Is A Word by Brenda Clews

Brenda Clews, poetry, voice, mix.
Music, Lena Selyanina's piano solo, 'Summer Morning,' from "Snowstorm Romance": http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/73627 .

direct link to SoundClick: My Body Is A Word


The album of poetry recordings that I am working on seems to be on a theme of love. I don't have a whole lot of love poems, in the 'I and Thou' form. 'My Body Is A Word' is an older poem that I had up at my original and now defunct art website. It seems to work in context of the album, and also, hopefully, on its own.

A tiny chorus of voices, yes, positioned behind the main voice.






MY BODY IS A WORD

I

My body is a delta
awash with scripture
rivers of language flow over my tongue,
raw with salt.

My body is a delta
of waterways, signs,
inscribed, and gendered,
my body is tattooed
with the blue veins of roses.

II

I am rain falling on the edges of leaves;
I am earth, wet, a glistening emerald;
I am a breath of fire on the horizon at dawn;
I am a white orchid unlacing.

I am the succulence of the peeling of fresh fruit,
juice of mango, orange, kiwi, bloodred pomegranate;
the thorns of the pineapple rind fall into the sink.

Remember when
our bodies flowing
into the flowing warmth of each other,
paradise on the horizon of being.

Our bodies flowing, washing the world.

Our scripts intertwining the way
we endlessly write our lives.

I am the crimson space
in your heart.

You are the calyx of flowers reaching for the rain;
You are the sun ripening the fruit;
You are the awakening of the world;
You are the origin of the alphabet of love.

I read your body every day,
finding a script
like traces vanishing in the night
of light everywhere.


© 2003 by Brenda Clews
Recording, 2010

_____
(Note: Trying out different players - Sitemeter is my storage site for recordings, especially as how SC allows edited versions to be uploaded into the same url. Once the 'album' is finished, I'll upload it to Jamendo, where it will be available for free download. Any feedback now can aid help me in the creation of this collection of recordings - and I thank those of you who have offered responses and suggestions. It all really helps.)

                                                        

What Is Underground Is What Holds Us

I

You rise out of flat stone
the shield
of your heart.
The moon crosses the sun.
Do we
become light
when we dream?

The folds of your corduroy
like ridges and hollows
furrows where the Spring runoff
sculpts a geology
in a landscape of tundra.

"passageways and connections that
happen deep within us when in relation
to another..." Nancy Otto

In our Klondike, cross and beams
hold the tunnels we dig through
to find the gold in each other,
rich veins tracing through the rock
like sunlight.

II

Spring is a tendril
of green;
the leaves a papery mass of veins unfolding.

Cliffs of grass by the old mine ripple
in the wind.

We are like those two trees
ancient, weathered, yet
our roots thoroughly
intertwined.

What is
underground
is what holds us.

The deeper passageways
and connections.

III

I wear the crescent moon in my hair,
the cold northern air;
you are the sun buried in the land,
illumined from within.

The sharp edges
in each moment
bind us.

My Adoni, my Aholi,

even in this harsh typography
you are a landscape of love,
a cartography of desire.

©Brenda Clews 2006




>





Photographs were taken by me.

Poem and commentary written in April, 2006:


The title that I had thought of is a line from a poem by Hafiz, the 14th c Sufi master:
Our Destiny Is To Turn Into Light.

Here's the poem:

Faithful Lover

The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.

She said,

"The sun has been my faithful lover
For millions of years.

Whenever I offer my body to him
Brilliant light pours from his heart.

Thousands then notice my happiness
And delight in pointing
Towards my beauty.

Hafiz,
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
itself?"

Hafiz, The Gift, trans. Daniel Ladinsky (Toronto: Penguin, 1999), p.159.


While my poem is about light, it's really about roots, and works off Nancy Otto's lines (she's an artist who creates small, stunning glass sculptures where she explores our inner consciousnesses, our inner lives, the deep channels and underground ways that we connect).

Adoni and Aholi are both gods of nature: one ancient Phoenician; the other, ruler of the Pikya clan of Native Americans. Nature is usually imaged as a woman, but sometimes as a man - the dying & resurrected god.

Also I'm currently not just crazy about Hafiz, but also Pablo Neruda, his love poems, and Juan O'Neill's translation of Macchu Picchu.

If I Could Write

direct link: If I Could Write

for JP

What would I write if I
                         could
                  write?

I reach over continents
                               and
                                       oceans
into the Parthenon
to find you pressing
the shutter on your camera,
the photograph
you sent.

Or ordered chaos,
                          but this is my life.

A leaf swollen with rain.
Sleeping in a hammock
in a barge with hundreds of others
on the Amazon River in Brazil.
Sun shining on metal.
How sentences
                                     fold 
                         in on each other
like white rose petals.

Days pass endless
waves in the lake.

I found her,
a spirit in the forest of the lake
in the Canadian terrain
where I fast for days.
She broke the spell.
Unexpectedly,
in the silvery leaves of the
maples standing in water.

Abandon logic for metaphor.

Speak in the tongues
                                     of the poet.
I burn the fire
on your eyelids
in my soul.

Those Ionic columns in the heat
of your Grecian photograph.

                         Mirrors
to hide behind.
My polished earrings,
necklace of reflective stones,
shirt sewn with tiny mirrors.
See yourself seeing me.

Clouds that form
a grammar of understanding
of the sky.

The wine
that sweetens your lips.
The dazzle of a sunset
the colour of
oranges.

__
Piano solo accompaniment: Roger Stéphane, 'Lointain,' from his album, Picasso, on Jamendo.

Response to Big Tent Poetry's prompt (where other entries are linked in the comments).

The recording, for some reason, took unexpected hours, and yet I feel strange including it and hope it adds to your reading of the prosepoem.

                                                        

from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

Free music for professional licensing

direct link: from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

This poem is now available at Jamendo, with better sound than SoundClick, and you may download it if you wish. Later on, I will be offering a reading of this abridged version of my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems with another musician.