On the sorbets and Bob Chelmick's voice...
October 6, 2011
I have never been comfortable with the idea of listening to my own writing read back to me. But when Bob Chelmick read last week’s sorbet (Note to an Ancient Poet) on his The Road Home show, on CKUA radio earlier this week, I was stunned at what I heard. It was beautiful, made more beautiful by his gentle reading. I was listening on the laptop and as he began, I stood up and moved across the room. Stood at the edge of the room and listened, and I was moved by my own damned poem. Its prayer-like plea got to me. Crazy huh? Anyway, here’s a link to Bob’s voice. See what you think. Here.
Note to an Ancient Poet isn’t up yet, but poke around and see what you think. Better, listen live…
Here’s this week’s sorbet. It’s a bit of a Haibun — a narrative travel poem with a haiku at the end. Enjoy…
Up on Mt. Shuey
You are nested with five women in a small cabin in the mountains; your
wife, and her mother, her sister, her sister’s daughter, and your daughter.
All the ages of women are represented here, from ten to seventies.
It’s drizzling and there is an estrogen festival in your cabin.
Even though you are in your bliss with these women, you decide to go
for a little excursion. You might step into the woods and immediately
start to climb.
You’ve decided to carry your coffee mug, which is half-filled with scotch,
on this journey. There is a trail but it requires focus. It’s Alberta but it feels
like the West Coast – it feels like an ocean could be near. A mist
hangs in the upper pine boughs like a forgotten ghost of some sad song
from when you were seventeen and in love with that girl but you had
no idea what to do with love – or a girl. Your umbrella is useless.
The trees are too close. You use the umbrella as a walking stick as you
weave steadily up and through the pines.
After half an hour, you decide you will stop climbing in 45 minutes, or
if you run out of scotch, or if you run into snow – whatever comes first.
The mist closes in and makes the mountain smaller than it really is. You
realize making it up to the new snow is optimistic.
Something moves over there, behind those trees. Your scotch probably
smells pretty good to a bear, you think. There’s no way you’re sharing. But nothing emerges. No black mass of fur comes hard out of the misty pines. No mountain lion pounces. Nothing. After this, you decide to talk to the mountain. “Hello Mountain,” you say quite loudly. “This is a wonderful trail. And I’m moving my legs and my breathing is fine. I’m slower than I was but I’m moving up. I’m still moving and that is something. Hey, mountain, your colours are quite something in this rain.”
You take a deep breath.
“And your perfume is brilliant,” you add. You continue to talk to the mountain, filling in the lulls with assumptions about what you think she would have said – ‘Only an idiot would hike up a mountain with a mug of scotch.’ There. Do you see what you just did? You thought of this mountain as ‘woman.’
After 40-minutes, you realize the mist is actually low cloud. This is also the moment you stop in a clearing and hoist your, now useful, umbrella. Up the slope in front of you, is a lone aspen tree with a trifling of leaves clinging golden and sharp and radiant in the fall drizzle. You are almost afraid to move past this tree for fear of disrupting its beauty.
It’s trembling and ephemeral and once.
You are standing beside a boulder – one of the mountain’s children – you decide. At its base are juniper berries turned an amazing periwinkle. This boulder is tinged with lichens and moss. The lichens explode rusty orange and green and sage into your eyes. These colours pop off the deep-grey granite as if they’ve been lit from within. As if, they’ve been saving light all summer for this moment.
You take a sip of your icy scotch and hunker down. You take a bigger sip of your whisky and look around. You can hear the rain tickling the umbrella above your head, and your own breathing and under it all, the pounding beat of your heart.
The cloud encloses everything.
You’d like this moment to linger – this perfect autumn day to be
held in time. To spend a lifetime on the side of this mountain
learning her, understanding her, listening to her. Exploring every
nuance. You want the dissipation – welcome it. And then,
when time is released, there are the women in the cabin, in the valley.
And there is more scotch.
And just like that, the sound of the rain is withdrawn.
it’s deathly quiet
as large flakes fall past your view
the rain turns into snow.
2 Comments
1. Adam Snider had this to say: Oct 07, 2011 ~ 13:03 ~ #
I’ve never been crazy on hearing my own work read by someone else. I am still not fond of what CBC produced when I was published in the Alberta Anthology a few years back. I have this idea what the piece is supposed to sound like, and then I hear it being read in a way that doesn’t jive with my own sense of the piece.
It would be very cool to hear my own poem read in such a way that I almost forget that it was ever mine and can be moved by my own words.