MY FRANGIPANI TREE
                              from “Brown Water: Poems from Paradise”

"So that's the girl you want, is it?"
Homprang mocks me—
                         "the one you write

          Whispers woe
          In the grieving mead
          With the sweet white flowers
          And the bitter seed?

"But oh mai dai, Lung Kip, mai dai!
you have no taste—no culture!
The malingering one
cannot be grown
in a pleasant home like ours,
or grace a commoner's garden."

And then the Princess Sirindhorn,
that loyal Siamese angel sister,
changes the name, rewrites
the misbegotten tree's
girl-story.

She was too grim before, you see—Lan Tõme,
the older generation groaned—
'Storm Torn Tree of  Grief,' 'Sorrow's Thunder!'
Only the Wat could weather such regret,
the Princess recently announced
on government radio,
only the holy Wat could grin
at such despair,
                      or say, or bear it.

She knew before her gift no trusty Thai
would ever deem to have
              the Lan Tõme tree at home—
it only graced the temple yard or wept
its sweet white scent
at the village crematorium.
Now its mournful shade's been
cast anew as a lovely girl that says
"Come live with me, I'm Leela Wadee—

            My willowy breeze
            Plays in your gentle tree!"

it's springing up all over.

Oh, I'd love to say "okay, please do,"
but water too pulls worlds apart,
I know, and air makes rain
                                  and floods us—
the bright skinned undulating breeze
wrapped in the silk sarong
with the smiling limbs
and the black, black hair
blows up another sort of thunder.
I'm just a man who gets things done
and know that girls like this
                  shake down the oak and split
the hardest western beam asunder.

But the pool of Siamese meaning says
mai pen rai, "make no ado"—
                                     that's better.
For flexibility in mind and limb
is always free just like
this groaning, gracious tree—

and wife Homprang,
now it's Leela Wadee,
is free
even with me
and let's me say
I love to grieve a storm—
and gaily with me grows it.

                                  published in  The Atlanta Review (Fall, 2009)

___________________

Homprang (‘delicate odor of the cheek’)  Chaleekanha is the poet’s doctor-wife.

Mai dai  means it can’t be done, that it’s never been done before and will never be done any time soon—or, for that matter, ever.

The poet is called Lung Kip in Thailand.  Lung means uncle, or any man as old as your parents, and Kip is the poet’s childhood nickname. (‘Kip’ is much easier to pronounce than ‘Christopher’ with its crush of syllables and consonants. His grown-up name sounds cacophonic to the Siamese ear.)

The Frangipani Tree was called Lan Tõme until it was recently  renamed Leela Wadee by the King's daughter, Her Royal Highness Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, as a gift to the Thai people. Before the Princess’ intervention this most beautiful and fragrant of all trees could only be grown in a Thai wat (temple) or palace. It was simply too risky to have a tree with a name like that around the house.

Mai pen rai means it doesn't matter--which it doesn't only because you've obviously already gone and done it.
 

                                                       BIO

CHRISTOPHER WOODMAN realised at fifty that he was still an amateur at everything he did and set out to try to master just one thing before it was too late. He published his first poem at 52, and now twenty-one years later has appeared in journals as fine and diverse as The Atlanta Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Chariton Review, The Cumberland Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Kenyon Review, Phase and Cycle, Runes, and Visions International. A graduate of Columbia, Yale and Cambridge Universities, he has taught, built houses, and sailed boats all over the world but is only now getting to grips with his real vocation. Although a resident of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he spends much of his time in Chiang Mai in the North of Thailand, and says he's never done anything so hard in his life!

A  clay water pot and coconut-shell scoop under the Bo Tree near the entrance to our house.

Brown Water: Poems from Paradise is a work in progress attempting to create poetry that anyone can understand about subjects that nobody understands. In addition Christopher Woodman is working on two other very different books of poetry, Galileo's Secret and Gold Leaf on the Waters, both of which will be published as soon as they're ready.

