Canopy
 

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Canopy

The sun wanes now
and now the blue of the sky
deepens to disrepair

as overhead
color condenses
and crumbles,

light gambles
and loses
and tumbles

sighing
through these trees
whose green gown grays,

fumbles its own shadow
of a garment
and bares one shoulder,

one wooden limb whitened
by the promise
of a moon arriving.

The ground vanishes.
And the sky dissolves
beyond all that heaves—

this ghostly appetite of leaves,
this splash of green insomnia,
this borderless canopy of trees

rattling the pulse
of tireless pollen
in a dark wind.

All heaven seethes
and it will not sleep,
all muscles ever-stirring,

all cells aghast,
all sap at every moment
re-occurring.


(1985—Point Baptiste, Dominica)
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Exquisite. I want this to be the spell that will save the planet. So what seems like it will end, and soon, will be forever "re-occuring." I've never read a more beautiful and lush evocation of trees.

A treat Nemo. May I suggest 'wistful' for 'wooden'.

Thank you for sharing.

Phil

The way this paces the sundown is nearly perfect. That’s the rhythm of syntax I admire most. When the poem and the rhythm of the theme are one or almost one. That is our life in the crowded world and you’ve found it in the natural.

My one little limp is “whose green gown grays.” The poem demonstrates how easily alliteration comes to you and removing one “g” would be you playing against that. I’d prefer “whose green robe grays.”

This is a really strong one. It’s good to see you post it.

John

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The words and images are slow-dancing with each other. Each stanza is a poem and each stanza talks the scene down, down, down below the horizon. That's when the magic begins.

I had thought maybe the poem could have ended after the eighth stanza, but not anymore.

To John's thought about "gown": strangely, I heard a rhyme and looked for it but it was nowhere to be found. Then I realized that "gown" was a ghost rhyme for what I was hearing, which was "down". I think that line is just too good to change.

Thanks for saying this poem. Say another, please : )


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I like what Jim says about the ghost rhyme. Either decision works, goes without saying. My tiny nit is excessive alliteration, or my perception of it. The impression of moving downward is throughout the poem. Strong poem, Nemo.

Nemo, I don't know if this'll be any help but a few thoughts that you can take as you will.

I have a sense of religious thought in Jamaica and the surrounding area which is steeped in Rastafarianism, mysticism, and a certain mystique that's removed from European culture. This description could be a caricature because I only know so much, but it's the feel I get when I think about a place like Dominica.

I get some of that in this poem (albeit from a Western perspective), except from the words in red which feel a bit removed from the lush, mystic picture I'm hoping for. There's something distinctly Western/Christian about ghosts and heaven, and maybe European from cells, which I don't know would fly in the lexicon of the region.

As for the line highlighted in blue, one option would be to end the poem there. What follows feels a bit extraneous, maybe not completely unnecessary, but it feels like you're taking another lap just for the fun of it. You could also end it with the next stanza.

With all of that said it's a serviceable poem and can stand as it is, as you know, so I'd consider most of what I said above optional.

Hope that helps.

Thanks, Mary, such an appreciation from a forest girl like you is precious praise. Your reaction to the constant re-occurrence makes sense in light of more recent natural developments, but to tell you the truth there was a bit of horror in its original conception. This was the tropics where life runs riot, and can seem almost menacing (especially as dark falls in a foreign land!). So there is an undeniable element in the voice here of an exhausted Werner Herzog standing on his unruly movie set in the Amazon jungle and saying, "Look all around us, everything is fornicating, fornicating." That such relentlessness makes for ultimate survival is the complex icing on the rapidly melting cake.

John and Phil have both focused on the two moments in the poem that I was most hesitant about. It wasn't wooden that irked me, Phil, it was whitened, but both are quite suddenly literal. In the end that literal quality seemed to be connected with the moon's promise, a promise which I am not sure was kept before wood and whiteness were swallowed by shadow. And John, the original phrase was moist green gown grays, so I did cut it down some. This poem is from a much longer poem, much longer, six pages or so, which I wrote many years ago, on Dominica, under such a canopy, a poem in which my self-indulgences ran as wild as the jungle. I had filed it away and only recently stumbled on it, pulled out small fractions of it, and shaped them into this post. I clipped and pruned so many of my mannerisms, that I think I ended up keeping the admittedly over-the-top alliteration of green gown grays almost as a tip of the hat to the original. I am ok with it now, but who know when I stumble on the poem in a few years if it too will be adjusted.

Jim, I can't tell you how many times I have gone searching for a rhyme in a poem I am reading, only to come up empty-handed, and yet still haunted by it during subsequent readings.
That's what we get for reading with more than our conscious minds!

Nick, I really was not channeling any voice other than my own in the poem, I seldom consciously emulate any other writer or cultural player. My time on Dominica was spent pretty much in isolation with nature, so the only voice here is the voice of the jungle filtered through my own mind and pen. I do wonder about your characterization of the Caribbean as non-Western. Certainly there are other elements in the culture there, African, East Indian, but those elements are present in many parts of the West, and geographically the islands are well within our cultural sphere. I also wonder why ghosts and heaven seem out of tune with a mystic viewpoint. Ghosts seem entirely universal to the planet, and heaven and the heavens can often be interchangeable in common parlance. Still, I was not trying to channel anything but my own reactions, pretty visceral ones, to the landscape. I may be guilty-as-charged of taking extra laps for the fun of it, but you should have seen the original, ha! This one seem positively austere in comparison.

Thanks all.
Nemo

I figured, just grasping at straws trying to give you something.

This is lovely and effective. I do hear the note of horror at the end. It seems appropriate that the beauty of the beginning turns sinister as the darkness settles.

"Green gown grays" is difficult to say, basically a tongue-twister. When I say it out loud, an R keeps inserting itself after the G in "gown." Unfortunately I can't think of an alternative for gown that gives the same image.