The Influence of Serious

Tags

ballade, Elaine Stirling, French medieval fixed verse, poetry, the dog star, W.H. Auden

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
tombs of the sorcerers shatter…?
—W.H. Auden, “Under Sirius”

She had a fear of hooligans
hid money in her bra
always took her vitamins
and loved to talk about the scar
from where they took some organ out. The jar
of her remains was sledged and pressed
to inlaid script on a walnut bar:
I am chased by the state of immediate yes.

Every day he calculates the gains
and losses of his stock. He knows the law
of averages and watches for the evidence
of fraud and computer error. In his craw
resides a rattle, born the day he saw
that awful film about a lottery. In his chest
gather minions of a tumulus star.
I am chased by the state of immediate yes.

Beware, says the astral guide, when choosing religion
or cursing it, for what you think is never far
from what will prove to be. The jinns
of your experience work hard to bar
the opposite of what you want. They war
eternally against the lies of no and less.
In the arriving of life, there is no disallow.
I am chased by the state of immediate yes.

The lines I sketch, the cards I draw
hold steady to my vision’s best,
expanding whatever I think I saw.
I am chased by the state of immediate yes.

~~~

The ballade (not to be confused with the musical ballad) is a fixed form from medieval and Renaissance France. It contains three eight-line stanzas and a four line envoi with a refrain at the end of each.

The rhythm of the final line had been rattling in my head for days and finally came to rest when I found Auden’s poem. I love the galloping urgency he conveys in only seventeen words.

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

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The Peaceable Wobble

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Elaine Stirling, Malayan fixed verse, pantoum, poetry

I’m standing on a giant ball that spins
mostly water, mostly space
you’d think with such a wonder I’d begin
every new day on slightly higher ground

mostly water, mostly space
my heart holds the beat while I navigate
every new day on slightly higher ground
how I viewed things yesterday, who cares?

my heart holds the beat while I navigate
through snickers of cynics who love to recall
how I viewed things yesterday. Who cares
if someone thinks they saw my underwear?

through snickers of cynics who love to recall
past snobs who keep their uppity distance
if someone thinks they saw my underwear
I’ve been known to topple and feel ridiculous

past snobs who keep their uppity distance
I wonder if maybe we’re all just trying
I’ve been known to topple and feel ridiculous
yet where is the harm in a little exposure?

I wonder if maybe we’re all just trying
you’d think with such a wonder I’d begin
yet where is the harm in a little exposure?
I’m standing on a giant ball that spins!

~~~

The pantoum, a traditional Malayan fixed verse, is great fun to write when your thoughts are spinning and you’d like to decelerate. It’s a kind of sudoku with words. My thanks to Mikels Skele, poet and fine thinker, for tweeting “snicker of cynics”. I hope he carries on with his collective noun series. They’re brilliant!

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
The image comes from a site called Just Jared.

The Tangled Sea

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#bringingbacktheglosa, Alain C. Dexter, Elaine Stirling, medieval Spanish fixed verse, narrative poetry

A Glosa

He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat
against the stinging blast;
he cut a rope from a broken spar
and bound her to the mast.

—“The Wreck of the Hesperus”, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the moribund night of a waning moon
on the crags of an island known as Doon
o’ Fara, moves the shadow of a weaver
from thatchéd hut to cliffs of spray and salt.
By day she spins and knits complicated
garments for the discerning and remote.
By all accounts, her wealth cannot be touched
or measured, though she started life as
property of one they called the Stoat.
He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat

and circled her, resentful, day and night.
Whate’er she thought or dreamed, he knew.
He brought her sprigs of violet and skeins
of tangled wool to while away her hours.
He filled her head with tales of dread and
disappointment that sealed her like a cast.
You are my legacy, he’d croon. When I am gone,
you’ll carry on my song of life’s depravity,
wrapped firmly in the wisdom of my past
against the stinging blast.

