Leaving
I left the safety of your arms
for the vacuum of outer space.
I looked back to see you mouthing
like a fish. I couldn’t read your lips.
My blood did not boil but
seethed beneath the skin.
My hands swelled, filling
the space left by yours.
I stared into the sun.
The last thing I remember, tears
were simmering in my eyes,
your name frozen on my tongue.
Karen Dennison
From Counting Rain (Indigo Dreams)
Event Horizon
Untouched for months, your non-slip ruler
measures empty space. On the cutting mat,
a bone-folder remembers your index finger,
thumb, push of your palm. Dust has fallen unseen
on handmade maquettes, on the polished sheen
of the angle-poise lamp. Its moon of light hovers
over an empty pamphlet, casts a blade and a lip
of shadow from the knot and thread of its stitched spine.
Tracing-paper pages show hairline cracks
in their creases. In-between, the arthritic limbs
of a Photoshopped tree glow like a bone x-ray.
Your desk is flecked with gold paint.
I think of the traces of gold in our bodies, how all the gold
on earth was forged by stars; how you read that its glitter
is caused by the speed of electrons in its orbit,
the relative slowing of their time;
and of the crazy idea you had
that the point of death was like falling into
a black hole’s event horizon, where you could cram
a lifetime of thought into a second.
From The Paper House (Hedgehog Poetry) and first published in Under the Radar Magazine.
Image from NASA website.
At Point Nemo
At the height of youth, I circled earth.
It spun at my feet, a distant beauty;
admirers attracted into graveyard orbits.
For me the sun was another star
and though I learnt its physics,
I worshipped it as Ra, studied its secrets.
I was unbreakable and made of light
and time was for other people. I witnessed
the fall of peace – Mir breaking up
on re-entry with smoking hands and fireball-
fingertips, crashing into the South Pacific.
My own descent into waves was sudden,
knocked off course by junk and debris.
For decades I lay on the seabed
with other wrecks and remnants of life.
Diving down through miles of water,
you swam into the sunken city of my heart,
emptied my drowned mouth. I listened
to your stories of the surface, began to believe
in rebirth, in escaping gravity’s grip on my bones;
felt like I was back in high orbit. But you left
how you arrived ― a lone explorer on a mission,
fearless. And every night is terminal velocity,
nothing but the cemetery to break my fall.
Karen Dennison
“Point Nemo” (oceanic pole of inaccessibility) is the area of ocean
furthest from land and is the location of the so-called Spacecraft
Cemetery where retired spacecraft are sent
From Of Hearts, published by Broken Sleep Books. First published in Riggwelter.
Featured image ©strelkamag.com – “cemetery of spaceships” found in point Nemo
After you’re gone
I scour dead light,
coded impulses hurtling
through blood-dark space;
island suns that broadcast
their lonely semaphore.
My heart’s a pulsar
sweeping the night,
warm breath on cold glass
condensing to gas clouds,
constellations.
I search until
the stars switch off
and the shore of sky
weathers your bones to dust
Karen Dennison
From Of Hearts, published by Broken Sleep Books. First published in erbacce.
Featured image from NASA website
Bedrock
At the window, light bounces
off me, journeys to glass.
Most passes through this solid pane,
tunnels away into night.
You can’t predict which photons
will reflect. There is only probability.
The five percent I see looking back
ghost the window with the shell of my face.
Our bedrock is not rock at all
but shifting sands, particles that slip
in and out of space, find themselves
in different places at the same time.
I think how no-one is ever truly seen,
how what we know is a surface
of a surface of a surface.
Karen Dennison
First published in 14 Magazine
Imagine chasing a beam of light
Imagine life as an impression
in four dimensions where time
is space, where an image
of each moment is held
forever in its place.
Imagine the traces each person
would make, human-shaped
hollows, tunnels that meet
and split and stop; and never fade.
Imagine the sky embroidered
with bird-shaped loops,
each fanning of each wing caught;
the sun a pulsing streamer
of endless figures of eight.
Karen Dennison
First published in Popshot and also in Shoreline of Infinity.
Featured image by Anthony Ayiomamitis from http://solar-center.stanford.edu/art/analemma.html
This is the third time that Elly Nobbs and I have given each other images to respond to. It’s a great way to inspire new writing.
Photograph by Karen Dennison
Scene Noir — The Protector
The shadow by my elbow
says, Never mind. A gun hides
under wrapping paper.
It’s up to me to use,
thus saving
all the other party goers.
They have no clue.
I grip the thing, contemplate
its heaviness; hide
it behind, in the waistband
of my jeans like the FBI
agents do on Netflix.
Resigned that the plot calls
for this protagonist
to shoot her mouth off, roaring
— Let’s be done with it!
E.E. Nobbs
Photo by Elly Nobbs (Kodak Instamatic 1978)
I asked Elly about the story behind this photo. In the 1960s her parents bought the adjoining small farm which had belonged to an ancient brother and sister. The barn was full of stuff of all sorts – old magazines etc…nothing ever thrown out. As it was gradually falling down it became dangerous so in 1978 Elly’s parents had the Fire Department come and burn down the barn.
