The House & other Arctic musings

Thirteen ways

A poet I follow, mostly on his channel (stack?) Poetry Unbound on Substack, is Pádraig Ó Tuama. In his latest post he speaks about Wallace Stevens' excellent poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and the entire genre of poetry it inspired. If you are unfamiliar with the poem you really should search it out. 

In his post Pádraig asks: What it is that you feel the need to have 13 ways of looking at? 

No need, but it did inspire me to pick a topic and write my own Thirteen Ways poem.  Many topics it could be but it might not be a surprise that near the end of the journey of building a cabin I wrote... Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Cabin

I

Tent rings border this cabin
Ancient lives
Also knew the beauty of this place

II

Sawdust coats my face
And slivers hide in my skin
A sore back belies
How much joy building a cabin brings

III

A cabin looks small
Against this land

IV

When the saw stops
Silence begins appropriating
This space
In answer, out before the cabin,
Narwhal exhale
Stars wink on

V

I see the flaws I made
The joint not tight
The moulding covering a mistake
Phoenician flaws
Because the cabin’s beauty
Lies not in perfection

VI

Crossing the river
Ravens circle me
My blackbirds
So stopping on the far side
They also pause
Raucously giving me news
Telling me it wasn’t them
That shit on the cabin’s window

VII

He paddled here,
Nuvumiutaq.
In a qajaq
Made of skin.
Eight hundred years
Before I sought his ghost
Looking out
from a cabin
Made of wood

VIII

Avingaq is my son
And a lemming.
It wonders why
I built a cabin
On it’s meadows.
The lemming. 
My son knows.

IX

An iceberg
Blocks the view
The blue
Lights the cabin
And dances.

X

Time slows
On the cabin deck
You can see it in the light

XI

Bare rafters bathed in gold
The entire coast in colour
Pipit calls from the peak
Air is cold but the cabin
Covered in warmth

XII

Hare knows
There is no danger
In my footsteps
On the snowy climb up
He stands stoic
As I reach the cabin
Closing his eyes
As I pass

XIII

The bones of this place
Run deep
To the beginning of time
And the first
To sit where sits the cabin
And watch whales play

Politics

How can I, that moon hanging there, 
My attention fix
On American, or Russian, 
Or Canadian politics? (With apologies to W.B. Yeats)

This past Saturday found me in a bad mood. I was grumpy, and irritable. And though I recognized that I was part way through the day it did nothing to mitigate it. Every mve the dogs made annoyed me, just being seemed to get on my nerves. 

I understand that a huge part of this is the state of the word right now. These are dark times, and the future looks even darker.  I've remarked before (not here) that this must be what it felt like to live in Austria in 1936.  I'm unsure what the world my children and grandchild will live in. And this mood persisted. 

Late that evening I was watching the FireAid concert from Las Angeles, and P!nk was performing. And as I was listening I was thinking what a beautiful powerful voice she had. And that flipped the script. Beauty. I felt the negativity begin to recede. The joy of music. 

And then I replayed my trip to the cabin earlier.  As short as it was.  The cabin was too cold to do the last little bit of painting we had planned, so it was a matter of refilling the generator and making plans to return the next day. The air was cold and still and hanging in a blue sky, rimed with gold on the horizon, was Venus and, below it a thin crescent moon. Two bright lights, existing only for my pleasure in that moment. What a universe we live in.

And thinking back at that moment I thought "how can I?..." how can I be in this mood when, as terrible as it is the world is still filled with beauty. And with "how can I?" Yeats' poem sprung to mind. And I appropriated it. 

Yeats' poem "Politics" was written at a time of upheaval in the world as well.  The Spanish Civil War was happening, and Hitler was consolidating his hold on power and changing the world. Times that feel not unlike our own right now. Disquieting troubling days. 

Politics (by William Butler Yeats)

How can I, that girl standing there, 
My attention fix, 
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about, 
And there's a politician
That has read and thought, 
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms, 
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

Poetry inaction

So, I haven't done a thing since reactivating the blog. And perhaps that's another thing I need to work on.  I truly miss the communities that sprang up around blogging. 

One thing I've done more of since leaving this place has been to try my hand at poetry.  I've long wished I could express myself that way, and like many things get frustrated that I'm not instantly great at them. I want to be great, to be able to put in words what many people can only feel. But... I'm not. And that's okay. I'm finding my way, and, as I've discovered, I need to create. Something. Photos. Poems. A script. A cabin (more on that coming). 

One day, some time ago. I was chatting with my sister. She was on holidays and I asked how the birding was going. She replied that it was raining and I texted back "Birds disappear in the rain". That line seemed to want to be a poem, so I quickly jotted down one. And texted her with it. Perhaps five minutes later. 

Birds cease to exist when it rains,
their form begins to fade at the first drops
the feathers blur, ever hazier
until you can see through them,
like waves of heat in the desert.
But if you strain, a song remains
somewhere in the ether.

Not much, but it was a start. And it came to define my process, as flawed as it might be. A line, a word, something that unfolds in front of me, will want a poem built around it. And I will quickly bang it out. I rarely edit or labour over it. Write it down and call it done. 

That first poem didn't lead to much, and eventually I decided that I needed to drive myself some how. One of the best bits of advice on writing I had was "write" get it down. Whether it is a screen play or a poem, or perhaps even a blog post. Write. With screenplays I discovered that the best thing that worked for me was to sit down and write it out, start to finish. Then go back and make it better. And even if they will never see the light of day, or the light of a screen, I will have created it. And that, the act of creating something, is the important thing. For me. 

So at some point, a few years ago, I decided that if I would write a poem every Friday. Inspired or otherwise. Write something down. Take a line, a word, something someone had said to me, a bit of light on the horizon, and write a poem. Every Friday. Some times I'd be writing one at five minutes to midnight. To get it on (virtual) paper before Friday had vanished. And it worked. I wrote. I don't necessarily think I wrote well, but I wrote. 

Eventually I gave up my Friday poems, but continued to write as things inspired me, when a muse inspired me, when the light caught my breath, or a curve of skin made me pause. Mostly I write poetry when the moment takes me. And that became my tagline when I post online #PoetryWhenTheMomentTakesMe. 

So there you have it. Here is my latest poem, a rare edited one, as I disliked the final lines. But as all of them, written quickly and done. Formed after watching a Raven wheel to the ground while I was driving somewhere.

It sweeps around
Curving towards earth
Black feathers flared
Against the orange sky
Of a hidden Sun
Is beauty born
In these moments?
On Raven wings
Stretched across heaven?

 

 

Blackbirds

Red-winged Blackbird in snow storm

Blackbird

by C. K. Williams

There was nothing I could have done—
a flurry of blackbirds burst
from the weeds at the edge of a field
and one veered out into my wheel
and went under. I had a moment
to hope he'd emerge as sometimes
they will from beneath the back
of the car and fly off,
but I saw him behind on the roadbed,
the shadowless sail of a wing
lifted vainly from the clumsy
bundle of matter he'd become.

There was nothing I could have done,
though perhaps I was distracted:
I'd been listening to news of the war,
hearing that what we'd suspected
were lies had proved to be lies,
that many were dying for those lies,
but as usual now, it wouldn't matter.
I'd been thinking of Lincoln's
"...You can't fool all of the people
all of the time...," how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

I had to slow down now,
a tractor hauling a load of hay
was approaching on the narrow lane.
The farmer and I gave way and waved:
the high-piled bales swayed
menacingly over my head but held.
Out in the harvested fields,
already disliked and raw,
more blackbirds, uncountable
clouds of them, rose, held
for an instant, then broke,
scattered as though by a gale.