Transubstantiation: Katrina, 2005

I apologize for the bleakness of this poem..

Transubstantiation: Katrina, 2005

When the storm hurricanes
blowing a city apart
then impasses breached
when the inland river flows over
containing levees
and brings the flooding ocean back
and death rises
against the attics of redemption
against the attics of wood and tile and tar
where last breaths, last rites
before drowning
in the communion cup
New Orleans became.

Of storm water
debris of ruin and bodies
excrement and chemicals
and the wailing
loss, wailing
in the diminishing wind.

Twenty thousand in the Superdome
stranded, the unescaped
awaiting welfare checks
that were washed away.
Carnage of a city,
so much death.

The Holy Communion of New Orleans,
what the fundamentalist
administration
chose to ignore,
in the richest country in the world.
People starving, senseless dying.
Freedom of all citizens to
inalienable rights, stripped;
democracy nailed on a cross
broken floating on flood waters.

Days
without help.
Helpless
days.

The shock and horror
of being black, racial minorities
poor, destitute, suffering
in the windless silence,
the swirling storm
not even a memory in the clear sky.
And the deaf posturing of the high priests
of Washington.

A city underwater.
A city drowning
in the sins of a country.

A city of death, swollen with
drownings
disease, fetid, slow evacuation.

America, take this chalice
of holy flooded water,
remember how monstrous
you have become,
and drink.



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NY Times: "A disaster of Biblical proportions..."
Globe and Mail: The Flagging Empire
Women's e News article on Rape Victims; Charmaine Neville's video on the horror of the rape and killing, abandonment by the administration, and survival: Survivor's Story

On the edge of not knowing. The flow forward about to begin. Knowing without surity. Already the energy has begun its motion; already the future is in place. Yet it hasn't happened yet.

She sips a cappuccino under the green awning. An empty cigarette pack falls to the ground. A tiny Chinese lady pushes a shopping cart with a hundred yellow plastic buckets stacked in three leaning towers. The musician playing the guitar strums bluegrass in a straw hat and a pale cream linen suit. It is a cloudlessly sunny Summer day, not humid, perfect. People are casual, happy. Life is easy on a Sunday in the city - Kensington Market is closed off to traffic and there is an ambling street festival of musicians, dancers, food, shopping.

Does time stop for such moments, these pleasant hours? Even now the future is drawing nourishment, like tendrils of roots in the present. The question I want to ask is, does it happen before it happens? Or are we only and forever creating a lattice of possibilities for the flowering of the future? Even on the edge of.

Finding your creativity in your body, its sensuality…

From Fruitflesh by Gayle Brandeis [paraphrased for women & men who write]:

Relax, perhaps lie on your back, let your breath circulate in your body, “When you feel quiet, open, bring your awareness to the inside of your body. Explore your inner regions, the space inside your skin. Can you feel where your creativity pulses right now? Is it located in your vulva, or phallus, your rib cage, the arch of your foot? What shape does it take? Does it have a colour, a sound, a density?”

I am dreaming my way in. Glimmering rainbows, electrical, channels of energy pulse, throb, unfolding, hovering, swiftly moving currents. Is there a location for this energy? More deeply, envisioning this creative energy, its locus in my body, moving into it---an apex in my vulva, in the folds and membranes, but also floating above like an orchid, sensitive, delicate; and sliding across my thighs, radiating up and down the sides, where my body retains its memory of childbirth, in the skin there, its puckers, spots of cellulite like the remains of a cocoon my babies slid from, losing the elasticity of tight skin, youth, the years of serving others winnowing me, my creativity in the folds of life; sparking in my breasts, curving out from my breath, this place of giving, radiating, the warmth of the loving heart, beating; I feel my creativity rising out of me like a phoenix, rising again and again from the ashes of my existence. And in my graceful hands, in a dream my palms multi-petalled roses exuding softness, tenderness, wild and winsome scent, a lusciousness, hands I barely respect, don’t cradle them, don’t cream them, veins showing like markings of jade across their white skin, but from which everything flows never-the-less; my creativity in my mouth, auras of rubies, sapphires, opals, tourmaline and serpentine and raw diamonds, multi-coloured, rising as if from some volcanic source within; and my creativity flows from behind my eyes, where it is always swirling, thick, dense, blindly seeing the rhythmic music of sounds, images, forming, creating the dance on this caress of canvas, of parchment…

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.

~

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...