Yet Phoeb, who only hears the vowel,
can charm her with his master bits,
the moving fracas of decay
he thinks is life.
I, too, feel woman’s tenderness
for his long, sloping shoulders, sagging gut,
his tenor voice that seems so sad;
in the refracted light of dusk
he seems to shine.
But he is not safe, my Phoeb, my prince,
my snapper-up of trifles, semi-breve.
The court grows tired of sortilege.
Once crowned he reigns
like a month of April, a fool moon,
and sings as if to wake the world.
But dreamtime ends. The princess sets
the riddle she must always ask
from poetry, her body’s need:
LOVE.
Some things want faith. But Phoeb,
who scrambles all things consonant,
erodently says “vole.”
Encrypted is not clear intent.
His dissolution failed the test.
We rats turned tail and scuttled from the hall.
4. And afterwards?
Phoeb’s bobtailed bits
like dust in moonbeams recombine
into a thousand other things,
living a sort of semi-life, as he does,
in the narratives
of time and change, and change of mind.
The rest of us left the palace for
the ports of rapture, monuments
to transit, concourse than discourse.
The jets loom down. Below the baggage carousels
we lurk, making our food stall forays early dawn,
and live on crumbs and ketchup packs
and the occasional paperback
in faith, sometime, our flight will come
(as yet unnumbered and uncalled).
Back on the farm my sisters hide
uncourted and unheard of, and
unangeled, but
their poetry
like the low lichens of the earth,
lovely, endangered, larcenous,
resists, maintains.
from
THE ALL NIGHTER’S RADIO
THE PICKUP POEMS
We’ll talk about truth and mystery
you won’t see me though
all you’ll see is mountains
Pickup*
1. Economy
Monk, poet, and philosopher,
I live by myself in the high woods.
Cold Mountain they call me. The bell
at the foot of the forest path
is clapperless; hit
it with your fist or crutch.
I might not come.
If you see me I am invisible.
Each mornings the monkeys visit me:
no news. Their treetop voyages
are all one to the mountain,
here or there. When snow comes
I’ll be old. No one
will climb up here to chop my wood.
I’ll go down to the village gate
where a steel drum
keeps fire for the houseless ones,
like the star at the edge of Bethlehem,
that said NO ROOM! NO ROOM!
Beggars must be philosophers.
2. “Millions of Gathas”
I have millions of gathas
instant cures for every trouble.
Pickup
Cures for all curses?
Don’t care!
If I knew more,
would I be talking?
You know already
things are bad.
Like the farmer’s dogs
I bark and bark.
And there’s all that moon.
3. Bodhi Road
They are not thieves, your eyes,
ears, touch.
Listen. Touch.
Look closely
though your fingers burn,
though your eyes sting.
Nothing repeats. Sand,
seed,
riff in a rainbow,
desert pearl,
feather dropped from Noah’s dove,
or a nacrescent
waterdrop,
the candles on Mt. Ararat —
all, all are song.
Caress
this life,
this “Bodhi road.”
4. Fed by the Birds
Fed by the birds. That’s me,
cold poet in my mountain cave.
They boil my rice and bring it up.
I scrub my poems on the floor.
Is that a payment,
kindness,
grant?
Really, they ought to read my stuff,
after all the work they get through,
but
a poet’s like a monk, we say:
you need us, need not think of us,
except for food,
this stony verse.
5. Hermit Poem
My fellows are ghosts:
some distant, some just dead.
Sometimes a letter,
frail as a leaf
in its pencillings —
I’ve reached, sometimes,
for the telephone,
then put it down
(those awkward, counted
silences when
touching would do better)
or
sometimes, in my sleep
I am so sure
so sure
of this good company
I do not keep.
6. There Are So Many Deaths
i
The air is silent;
the wind makes noise.
Let it stream away.
Need, anger, grief —
are noisy for a little while,
but
yield them up.
Like water, flow.
Want nothing, let
silence
fill your emptiness.
ii
The air is silent;
the wind makes noise.
Cloud weathers rattle
the forest leaves.
You, singing in your Granny hat,
flat on your back in the hospital —
your granddaughter conducting us
with a wooden spoon —
there are so many deaths,
but song —
Singing is better than silences!
(And we will sing!)
* * *
* References to The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, by Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and his colleagues Feng-kan (Big Stick) and Shih-te (Pickup), the Hermits of Tientai (8th-9th century Taoist/Buddhists), translation by Red Pine.
