Why Poets Think (erroneously) They are Unread, Pt. I

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Elaine Stirling, magical realism, medieval fixed verse, narrative poetry, sestina

A priestess from the Samarkand for whom a tree
with poison thorns is named, invited me
to stay awhile, for free, inside her cave
because she’d heard a group of four
were on the move again, a loopy convex
band distorting what has long been true.

I’ve heard of you, she said, circling me. Is it true
you’re resurrecting form, pinning poems to every tree
you see? Not quite, I said, hoping not to vex
my esteemed host. Not every tree allows me
to post poetry. Who are these loopy four
you speak of? Am I safe inside your cave?

For now. What gathers in authentic and concave
assemblages has always served the poet true.
It’s when you leave my hallowed ground the four
begin their mischief. While you’re here, my tree
of venomed thorn will listen and protect you. As for me,
I’ve business in the city. Pay heed to those who vex

you while you write. A prick, she laughed, doth vex
and pleasure both. I settled in. The roomy cave
was cool, the implements she’d given me
were of the highest quality. I wrote both true
and fictional until I heard strange noises from the tree,
a kind of hissy groaning in a slow four-four.

I crept outside, curious about the distorting four
I did not know by name. The bluish convex
glow of moon cast rippling shadows on the tree;
the comfort I had felt inside began to cave.
Spiky thorns six inches long looked true
to form and deadly. I did not feel like me.

A kind of beetle shell slipped over me.
I longed to spy, seek out some enemies. Four
or forty-four, who knew? Intelligence I hoped was true
suggested that someone out here sought to vex—
but couldn’t while I worked inside the holy cave.
I ran back in and heard a wailing from the tree.

A spy who looked like me was caught next day, convex,
her four limbs tied in agony behind her near the cave.
An untrue poet, she had pinned her work to the wrong tree.

to be continued…

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
More of the gorgeous cave images can be found here.

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One Stroke

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Elaine Stirling, Horacio Quiroga, Jules Michelet, light erotica, love poems, magical realism, nagual

Man hunts and struggles. Woman intrigues and dreams;
she is the mother of fantasy and of the gods.
She possesses second sight, wings that permit her to fly
toward the infinite of desire and imagination…
Gods are like men: they are born and die on a woman’s breast.

—Jules Michelet

~~~

But man, too, intrigues and dreams.
I know this to be true
because of you

because of you
feathered god, who
with one stroke of your feather

the pearls that I scattered
in gutters and sties
the pollen I blew
into angry men’s eyes
the syrup I dribbled
the platters I cracked
to uphold disingenuous
plots

reassembled
to banquets
and breakfasts in bed
with a long-lashed lover
who knows his Quiroga
while honey bees swoon
spilling marigold
nuggets

and the slop yards
I ran from
with one stroke
of your feather
have reclaimed
their true nature
as houses of treasure—

and now you’re not
writing love poems.

Well, that same
feathered god whose
wingspan we share
has sent me
to tell you
the breast
you will die on
can’t find you.
She aches.

One stroke,
one stroke
is all
she will need.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Translation of J. Michelet, © E. Stirling, 2014

Dreaming Gabo

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acrostic sestina, Elaine Stirling, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, homage, Latin American writers, magical realism, medieval fixed verse, poetry

Let us speak of love
Openly in the streets where myth
Vanquishes hard truth, and stories course
Eternally like tendrils of a vine.
I’ll learn again to disregard no dream
Naturally, to avoid reality’s cold hosts.

The gossips crow today of hosts—
How faithful, how devout to godly love,
Excepting fellow man; but in your dream
They flourish, flawed, woven through the myth
In which the hummingbird protects the vine.
Macondo breathes, and soldiers know, of course,

Enemies in politics and sex direct the course
Of every man, while fever born of tropics hosts
Fierce calumnies that twist what is divine.
Ghosts, they coincide us, fleshed by love
And fecund women who secrete pure myth
Between their limbs to fuel the shaman’s dream.

Oh, I’ve no quarrel with the torpid dream;
Grist shines in every form, each course
And rivulet propels Creation’s myth.
But let us tolerate no disappointed hosts
Riven by the tales they tell of wearied love.
Instead, let’s propogate a strong new vine!

Ecstatic, we are labourers of fruit and vine
Laid back in hammocks where the dream
Gathers sinew from the sins of love
And funerals like weddings run their course,
Respiring through the sleepy childhood hosts
Colombia revived in you. This myth

Is universal, plumb. Adopted myth
And native-born, we all grow from the vine
Mysterious and drop our seed where hosts
Act fast to stimulate the better-tasting dream,
Remembering that preference guides our course
Quite ably when we speak perforce of love.

Upending myth, you show me where the dream
Excises from the vine, fermenting new realities whose course,
Zero tolerant of rudeness, hosts exuberant varieties of love.

~~~

An acrostic sestina contains a hidden vertical message, which I’ve made easier to read by capitalizing the first letter of every line. Readers and adorers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) will understand the wordplay.

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

Speak to Me of Novels, Mr. Greene

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Elaine Stirling, Graham Greene, imagination without limits, literary cross-discipines, magical realism, narrative poetry, novel writers, poetry, the creative process

Graham Greene, novelist, (1904-1991)

Speak to me of novels, Mr. Greene,
those vast terrains you seeded from
misfired sparks and neural floods,
unmitigated impulses that laid out
end to end today, we’d medicate,
eradicate, restoring you to moral
and to level, playing, boring,
disenchanted fields.

