POEM OF THE WEEK: Tunneling

Tunneling 3

TUNNELING
by Christine Hemp

I have found my way down.
Feverish, muddled, I dig
deep through loam and stone.
I jam my bleeding fingers
behind stuck rocks,
my nose dirty, the darkness close.

Burrowing deeper I feel
the earth breathing, her flesh
old pebbles, algae, rotted trunk.
Inside her I can breathe.
Rise and fall, rise and fall.
Even the hands of moles move with her.

Secret springs pulse
to the beat of blood and lung.
I press against the damp cool dark,
far from glare and sounds
of feet and talk.

My eyes grow larger now, burning
wide as miners’ lamps. From every
crack and cleft a tiny rivulet
of sand spills in my path.
It’s deeper

down from here on in: to find
that hidden root, a living course,
the buried seam that joins all things.

IMAGE: photograph by Christine Hemp

Poems and Ponderings

POEM OF THE WEEK: Phone Sax

Claes Oldenburg1992  Lithograph  Soft Saxophone detail
PHONE SAX

Debussy called it that
aquatic instrument.
Here on the very edge

of a continent, the Pacific
pulls down the sun, and
I hear one reed singing.

Brass keys walk the curve
like a wave, and the moaning
makes me want to come

to you, blow across the
states to find those notes
spilling from your horn.

So sue me. What do I know?
Just that a wild riff came
spiraling through the cord

of my green phone,
and for a moment I heard
the Atlantic scale of you.

–Christine Hemp (originally appeared in The Maine Times)
Image: Claes Oldenburg “Soft Sax” (detail) 1992 Lithograph

Poems and Ponderings

POEM OF THE WEEK: The Cutting

 

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THE CUTTING

Even in the dampened folds of my handkerchief
the cutting took hold,
its tendrils clinging to the cotton cloth.
My pocket breathed.

Though I left the forest the way I’d come,
things had changed: salmon berries dripped
their pinky-orange beyond the bush;
rhododendrons bloomed so white I had to look away.

My leg brushed a fern,
I recognized the whisper I thought I had
forgotten long ago.
Fir needles sang beneath my feet.

Cedar bark and fungus scent followed me
down the path to home.
I knew mosquitoes watched me leave.
Inside my shirt the cutting moved.

I planted the shoot in a clay pot and left it
in my living room; I shut the door behind me.
After several days I woke to the song of the thrush
and I could hear the ticking

Of flickers’ beaks against the wood. Strange smells
seeped out from under the door. Skunk cabbage and scat.
Little beards of moss were pushing through the keyhole.
I began to hear the rain.

–Christine Hemp

originally published in Explorations,
University of Alaska Southeast 
IMAGE: photograph by Christine Hemp

So it’s Labor Day weekend. The swallows’ departure and the arrival of the flying red ants tell us that summer is over. New lunchboxes, a set of Crayolas, and tight shoes replace inner tubes, tree camps, and bicycles. This week’s poem is for all children (young and old) who hate to leave summer behind…

 

Poems and Ponderings

POEM OF THE WEEK: Contraries

 

Ohlke Detail

CONTRARIES

Yesterday, for instance, on the lake
we saw two otters slip out and wrestle on the rocks.
Their slick joy carried the August day. Until
someone pointed. A merganser spun

through the reeds, flapping madly at the air,
unable to lift and leave its pain behind.
Riding out this evening, the sunset
molten clay, the lake dented

with waves, I thought, How can ecstasy
and sorrow stand side-by-side in my heart? Love
and fear hot as evening clouds. The spillway
holds them both. Why this boundary

of flesh? We landed on an island. Green lichen
fuzzed the rocks. We ate June berries and John said,
“It’s a pome!!” as he dropped one in his mouth. I nodded
“yes!” thinking he’d said “poem.” “A fruit —

but not a fruit,” he said and smacked his lips.
The world shifted again.
Ojibways call them Spirit Trees, the pines that grow
straight out of rock. Bad luck to cut one down.

They thrive on air and barren ground, yet stretch
their arms across the water, blessing everyone
who passes. We brushed up next to one, then
toppled in the boat, and roared across the choppy lake.

A rainbow hugged the islands and I prayed
that I would get to grow and not be felled
by storms or someone’s careless hand, that I could be
a pine making its living out of stone.