Old Flames
He piled up her letters to him,
together with photographs, favourite novels,
diaries he’d penned, poured on lighter fluid.
How she and he melted in Rome and Paris,
fluttered like moths into the night, flames twisting
into ghosts, exorcised as smoke; words re-written as ash,
while the crackling edifice collapsed.
Years later, loss hits him like sunlight
through magnifying glass
onto the crumpled sheets of paper
where he’s written his heart.
What he would give to go back,
unstrike the match, save one photo,
frame the face he can no longer picture.
Karen Dennison
This chapbook of twenty poems is published by Picaro Press, an imprint of Ginninderra Press. It is notable for its narrow shape, egg-shell-like cover paper and transparent endpaper. The poems are about loss in a number of contexts including failing relationships, childlessness, hospital admissions and dementia.
Each poem brings a distilled image with an intense focus where the abstract and the unseen often become embodied things. For example, in Sense of an ending – ‘The air between us is tired/wants to lie down/dream of doors being open’ and in What the old house thinks ‘my yellow’ is a living thing that once danced and sang and has now been stolen.
Emotions also become living entities, through the use of visual metaphor, that communicate with, possess, and control the speaker. In Offspring loss has its own will, taking the form of an unwanted companion, and ends up being carried in the speaker’s handbag and releasing itself as a ‘god-awful sound’. And in Instinct, ‘..it stood awkward at her door/ in a uniform it couldn’t breathe in.’
The poems also have the feel of a dreamlike distance as if the speaker is looking back on the past, detached from an earlier self where there was a sense of loss of control; where her body, hands and mouth had their own minds. From Admission – ‘her hands restless spiders make nests in her hair’ and she ‘moves her words to her fingers/ touches her mouth when she wants to speak’. Loss of control also features in Body where ‘many women have choices/mine are made for me.’
The image of the mouth punctuates these poems, recurring like an archetype where sounds and words are involuntarily released and then purposefully held-back. In Release, ‘I peel down/unravel myself./ Start with the flap at my mouth that’s teased for too long.’
Paper and folding also feature as metaphors for fragility and acceptance / closure. In Revelation ‘you thin me to paper’; in What the new wife does ‘she folds into routine’ and in Leaving ‘I place my goodbye on the table/ seven years of tears/ line dried, folded in pairs’.
This collection really resonated with me and its images stayed with me long after reading, a reflection of their strength and symbolism. I highly recommend it.
To end, here’s 17 years in full which I have chosen because of the stunning ‘moths that martyr the windows’.
17 years
Our mouths are no longer in love
they forget their place
what they used to be.
After rising I pair lonely hellos
spend the day elsewhere
although you left some time before this.
And still we return
to goodnights like moths that martyr the window
until we fold into ourselves.
J V Birch is a British poet living in Southern Australia. To buy the pamphlet, see Picaro Poets Series.
This review was originally published on Abegail Morley’s Poetry Shed.
Elly Nobbs (author of The Invisible Girl) and I gave each other an image to respond to again (see previous post) and here are the results.
Here’s the image I gave to Elly:
I took this photograph in Brussels near the EC headquarters in 2013 and manipulated it in Photoshop
Elly’s response below was also influenced by the novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler and the three sessions of a stage performance course she attended. I love the way the poem bridges different genres and how it tackles this important topic.
i. Freeze – Upstage Left, Person #1:
The old chimpanzee,
veins & vitals scarred from years
at this pharma research facility, behind bars
that reach to the sky, waits
for 5 p.m. supper, hoping something
unusual might happen; she’s lonely & hungry
(her stomach is rumbling)
& yes, she’s certainly dangerous
we agree…
ii. Enters – Downstage Right, Person #2:
The white-coated human, who contravenes
(just this once) Sect.1(c)-23
of the for-everyone’s-protection lab
protocol – NEVER GO INSIDE UNLESS
SHE’S SEDATED – unlocks
the escape-proof cage door, scoots in (it will only
take a second) to retrieve the tray
from lunch ignoring the long pole with grippers
he should’ve used to safely slide it
through the slot
but slipping on a banana skin, he knocks
shut the door behind him when he stumbles
… the key flies from his hand
arcs through the air to hers…
iii. The Two Characters Interact Inside the Locked Cage:
Note — the two actors
agreed before the skit
that they must
find a way to help
the old chimpanzee
— so used
by us —
or we’ll not let them
off the stage.
E.E. Nobbs
Here’s the image Elly gave to me:
Elly took this photograph early one Sunday morning, December 2015. It shows a part of the Confederation Trail (the old railway line) where it passes through Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
When I saw Elly’s photo Skiff of Snow, I was struck by just how many footprints there were in the snow but how the path was empty of people. It felt like a visual metaphor for the journeys we make through life and their inevitable endings.
Skiff of Snow
A snow-coated path
funnels the horizon, narrows
to a tree-lined gap, births
a wide heavy sky.
Ahead, a frozen flock
of ice-black footprints
recede to mottled-grey.
A pilgrimage of people
have passed this way,
marks unnamed,
their clouds of breath
swallowed by air.
Karen Dennison
Karen Dennison 