beautiful monsters

Luo ye gui gen

“Falling leaves return to their roots.”

I’m not sure if this proverb means that once worn out, people return to where they came from, or if it means that the old falls down and becomes nourishment for the continuation of growth. Either way, I like the sentiment.

My folio for Writing the Landscape was called “Leaf Trace,” and leaves (as in an pieces of trees, pages of books, but also departures) recurred frequently throughout the pages. Although the class focussed on landscape writing, we took a very broad definition of “landscape.” Many of my poems were about the landscape seen through the lens of human emotions.

In the middle of two sections of poems I included a series of prose extracts from my Costa Rican piece. I couldn’t put the whole piece into my non-fiction folio, so I pulled out a few landscape orientated extracts to put in Leaf Trace. One of these extracts was the first half of this (probably slightly rewritten). No, it’s not about the landscape, but in my view it’s not less about the landscape than most of the pieces in my folio. It’s partly about the first time I ever visited a tropical jungle. Ok, so that doesn’t turn out to be the focus, but that’s part of the point. And, as with many of the poems in my folio, I tried to use the landscape in subtle ways to convey emotions that I may not have been able to express myself. The tangle of trees, the snuffling of animals, crying of birds…

Anyway, one of the assessors questioned whether the piece belonged appropriately in a landscape folio. It came as a shock, and overwhelmed the central purpose of the piece, the exploration of landscape.

But for me… that piece was an integral part of my folio. The whole body of work was about the way that the landscape is seen by someone who is experiencing grief, loss or trauma. Even the less explicit pieces;

I remember
the rain

dark smudges
of macrocarpa

mountain dissolving
into clouds

fat droplets
on the tips of branches

a deluge of white
petals on the lawn.

That’s one of the ghazals from the first section of my folio, and it’s about some of the things noticed during an incident of sexual abuse when I was a child.

When something painful has happened, it’s often the landscape that I will remember in later years. When I think of a little baby dying, I picture magnolias and jasmine. When I think of the incident in the jungle, I remember of the sound of the birds in the pre-dawn darkness. Wind, stones, falling leaves, all these things carry traces of sadness as well as beauty.

Posted by Fionnaigh at November 30, 2003 09:01 PM