The weaselly man he traveled far, indulging
endless appetites. To ease his welcome home,
he filled the holds of ships with ivory bits and
wooden masks in such vast quantities that
Fara could not move inside her thatchéd prison.
Some folk say she clubbed him with a bar
of solid gold; others say he met his end
in polar realms—who knows? One day,
she hired a young man home from war.
He cut a rope from a broken spar

and built a sledge, and together they expunged
all traces of the dark controlling Stoat. With every
discard off the cliffs, her mind became more spacious.
The young man went his way, and she, devoted
to the doon, mastered patterns of abundance from
the roiling wind and sea. Eons since have passed,
and only in the darkening moon are glimpses of the
weaver seen. But on certain icy twilights, you may
catch the whiff of him who, loathing freedom, cast
and bound her to the mast.

~~~

You can learn more about the medieval Spanish form called glosa here.

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

The Physick

Tags

Elaine Stirling, Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet, poetry, psychopomps

The physick of a time more violent
than these appeared once to me dream-like in
the night, and with his scalpel shivved the skin
from off my bones in narrow strips. He spent
the next night and a third deeply intent
upon the meat surrounding all I’d been
and done, remarking on my loss of vim.
The construct lives but to your detriment.

Your single hope lies now in letting all
you think you ought to feel to fall away.
Spend your days reconstituting marrow,
letting nothing but the choicest bits enthrall
your spirit who excels in idle play
unnoticed, darting weightless like the sparrow.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

Missing: Poet

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Elaine Stirling, medieval French fixed verse, poetry, Roberto Bolano, triolet

for R.B.

I

The poet has boarded up his lonely streets.
Do not seek him there

where ink dilutes on flapping sheets.
The poet has boarded up his lonely streets,

learned all he could from lazy cheats,
his knuckles chafed, cold schemes laid bare.

The poet has boarded up his lonely streets;
do not seek him there.

II

They whisper him in the Academy
where Góngora was once reviled.

On silver trays, the fear of poverty
is served on ice to huddles of society.

Meanwhile, his poetry, cross-referenced, A to Z,
feeds the unemployed, the homeless child.

They whisper him in the Academy
where Góngora was once reviled.

III

A fresher word for victory is enough,
the poet laughs, of blood and pointless grief.

The artist unafraid to call his bluff
will find the world is built of finer stuff.

Inspiration is best eaten off the cuff—
a squeeze of rhyme, a lick of sweet relief.

A fresher word for victory is enough,
the poet laughs, of blood and pointless grief.

~~~

The triolet is an 8-line fixed verse form that was popular in the courts of medieval France. The image of Roberto Bolaño comes from http://www.fanpix.famouspix.com.

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

Rough Draft

Tags

Elaine Stirling, poetry

If I could let the sordid scene
of angry and defeated men
unravel like the fraying hem
of curtains in old Bethlehem

If I could test the limits of
a gentler, more indifferent love
by pressing less upon the clutch
and slowing on the wider curves

I might discover scenery
in process of new greenery
smell maple buds and not so much
the acid of distending nerves.

If I could learn it’s not too soon
to hope with some authority
that glimpses of a brighter noon
are gleaming from humanity

I might be less inclined to swoon
at every seeming tragedy
or at the very least disdain
from jumping on the nearest train—

—to Bedlam and cheap perfidy.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

Where I See Good

Tags

#CharlieHebdo, #jesuischarlie, #MarcheRepublicaine, Elaine Stirling, French medieval fixed verse, Paris Rally, poetry, rondeau

A Rondeau for Paris

Where I see good, but for a day
with millions strong finding a way
to transcend ignorance and fear,
marching united, we are here—
with these fine hearts, my own shall stay.

A kind of comic grief at play
sweeps through us with relief today.
New friends appear, where I see good.

