perlerorneq
DESCRIPTION
4-inch wide white pathto oceanno hand-hold but balance --perfect -- seeyou're no one -- thereTRANSCRIPT
perlerorneq
john martone
samuddo / ocean 2013
perlerorneq copyright © 2013 by john martone
samuddo / ocean
perlerorneq
perlerorneq – to feel the weight of life (inuktitut)
Someone moved the Guanyin I gave mom to my night table. J, I imagine. It rests on grandmother’s lace. The bed I’m sleeping in was my parents’ for the first decade of my life. The dresser next to the bed theirs as well, drawers shockingly empty now. J’s doing again, as she works through the grief of emptying out of the house. Back from the hospital tonight, sat at the kitchen table, and there was mom’s chair. She’ll never sit there again. And so the end of life recapitulates its beginnings. Once there were the first smile, first steps, first words; now there are the last time in a chair, in a house, the last coherent sentence. Her things enter the vast catalogue of no longer. And so she must understand, as she cries fearfully from her hospital bed into the emptiness – don’t let them take everything away.
there’s no hand hold
white knuckle gunwales this passage out of your mind
If only I could be sure of that. If only anyone else in the world could know for sure what
transpires in those handfuls of neurons or mind lying in bed or falling through space, unable to tell people from phantoms, pen from knife, or whether we aren’t all upstairs in one of
the houses that was once home.
Vasubandhu begins his Twenty Verses, likening human perception to how someone with poor vision mistakes floaters in the eyes for
phenomena outside. Mom sees strings and hairs everywhere and waves her hands to brush them away. What did Vasubandhu know?
She says we should sit on the stoop, go to the sandbox. She says she should go inside. She says she wants to go inside. She wants to be in her corner. Is the baby upstairs? Can we go to the farm again? Can we go home?
And we have done that.
front door maple branches right in your face
hospital floor-tiles same as our kitchen’s
don’t leave me in the woods
as if she were gretel – breadcrumbs
room so bright & sunny you don’t
remember a thing
This nursing-home evening, worn-down veneer (not hardwood floor) ends at dirty molding. You run a gauntlet of residents in wheelchairs down the hall to her room. The wall behind her bed needs to be washed. She gets four small drawers and a closet. Not even a shelf for knickknacks.
Roommate G has an oxygen compressor that runs all night. Mom wonders who’s cutting the grass. In disconnected words that sometimes aren’t, you hear how circumstantial and demented time is – the chance matters rising to sight, in talk, the turnings, contingent perceptions, images floating up from dreams, for so long.
talk about how she’d cook for you now you feed her
empty mirror soap dispenser fluorescence
mother sees fish floating in space – then they turn up in your dream
day a white curtain between 2 beds
what good this gate
brother sparrow
A good supper – most of a small cheeseburger, pudding, a chocolate donut. I have brought a
coloring book and some crayons (will this hurt her feelings?) but yet she can barely hold her crayon, making faint red dots on her handkerchief rather than the page. There’s also a book of stickers, but she can’t peel them from the backing. When dad arrives, he steps back at first to see us doing such things, but says nothing and I can see him taking it in. This is where we are going. He sits silently, watching the
roommate’s TV, which does not penetrate his deafness, though the people’s courtroom blares away, a preposterous judge ruling on some subsidized humiliation.
Weighed down with books in airport, shoulder bag won’t stay on, slips off, making me lose balance as I swing around trying to catch it.
his empty books too the weight
It’s just appetite, glutton, try as you may to convince yourself it’s something more. There’s that desire to find the book that will answer all questions – Traherne’s desire. There is that clinging to the vade mecum – Dhammapada, Hosai, Santoka with you everywhere, and there is the knowledge that the days of learning from books are pretty well over, that what’s left to do is something different.
the hurricaned
pine’s amber sun
mountain ridges ruled paper in the snow
a wood stove & no one home
(sandy, ii)
letting a dead branch hang there all winter
4’ tree stump good for table top
we were a family
carry stove-wood
listen to waves
4-inch wide white path to ocean no hand-hold but balance -- perfect – see
you’re no one – there
indelible your last name in collar & waistband
2-inch snow teeth chatter
in a warm bed
watercolor dinghy the white wall
needing paint
la lecon d’equitation
(cheap reproduction) on wall above wheelchair lift
imagine -- a thimble factory
those spaces!
birch trees & pine trees
we drift above a garden
It is like living in the same house with persons who have been mentally sick from birth. You are crazy if you imagine that you can find some long lasting peace or warmth or reason in this place.
