Drawing

© 2005 by Brenda Clews

This is inspired by the photo I took to go with the last post and is a whole series of images in itself. Today I wrote this prose poem, away from the images in photo, in my notebook at a cafe, remembering.

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Follow the curve of birth. Images of fertility. How did they appear with such intimacy? Seeds, eggs, vas deferens, oviducts, ovum, egg sacs, a winged maple seed helio-revolving, honey combs, womb, scrotum, the tubes where living cells spawn. Cracking apart, breaking, blighted, ideas and wishes that form, eggs bursting without yolks, and one perfect moment that rises whole into the world. What is viable, what happens, where desire and its fulfillment are one unfolding. Purple, blue, insect, fowl, animal, human, whirring. Moonscape, the deep unconscious. Libido an overflow of the deep forces in motion, possibilities appearing and disappearing, where the shape of the future occurs. Incipient wholeness. Where it is never still. Three hundred million sperm entering the central canal of the testicles of each man every day. In excess. An abundance of fertility. Eggs waiting, releasing one at a time, a slow, sensual journey towards union. For the one perfect being, the eternal hope of the generations of the future. Striving, giving, living. The deepest music of creation, unbroken, even amidst the shattering, the shards of the half-made, the untenable, the profuse attempts at what are works of art. Then the perfection of the way the unbroken energy flows, syncopates, beats staccato, creates stillness, chaotically refines, prays, meditates through what lives. Solidifies into living form. Strange magnified continents, an image of silence on the edge of creation.

Body Painting on Saris

Body Painting on Saris

I am moving through a landscape of strange passion. The air is scented with a mixture of hyacinth, pine and memories of seabreeze. With wild fruit. Raspberries glisten redly amidst thorns, and I greedily pluck them from the bushes until my palm is overflowing and my tongue alive with sour freshness. The wind dances in the treetops, plays with racing clouds. I breathe deeply. The warmth of Summer and the ease with which I glide across the urban terrain, even with my unsettledness, unsettles you. I am like a tendril falling across your face; a glance of wind on your cheek; a sudden rush in your heart; a woman swirling about you like a dervish. You thought you had forgotten me, turned me into a speck of dust that you blew towards the mountains. And here I am, my mouth full of raspberries, red juices trickling. And I hold my hand to you, heaped with berries like jewels. But am I real? How quickly can I swirl in my colourful sarongs, beads and bracelets jangling, and disappear again?


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[Image from Mythical Lovers, Divine Desires, by Sarah Bartlett (Blandford, 1988) listed only as L.Vallet.]

I'm still working with ideas of the muse as speaking subject who is consciously playing the role traditionally assigned to her. The "I" is not 'me,' it's just a poetic convention, a persona taken on for the moment, a flurry of images that have written themselves across the page of my notebook today. The woman in this piece, for instance, is much younger than I am. And she is caught in a myth of entrancement; perhaps that's it. Her laughing eyes. Think of nymphs, sylphs, devis and tantrikas.

The River

i

What is the surface
of this river
that I am flowing with?

Gliding where the water
paints the trees and sky
in liquid colours,
calm, steady, tranquil, smooth;
underneath, I am a torrent of emotion,
a riptide of passion, flux of feeling
affirming, reeling, denying, spinning
into my own whirlpool.

My journey
back to my city
re-invokes memories
endings, untenable relationships that have lost their power,
that time has spun into the eye of the whirlpool,
currents of emotion, burdens of loss, gone.

I can look at you now
without flinching.
I am not trapped in cycles of unending irresolution.
Because I can leave, wash myself
of algae, reeds, sand and grit,
let the waters rush the detritus that remains
into a spining watery vortex.

This knowledge alone
depotentiates.

ii

I am the gentle
lapping on the shore,
fresh water of coolness...

Do you not see or hear
the thundering waterfall that I am?

I have lotuses growing on my still surface
like stepping stones
of flat jewels, of full moons, of honey cakes.

If you wish the beautific vision
of the saints,
it is here. But stay on the edge where the
stars meet the water.
Underneath, the currents rage like a woman gone
wild, frenzied, writhing, torrential,
hot, and uncontainable...