Afterword
ON THE LONG POEM
The “long poem” is not a “form,” but it is structurally different from a short poem, insofar as a short poem tends to seize upon a single incident, while a long poem carries on further. In the absence of anything other than duration as a criterion, I propose that a poem which takes at least five minutes to read out loud is long. Thus the poems included in this collected edition.
I have written as many different kinds of long poems as I can, but there are some kinds I don’t: poems that rely heavily on repetition, echo, rhyme, and circularity. Repetition tends to give a sense of the inevitable, and that gives me claustrophobia. Rhymes and echoes give a sense of “finish,” which I rarely want. Poems that end by returning to their beginnings (as coronas do, for example) similarly enclose, repeat, and “finish.” I don’t mind these effects in a short poem which, clinging to a single perception, need not move away from the originating perception — (though it might!) — but a long poem, whether narrative, sequence, or essay, has time to think, develop, revise, or question its opening perception. It carries on further. And it is just that opportunity to re-think that I most value.
To give an example of the re-thinking or re-visioning that I find
valuable in the long poem, consider the first section of “The Seasons.” Summer opens with a declaration of that sense of bliss, plenitude, and good fortune which most of us at one time or another experience. Yet the section ends with the legend of St. Dorothy, a wealthy noblewoman who saw that the peasants outside the castle were starving, and was forbidden by her husband to take bread out to them. She did anyway, covering her baskets with cloth, but he caught her as she was sneaking out and he asked her what she was carrying and she lied, “Roses!” He snatched the cloth off the baskets — and there they were, roses. That “miracle” repositions us: the hungry are not fed. What we had seen in the first stanzas of “The Seasons” as “plenitude” is not enough. All sections of “The Seasons” contain this kind of change, and the poem as a whole ends with a re-visioning of summer’s comfortable “plenitude” with the exhausting and imperfect profusion of spring.
At the same time, as you can see, I don’t think that the conclusion should be wholly unconnected with the beginning of the poem. “‘Cracked’,” melding Dickinson and Melville, begins in distress and ends with escape. The elderly speaker of “Grouse” looks back over her life, loves, opinions — and settles, fairly comfortably, for less. The hymn to Fredericton, “Local Suite,” gradually darkens its images of the city. And so on.
Like so many poets, I am tempted to chatter about the characters, events, that have been gathered into these poems. This really happened, I want to say. (Though you must be a Frederictonian over seventy to recall Bolden’s stained glass window with its “steaming coffee cup.”) That un-autographed photograph album exists; so, too, that cabin and its stories. Yet none of these poems are historically, biographically “true.” I carried further the ideas suggested by the material, and the poems, re-thinking themselves, became long.
M. TRAVIS LANE
Editor’s Notes & Acknowledgements
I would like to thank, above all, my spiritual home: the province of New Brunswick. The other primary thanks I offer is to M. Travis Lane’s poetry. To my comrades in small press who published M. Travis Lane over the years, I cheer you! This book is yours. We did this together. I also offer my thanks to the following people who assisted with the introduction: Carmine Starnino, Jim Johnstone, Alec Follett, and Lorraine York. M. Travis Lane did not view a copy of the introduction prior to the book’s typesetting, so the prose is not officially authorized by her. The opinions expressed therein are my own. I trust a reader would not want things any other way.
I chose not to footnote this text because I think part of the joy of reading poetry is independent discovery. M. Travis Lane was very much in agreement with this decision. She also assents to this explanation of the current volume’s title: taken directly from one of Lane’s long poem masterworks, The Witch of the Inner Wood is meant to be a feminist title. The choice of “witch” is, at first glance, a pejorative word meant to denigrate women; but in Lane’s originating poem, the word is reclaimed, even though an actual “witch” is depicted. This witch creates the larger world in which she lives, but she also creates her own subjectivity, her inner life. Thus a title that seems on initial reading to suggest femininity under attack (as well as a title that could work as a fairy tale) is actually femininity proclaimed within and without. Regardless of political implications, Lane’s complex work is serious, rewarding play, and this is the ultimate signal intended by the title.
I have two wishes: that my mother, Elizabeth Neilson, could witness this book’s publication; and that Dr. Lauriat Lane, M. Travis Lane’s husband, could accompany his wife when she reads from the text. Neither of these wishes is possible, and so they remain somehow the predicate of poetry.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
M. TRAVIS LANE is the author of sixteen books of poetry and has been widely published in literary journals as a poet and critic. She has won the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the New Brunswick Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Bliss Carman Award. Her most recent book, Crossover, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2015. She is a founding member, as well as Honorary President, of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. She also is a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets, where she has participated vociferously in its feminist caucus.
M. Travis Lane lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
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