beautiful monsters

Winter

Most of all, I remember the rain. Dark smudges of macrocarpa, and the mountain dissolving into white. In the garden, fat droplets gathering on the tips of branches, and bruised petals clinging to the grass. Inside, warm light, and the sound of the rain clattering on the roof.

Then, it seemed as if winter stole back overnight. The lawn was frozen, the sun barely reached above the horizon. Sparrows huddled together, perfectly still, like stone cherubs with their numb fingers thrust under their armpits.

Even in winter the garden was beautiful. There were camellias flowering, witch hazel and wintersweet, and rows of paperwhites beside the driveway. But everything was so still, a world sculpted from ice.

And at the centre of it all, something changed inside me. The temperature of my blood dropped, the breath froze inside my lungs. I moved through an eternal winter. Even the rain was as still as ice.

Poetry

I spent the last of my overdraft funds on “Summer” by Jenny Bornholdt. For those of you who aren’t from Aotearoa and haven’t heard of Jenny, she is (according to the back of the book) one of New Zealand’s most accomplished and widely read poets.

The poems in this collection don’t have quite the same shivers down the spine quality of her earlier work, but they are nonetheless very satisfying. In some ways “Summer” is more interesting than some of her earlier books.

Jenny has taken to using rhyme in some of her poems. I tend to have an allergic reaction to rhyme, but in most cases Jenny manages to pull it off. There were one or two moments when I struggled with what felt like a forced rhyme.

Most of the book is about the Summer Jenny spent in Menton, in the South of France, on a literary fellowship. I felt the most successful part of the book was the first section, poems about the previous summer, “the summer that wouldn’t go,” when Jenny’s father was dying. The poems in this section are beautiful and moving. “Pastoral” is particularly touching (We watched all night / and just as colour / leaked into the sky / all light left him / and day rolled up and / over us).

I still think “Being a Poet” is delightful. Another favourite is the six page poem “Confessional.”

Reading over that part of the poem, sitting in the ancient
green deckchair outside the writing room in the shade

of the early morning, I look up and down he comes
again, as if summoned (hey, how about that, I would say

if I were American). About ten rungs down, he stops
and I imagine takes in the view of the soft, still

Mediterranean – one of the boys said this morning It looks
like you could get a white crayon and draw all over it -

then he reached for the red T-shirt slung over his shoulders
and it fell, down through the circle of the ladder like…

like what? Like a red T-Shirt falling down the inside
of a crane. Someone on the ground is whistling.

*

While I was curled up with Summer I was inspired to start a poem… and another… Yay! The drought has ended. I can still write poetry.

Jenny sometimes featured in my psychotic episodes, which is kind of weird. Gawd, I don’t know if I should be writing this, I’d be mortified if it ever got back to her. I think it was probably a mix of things going on in my subconscious. Firsly, I really admire Jenny, and I think I felt guilty about this, I think I felt I liked her “too much.” And secondly, writing has become so important to me, and I started to feel paranoid about “losing” it somehow. So these things got churned over in my subconscious, and I started to believe that Jenny (along with other poets) was angry with me, because she could read my thoughts, and she was going to take away my voice. Something like that anyway. I’m carefully using the past tense here, because I’m optimistic that nothing like that is going to happen again. And I’m sure Jenny isn’t really angry with me, I have it from a reliable friend that she is a truly lovely person. Pity she went and got married, children and everything. Three of them now. Gosh.

This is a picture of the tattoo on my back. Someone asked to use the bird picture from my old blog as the basis for a tattoo, and I started daydreaming about getting a new one. But I’m not sure what, or where, and I can’t afford it right now. Sigh. But I like to daydream about it anyway.

Posted by Fionnaigh at April 16, 2003 04:17 PM