Courage My Love

Courage My Love grows on you. Eventually it becomes the place where you always stop, browse each week before continuing on to buy fruit and vegetables and other health foods at Kensington Market. Occasionally you buy some silver jewelry, earrings or bangles or a pendant, or sometimes just beautiful loose beads that you'll string later, sometimes a vintage slip or skirt or shirt. You'll always touch the jingly silver dancer's belts, for belly dancers or strippers perhaps. You'll run your fingers through the sheer silk scarves from the 50s in the basket on the floor, knowing the last time you bought one it developed moth holes and so you can't again. But touching is okay. You'll admire the silk kimonos hanging almost out of reach, their elegant patterns, cloud-dance colours. You'll look through the dress shirts, dozens of them, wondering if they'll all sell and be worn again. In the Winter you always run your hands through the cashmere, some of the sweaters in mint condition; in the Summer through the silk or cotton skirts. You'll remember the styles of bygone eras; the way women fit themselves to the lines of then current design that is now retro-in. You'll silently talk to the primitive masks on the walls from obscure parts of the world about where they've been, what they're doing here now, where they'll end up. You might ask whoever's behind the counter where the turquoise rings in the jeweler's case came from, or the rich amber bracelets. And you'll see calm browsers like yourself or shoppers who have that hungry look, searching for an item, a bargain, of which there are lots, or something to make them feel fresh and new again. And you'll always find a small satin bag for a semi-precious stone or a tiny carved box or an exquisite card or even some incense if you need to take something with you for the rest of the day like an amulet.

Tristan and Iseult...

It wasn't that Tristan and Iseult were victims of a love potion that they couldn't remove from the DNA of their cells once eros had altered their chromosomes. It wasn't that they were enslaved to their passion for each other without choice because the potion had altered them forever, opened them to each other fully and definitively and without respite. It wasn't the potion at all. That was a myth. Iseult's mother didn't make a love potion for her daughter and her amour (oh, she knew they would inadvertently drink it on the voyage from Ireland to Cornwall) so they could be trapped in unredeemable desire for each other. She knew that their hearts had already opened to each other. She hoped the love potion would encourage them to follow their passion for each other. But it didn't work. What was wrong with Tristan and Iseult was that they were always trying to do the 'right' thing, to 'please' everybody but themselves: King Mark who Iseult marries, Iseult of the White Hands who Tristan marries, though Kaherdin negotiates as Iseult of the White Hands' brother and Tristan's friend and attempts to help him choose between his divergent loyalties to a peaceful unified state or to his heart. Because of the choice Tristan and Iseult made, to serve others, they found no relief, no solace, no blessing in their love for each other. And their tragedy unfolded and they eventually died because of the jealousy incited among those they tried to live by the rules of convention for...

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Pre-Raphaelite Tristan & Iseult painting by Anonymous: www.angelfire.com/me2/legends/Artpage2.html

On Uncertainty...

I've been wanting to write on uncertainty for a few days, and this has emerged, a prose poem, philosophical, in the dream-time...

"Make your own flute, and learn to play it from the innermost center of who you are, play it from you soul... the woman who loves your song, as you love hers, is the one." Tony Macasaet

Floating on the face of existence, wide ocean of unknowing, do the waves bring us closer, draw us to each other? In the darkness of our isolation, our lives, their solitary attachment to the energy of it all, we can live together, we can die together, but still we are born and die alone. There can be no escape from it. Together and apart, fathom this in the dark sea around us.

In the dream from which I wake in the hot night, we are lying next to each other, sheets over bare bodies, comfortable, touching, on a bed floating in a vast and dark ocean; we can hear water lapping to the edges of all the horizons around us. We are illumined in the night, diffuse spotlights, chiaroscuro lighting, a golden sepia whiteness, our faces warm and content, the soft white pillows we rest on.

Finding closeness in the vast uncertainty, we can agree on this beauty, even as we gaze into the darkness glimmering with stars.

There is comfort in unknowingness.

In the closeness of love in the vast unknowing.

Writing and Line Drawing © 2005 by Brenda Clews