--for Frank Sherlock
(some of the resulting poems from this (Soma)tic were published in POETRY Magazine, BOULDERPAVEMENT and elsewhere. Many thanks to the editors.)
I had the privilege of spending a month in the Leighton Art
Colony at Banff Art Centre, located in the Canadian Rockies. The Native people once used Banff as a locus
for healing their sick, but they refused to live there. Banff Art Centre sits on top of an enormous
deposit of magnetic iron. Many holistic
health practitioners today use magnets to pull toxins out of the tissue and
into the blood to then be flushed free from the body. The Native people would not live at Banff,
but they did come with their sick to be healed.
Oread frequencies, this (Soma)tic poetry ritual resulted in
a series of apologue poems without a definitive statement, the moral caught in
a fang in a tree. Every morning I would meditate
on a hawk webcam in Philadelphia. It was
ridiculous leaving Philadelphia to visit it every single morning in Canada, but
ridiculous was the exertion I needed to unzip the sublime. I would prepare to write inside the hawk
application, writing through the webcam in Philadelphia. One day my boyfriend Rich appeared on the
webcam, waving from the street below the hawk nest, then opened his sign FUCK
YOU COME HOME!
On one of my first nights a young man drove me to the top of
the mountains above the art colony to show me the hot springs and lake. There were fish in the lake. There were fish swimming above Banff Art
Centre, swimming above my head each night, and this became part of my writing
ritual. I would go to sleep with a piece
of celestite crystal, meditating on the swimming above me, the swimming above
me. The notes for the poems were often
informed by nightmares. Every night
sleeping was difficult, the magnetic iron dumping toxins into my blood. A few nights it seemed I didn’t sleep at all,
but was instead dreaming about not sleeping.
Once I dreamed I had a vagina for a nose and this dream was fantastic!
Notes from the morning hawk meditations, notes for the
poems. I brushed my gums vigorously with
cayenne pepper to stimulate the capillaries, JOLT the heart. I then drank crystal-infused water, the
Mountain lion paw prints in fresh snow, grizzly bear scat,
elk, mink, a pack of beautiful coyotes, and the magnificent magpies were
outside my studio in the forest. It
would be easy to write nature poems, documentary poems, straight up narrative
poems, but my notes were for poems found in the greasy film along the engines
of our planetary machine coughing, devouring, running in terror. My unease of hungry mountain lions, grizzlies,
and angry elk fueled the notes. A strict
vegan diet with deep tissue shiatsu massage once a week also contributed to the
lens I brought to the notes for the poems.
Banff was scraping me clean each day, and I kept to the flow, kept the
image of fish swimming above my head.
The hawks feeding their young, and the crystals I slept with on the full
moon for the final hawk application. The
notes became thirteen poems. The editing
process for the poems included listening to three original movie soundtracks
played simultaneously: Paris Texas, The Assassination of Jesse
James, and Brokeback Mountain.