--Josho Adrian Cirlea
Sometimes perfect bedlam – R’s Tibetan droning, C rocking forward a millimeter at a time in her wheel chair, panting home, home all the way; some other woman screaming in the shower, and one feels grateful the hall is well lit & warm & the nurses smiling.
her words out of nowhere another floral gown
that first sign—
it’s all you can do to fold a sheet of paper
between one spoonful & the next for getting
white frame first church
on hill to look inside – game for children’s fingers
sparkling stainless
wheelchair
it’s not leprosy still this mind losing fingers –
Her favorite flowers those silk ones in a black ceramic bowl. It was the story – you found them in at a Catholic convent in Nha Trang, the nuns saying nothing, smiling behind their Sprachgrill, and you could not enter the leprosarium. You brought the flowers back from half a world away, undamaged.
mother glows in this white light
the walls are talking
Because mom told you years ago she once got an orange for christmas, you dream a 1930’s
farmtruck bulging with oranges. A truckload of pickers, you one of them, climbs down from the bed, but the truck is still full of oranges, and you’re in a vast warehouse of oranges. Here’s a single bare segment on the ground. You pick it up and put it in your pocket for later --
so many
names so many people down this hall & one in white knows them all
one behind another – horses of chauvet
wheelchairs
going nowhere wants to hold on
(sandy, ii)
with mother gone trees fallen just as well
go on -- get the pine sap all over
pietà --
fallen pine caught in an oak
oak leaves hold on in subzero
such people
flying home eyes closed all the way
the heating fails & here you are
look at that (out of ink)
your glasses fog up
you’ve arrived
w/ alzheimer’s still knowing how cold
ayornartoq
(it can’t be helped)
A human being was created from nothing.
(inuit creation legend)
hospital room what’s left to imagine
a little oxygen & nothing to eat that winter
seabird-sounds
& a sea-green
heartbeat-monitor
how can we
not know
we are
strangers
fabrications
crystalline
refractions
when she
blinks us
away
at her
bedside
must be
we are
al
ready
ghosts
blows in
from far
side of
nowhere
woodwind
thin world
blue sky
you too
empty shell
odd shape
for broken seashell
human being
thread & needle
yellow plastic thimble
what were you doing?
of course you’re washing dishes when she dies
you find
her purple
slipper
shells
under
snow
along
the shore
snow
blowing
all day
won’t
settle
Day after she’s gone you head to florist to order
flowers & staggered by smells of her father’s
greenhouse 60 years ago can only say white
gladioli. They do not have enough flowers; there
could never be enough.
blowing snow
& ocean currents
mother now
blowing snow
& ocean currents
you’re a dream
barnacles grow from a stone in your hand
Cirripedia
In guilt’s overplus, shoes still soaked-thru, the
next day return to water’s edge & throw back
yesterday’s barnacle stone before it dries & inner
feathers can’t reach out to eat.
This is a new spot for you, where an ancient
paper-mill stream empties out into harbor, just
beyond the disused customs house. A raft lies
anchored a hundred yards out, piled high w/
lobster traps for your kin.
–But isn’t it always so – humble barnacle, all your
curled foot’s effort gone into staying put – sessile
– only to find (do you ever) that rock moves too,
tumbles about in great tides or even human
hands? And still you make your white facets – six
of them – perfect as snow blowing now in great
circles here. You stay inside & let go your instars.
now your
mother’s
gone
is this
silence
hers?
doe it
comfort
you?
a
light
touch
con
scious
ness
torn photo of that shack beside her coffin
her forehead’s chill
you almost topple
the coffin
a brass space-capsule with handles for bearers
three steps up
three steps down
no one trips
a small brass lozenge your universe
just things now
jostling inside
a coffin
white flower grave
whitecap harbor snow
no more glaucoma mom
buried now too late
to take a lock of hair
here’s a blizzard
mother gone forever now you’ve lost your keys
coda
after life
this
after
life –
harbor
side
hill
caves for
cliff
swallows
or
hermits
honey
combed
silence
you
en
counter
only
that
mother
&
children
on
their
hairpin
path
(any
stretch
of which
is
a bless-
ing)
but they
don’t
remem
ber you
nor
can you
say
which one
you
were now
they’re
gone