Poetry

Another entry?  Yup.  I’m taking this National Poetry Writing Month thing seriously.  This week’s poem was inspired by a book by Jamaica Kincaid called A Small Place.  I recommend it to everyone; it’s a biting critique of tourism in the Caribbean which draws upon, in my mind, the discourses of tourism (pamphlets, brochures, etc.). Here’s the image and poem: “No Small Place” To visit the island — whose white sands shimmer beneath the treasure hunter’s sun — is to forget the conquest. The magazine-spread sands pull the shadow of the damp-backed crab men who rake the earth to keep up appearances. Kincaid’s oceans, impossibly blue, impossibly anything but normal, can be nothing more than simulacra, imaginary ideas made real so only their artificiality can be discerned. Pull back the green screen to see the gears manned by buffalo men with juvenile growths squirming like maggots on their backs, to entrap the long-haired baboons with plump fingers prying and plying the cottonswab sheets you cover in dead skin cells. And then remind yourself that they are not buffalo men, maggot growths, or hairy baboons, but people trapped beneath a glass jar, like creatures kept for a child’s benefit… And that it is only a black curtain that rests between the prostitutes and the societies they serve. To visit the island — the curtain drawn back to reveal the hunter’s game — is to remember a history not your own.

Before I get to the poem, I thought you all should see what inspired me to write what follows.  The following images are of the same tree, though not the tree that originally inspired me, as I did not have my camera with me while I was on campus.  In any case, I hope the images inspire you too (if not, then that’s your problem, meanie)! The Tree of Knowledge (also known as Loopsy) This is like something out of a weird Little Nemo dream. The Tree of Knowledge The tree of knowledge spells its name in permafrost moss dangles from its limbs like frayed fingers framed  by the edges of a memory of another age, of smoke tendrils reaching to the earth to twist  into the fog from which the sweet dew of life chimes a tune for which only the sun will rise. What name does the wintry skeleton give itself as it bends — crick, crack — with the wind to track its tired oaken digits in the snow? Can anyone read its name — of whispers and salt — if nobody is around to see the letters? In whose language does the tree of knowledge speak? If not our own, then the traces of a tree thought must be found on the pages of our books, like subconscious — subliminal — metaphors to be teased from the edges of our collections; nobody will read the tattered adventures of pulp pap for the one hundred years to come — or fifty. But tree language is a permanent marker beneath the layers of pulp upon which the author pens his name in far too many words. If we could reverse engineer the page, perhaps we could rediscover the sacrificial lamb whose voice — chop, crash — we cannot hear. Perhaps, too, the tree of knowledge could tell us what the Woolly Mammoth calls itself  from the depths of so many ACGT repetitions  archived in the permafrost cover of gnarled roots. Perhaps humanity is but a prolongated process of return: to ourselves, to the beings we were meant to be, to the thought bubbles we actually are, archived, too,  in the sap stream memories of the grove.