–Christine Hemp

Image: Katie Ohlke, Detail: Day Trip from Artists Camp

 

Poems and Ponderings

POEM OF THE WEEK: Surrender

Stay Back

 

SURRENDER

Just like that truck on the exit ramp, I see
the S-curve too late and my load inside begins
to shift: A slumber party of fresh pears falling
over themselves in the dark, their ambrosial scent
the first hint of ruin. It’s not the pedal
but momentum that pitches me up and over
the guardrail. The bay below rises like a Baptism.
All those pears in concert roll forward and the whole
rig aches between the fruit’s amber blushing
and the whitecaps chanting. Who’s to say
what timeless words are spoken in that instant
between “Yes!” and “Oh no”? Perched in such
a silent space an ocean opens up. I plunge
into the drink, pear juice dripping into salt.

                                                  –Christine Hemp

originally published in Taos Journal of Poetry and Art                                     Image: Christine Hemp

 

Poems and Ponderings

POEM OF THE WEEK: Tunneling

jacksonpollockmural

This past weekend I attended a high school reunion, an adventure in time and space. Some of the people I’d actually known since kindergarten. In addition to our joys, we tacitly acknowledged our own trips to the Underworld, the hidden places that inform our disparate lives. Bodies may change (including my own), but our heart connections remained intact. We really didn’t need to express this connection in words; a huge long embrace often said it all. This week’s poem is for all my classmates from long ago.

TUNNELING

I have found my way down.
Feverish, muddled, I dig
deep through loam and stone.
I jam my bleeding fingers
behind stuck rocks,
my nose dirty, the darkness close.

Burrowing deeper I feel
the earth breathing, her flesh
old pebbles, algae, rotted trunk.
Inside her I can breathe.
Rise and fall, rise and fall.
Even the hands of moles move with her.

Secret springs pulse to the beat
of blood and lung. I press
against the damp cool dark,
far from glare and sounds
of feet and talk.

My eyes grow larger now, burning
wide as miners’ lamps. From every
crack and cleft a tiny rivulet
of sand spills in my path.
It’s deeper

down from here on in: to find
that hidden root, a living course,
the buried seam that joins all things.

–Christine Hemp

Image: Jackson Pollock
Mural, 1943
95 5/8 x 237 3/4 in.
University of Iowa Museum of Art

 

Poems and Ponderings

POEM OF THE WEEK: An Abstract Art

 7-kandinsky-watercolor-after-pwwb
AN ABSTRACT ART

When the painter Kandinsky lay in hospital, aching
from some mysterious complaint, he wept

to think about the surgeon’s knife, about being
wheeled into a room without intersecting circles

and squares in the cool blues that he loved, the altered
shapes in which he lived. Nurses cooed and patted

his shoulder, but he was not assuaged. His cry
spattered off the pale green walls and smeared

the yellow corridors, stopped those who heard
its pitch and timbre, its truth if not the implication.

“You do not understand!” he moaned, and the words
like a jazz refrain traveled up the vents and out

the windows, through the operating room, behind
the laundry door. “I have no skin! I have no

skin!” Throwing off the nurses, he clutched
himself, as if his arms could wrap his torso in the layer

of gauze he needed to face those unknown places.
What they didn’t see was that he knew his own

condition: Outside his picture plane – without
a brush and palette knife – he lay naked and alone.

Arcs and lines could not stay the bleeding edges,
random forms conspiring to erase him from creation.

–Christine Hemp

Image: Wassily Kandinsky, Watercolor after Painting with White Border (Moscow), 1915. Watercolor, India ink, and pencil on paper, 5 1/16 x 13 1/4 in. 

 

Poems and Ponderings

POEM OF THE WEEK: My Body Feels

 

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   MY BODY FEELS

My body feels fine
with your body
Your fine body feels
with my body
A full-bodied feeling
to feel one
Another (finally)
my body in yours
Yours in mine bodily
oh the fineness in
My body and your body
feeling.

–Christine Hemp

Image: Anne Hirondelle: Detail “Re:Coil XVII” graphite on layered tracing paper, 2011

 

Poems and Ponderings

Today’s Hempsonian Feature: “Still Life” by Marilyn Abildskov from THE SUN

Click Paul Klee Painting to read the story

Klee-Landscape-and-the-yellow-church-tower

 

Poems and Ponderings

Today’s Hempsonian News: A great poet has moved on…

DIGGING  by Seamus Heaney 1939-2103

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Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Poems and Ponderings