So let me no more seek the fray
of pessimists and cynics’ gray
myopic views of yesteryear.
Intelligence and vision clear
are child’s play, where I see good.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

First Time I Heard the Word “Infidel”

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, Elaine Stirling, essay, Paris, political asylum, religious experiences, UNHCR

In my first grown-up, career job, at the tender age of 22 or 23, I had the privilege of facilitating refugee hearings for people seeking political asylum in Canada. I felt like the luckiest person alive, being able to hear stories of survival and perseverance, and to be a representative of the Canadian government. I’d only just returned from traveling in Europe where a maple leaf and/or blondeness opened up pretty much every door. I am also the granddaughter of immigrants. I felt that I was doing good work.

The events this week in Paris reminded me of a Middle Eastern family who were seeking asylum. During our initial conversations, in preparation for the hearing, I found the parents to be warm and delightful. Their homeland was embroiled in civil war. I could feel how painful it was for them to leave everything behind and throw themselves at the mercy of a nation not their own.

Part of my task required that I obtain an Arabic-speaking interpreter. When I informed the couple that I had an interpreter and we were good to go, the husband asked me for the person’s name. An odd request, I thought, but I told him. There was an awkward silence on the phone. “Please find someone else,” he said. “Your interpreter is an infidel, and he will not translate in a trustworthy manner.”

I had never heard the word “infidel” before. I thought he meant that the interpreter was agnostic, something one could hardly gather from hearing a name. I tried to assure him that all of our interpreters were unbiased and well qualified. After he explained, I said, in my rosy naivete, “But it’s all the same God.” In the end, I had to find someone else…a “fidel”.

I don’t recall whether the family’s claim was successful, and it doesn’t matter. What stayed with me, though, is how much distrust and worst case scenario thinking we drag around with us, even when the opportunity for something better stands right before our eyes. Their children would be about the age of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. Each of us grows where we’re planted. Some of us never get the twists out. I offer these flowers, focused and unfocused, in tribute to all who are suffering today.

~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2015

Halo Round the Moon

Tags

Elaine Stirling, poetry

There’s a halo round the moon
tonight that springs
a subtle catch, a clasp
around the neck, a testament
between the old and new
a bull whose eye on Gilgamesh
has never blinked

too pale a mark
for disenchanted hunters
whose Beatitudes have frozen
either/or to sermon or to fine ground
lens and petri dish—what has
become of Artemis?

while mixing myths, the iris
of the cobalt space and I
are one and same, still science
of the priest-king predicates
upon his subjects: silver torque
and centrifuge conspire to separate
the monarch from the wild man
who fumes outside the city walls
uprooting forests of old meaning
for the key to sweet longevity

but all he finds are cataracts
in sad decline, no force, no flood,
no aim to storm the gates

and so he thumps
upon this bolted door in hopes
that someone, anyone—it might
as well be me—will rouse and rise,
consent to step outside and claim
the torque of full authority, admit
the blush of true originality, accept
as mine the hallowed ring, the halo
crystalline that rests around
the moon tonight.

~~~

Note: The original definition of Beatitude, from the Latin beatitudo, is consummate bliss. To beatify is to make supremely happy.

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Image of the moon halo comes from Farmer’s Almanac.

The Village in my Mother’s Head

Tags

Elaine Stirling, Fernando Pessoa, heteronyms, medieval French fixed verse, poetry, villanelle

A Villanelle

The village in my mother’s head
controlled her heartstrings and her purse,
withheld approval, dispensed dread.

Anyone who looked ahead
risked their wrath and learned to curse
the village in my mother’s head.

Mannequins of silk and lead,
obsessed with piety, perverse,
withheld approval, dispensed dread.

God rest her soul, my mother’s dead.
With all her errors now reversed,
the village in my mother’s head

sees her loved ones clothed and fed,
inspires every joyful, silly, complex verse.
Withheld approval, dispensed dread,

kaput! Edicts from a clearer head
encourage me, “Be plural like the universe!”*
The village in my mother’s head
withheld approval, dispensed dread.

*The quotation, “Be plural like the universe,” comes from one of my favourite poets, Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under dozens of heteronyms, which are pseudonyms with their own lives and identities. Whitman declared himself to contain multitudes. Buoyed by their audacity, I pulled Alain C. Dexter from my own village to be a protagonist and author.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Photograph by author