I’ve heard it told by one
who knew a clerk who kept
your cover on the western coasts
of Africa that novelists are further
down the road of disingenuous
than spies. We must be without
shame a fugitive, outrunning
fusillades of politic, pretending
faiths until we know the rites by
heart—though yours you never
dropped—refraining from the urge
to boast. There is no greater
theft or flagrant waste, you said,
than stealing from a character
her actions and her words to win
a spate of praise. The glory days
of one who writes long fiction
live within; she radiates.

Speak to me, kind sir, of pace
and plot, the boldness that it takes
for witnessing and laying out
and never stepping in. How do
I plug the holes, endure?
And you explained: let no one
judge, come near the planes
of your terrarium. Their imprints
and their breath will only fog
and kill the shoots; your world
is one apart and must be so,
yet be more real than any
but the truest kiss.

And now I hope
you will not take amiss,
Moiselle, I step again into
the borderlands where first
we met. Remember what to
keep, when to forget, and how
to see anew. I will say this
of your composure, in the hindsight
of our pleasure, you have much
of greater worlds and souls
than mine yet to compose.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

Castles our Imagination

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brave new business leadership, Elaine Stirling, magical realism, poetry, The Corporate Storyteller

Every room a mansion
we were promised, you and I,
with ceilings high enough
to float, a moat for fishing
and to draw fine bridges on;
vaults of redwood cross
the sky and firepits for roasting
meats and marshmallows
and villagers, communal
thought you’ve gathered who’ll
protect you with their lives—
these are the multitudes
and sum of you, resounding
to the borders and beyond.

You would create? Throw
off that cloak of sad apology!
What need have you of crawl
space? You are human-formed,
upright, and none of us is paid
enough to disabuse you of
the preludes and grim epilogues
you self-allot. Vermin, who would
rob you of your few remaining
crumbs—for Nature, she wastes
nothing—know not where your
treasure or fresh baking lie.

But you, my friend, somehow
forgot, so fixed upon what you
have not. The shadow puppet
show was but an afternoon—
reality’s gargantuan and brings
his own solutions in a bag of
beans. You have no fear
of large, have you?

And so, I send this letter
from my castle cross the skies
to yours, full knowing that
my dragon, freed now from
his dungeon, will navigate
between what clouds of
awkwardness remain or fly
straight through and zap them.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image is of Neuschwanstein Castle
in South Bavaria.

Pages Ripped from the Secret Diaries of a Blocked Writer

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American novelists, divisiveness, Elaine Stirling, fertility gods, flash fiction, humour, irreverence, magical realism, prose poetry, purple prose, soft porn spoof, the myth of writing block, the nature of time, Tom Robbins

The following contains mild profanity and euphemisms. Reader discretion is advised.

—how would I write if All the Time in the World showed up, uninvited, and offered herself to me? Would I push her away, saying, “Sorry, no time”? Argue in defense of not enough?

This is why I don’t…
This is why I can’t…
This is why I haven’t…

Or would I truly hear her name, All the Time in the World? See her where she stands before me, berry-blushed and naked, legs apart, arms open, a smile playing on lips that make me want to…

Make me want to
Make me want to
Make me want to

…rush. Her lips, slightly open, and all the rest of her make me want to rush. The hammer of my accelerating heartbeat gives my urgency away, while the hair on my arms and other vital parts rise.

All the Time in the World moves closer. I can smell the sandalwood and cedar musk of her. A breeze picks up from somewhere to my left and lifts the corkscrew curls of her reddish-brown hair. The slope of her collarbone, a pair of apostrophes above two cherry pips on sundaes take me back to banana splits at Woolworths with Shirl Hedlock where I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out, and then her family moved to West Chester, and I never saw the east-west chest of Shirl Hedlock again.

All the Time in the World wrapped her arms around me. I’m aware of being inconsistent in my tenses. Does she know I’m tense? Present, past and future are balling up in my head like the pungent rolling prize of a scarab. Maybe the hard-working dynastic bugs of old were trying to impress scarab pharaohs, Nefertiti queen beetles, competing for the biggest—shit! If I don’t get serious about my writing soon—

“No, no, no, screw serious! You’re doing fine.”

All the Time in the World pokes my sweaty diaphragm with a cocked finger, and I tip like a bowling pin, like a bottle of milk left on the porch in a sudden squall, onto the bed where I’d been lying and thinking and lying to myself, “I will never write again.” Now, All the Time in the World is lying on top of me, and while I’m having trouble remembering what comes after exhale, lush, ripe pomegranate prose starts pouring out…

~~~

Author’s Note: While debates with no hope of solution at their present level of thinking zing across the airwaves, dividing us in disillusioned heaps of politics, religion, sex and how we orient our sex, a fertility god walks the earth. His name is Tom Robbins. The American novelist, author of Jitterbug Perfume and Skinny Legs and All, among others, navigates a fine, humourous, invigorating line between all of our insanities. For forty-plus years, Robbins has been penning phrases that are seemingly innocuous, setting them in scenarios so absurd you feel like you’ve found a piece of meteorite or the Meaning of Life. The phrase that got me sprinting to my keyboard this a.m. comes from Tom’s 1971 novel (his first) Another Roadside Attraction. “The uncomfortableness of associations” doesn’t sound like much, I know. As with all Robbins’s work, you have to be there—but only if you want to. In the tradition of the best gods and goddesses, he doesn’t seem to give a flying rip one way or the other.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013