Christopher Woodman says of himself: I've never been workshopped, you see -- they were a rarity  until I was over forty, and I never encountered one during all my 11 years of degree work on both sides of the Atlantic. That means my poetry almost certainly lacks the multi-layered elliptical density that the new, highly trained critical mind needs to keep itself fully engaged while  teaching it. But I'm a writer, not a teacher, and I don't read like a teacher either, not in real life, so I wouldn't know where to start. Indeed you have to read me as I am, a kind of new old-world wheel-wright. I've reinvented it, so to speak, spokes, grease and all, and for me that means it has to turn, and it has to go somewhere. A poem's a service thing for me, man's most accomplished tool -- older even than the axe, and sharper. It's fire, it's water--it's what makes life wake up and know it's alive, and good, and truly worth dying for.

"He Mistakes Her Kingdom for a Horse" was published in the Fall 2009 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal, and subsequently nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. You can read the poem below.

    A Short Selection of Published Poems in very different styles, 1990 - 2010.
                                   "Just as a poet has to live with what gets published, however
                                           dated  or inadequate -- he grows with what doesn't."

          PASS WORD

The trick is
to stay outside
even when it’s lonely,  
cold and not the thing to do
at all.

The trick is
to stay outside
even when there’s  
no one there to say
it’s so much better weather
where the well is,
the depths plumbed
inside.

With such encouragement
who would not try the door,
and even now I feel the knob   
flower in my hand,
O those hundred-thousand gentle sea-fronds
nestling in the palm,
curling slowly up the thigh
in arcs of flame
fire-fraught with wanting
only this.

As for me before the door,
belted and distraught,
hoping only for a turning,
must I know this       
sloughing off of petals
gilt and master work for
ancients in those towering days
before the shutters closed upon
the vault beneath
the floor?

But the secret now,
then as now,
O best beloved,
is to stay
outside—

where the word is more
than ever
even when it’s wet
beside the Seine.

                                                                                                                                           published in  Fire Readings,  A Collection of Contemporary Writing  from the Shakespeare & Co.
                                                                                                                                                                         Fire Benefit. (Paris, 1991)


 

             Like Every Angel Born

Your old lover comes to you
when your face is to the wall.

That's why he’s damp and mossy,
that's why his eyes are sharp like mice
venturing out just after all the noise
has died down in the country kitchen.
His hips are narrow like the cellar stairs
he eases himself down slowly, step by step—
his German shepherd's crippled grace
is eager to please with its dark slouch
even as it frightens the children
dreaming like lanterns on your lawn.

He scents your confusion in the doorway—
even when you’re hiding your smile,
even when you’re keeping your hands
securely occupied with not having
anything to do once you’re in bed.

He can smell your breasts cascading quietly
under the fresh sheets like waterfalls—
their odor is round like wading pools
that reflect last summer's softest clouds,
and the picnics too, with the white doves
tumbling at the back of the orchard.

You roll over and straighten out
your legs—your hips are ramparts,
your moat is filled with water.

He turns away, back to work as usual
with all his hands under the hapless car.
You see only his Reeboks in the grass
sticking out irreverently beneath you.
You hear the clink of his tools,
his breathing, the wires and filters
unraveling your secrets in his fingers.

The nuts and bolts are all that matters
when it's coming apart in his hands.

You phone him up in the silence
to be sure he's still there
under the jacked-up wreck.
You ask him if he loves you.
He says he's not too sure
but it's coming apart
like it should.

Such greasy reticence leaves footprints
all over your freshly washed resolve—
down on your hands and knees again
you’re washing the stains in widening arcs.
Like wings greening in the battered snow
the strokes show how to wipe clean
a sweaty heart bent upon its own
ungraciously divine descent,
how to release the grime at last,
to groom like every angel born.

                                                           published in  The Chariton Review  (1994)

                      Leadline

Sound out the falling fathoms,
sing as the markers fold back
and slip each beneath the surface

until the last strip stops short,
catches its breath as it spreads
its wings and flutters thanks.

Sprig of green, you mark
the summit of my need that rises
gabled from the latest depths.

You signal just how high a man
must roll his trousers up
to walk home across the flood,

or how to stay put even when the
humped tide hangs over the edge
like water hanging in a glass—

while far below your cupped lead
charged with tallow gently lifts
whatever stain such limits hold,

a trace of flecked shell, or sand,
or mud settling back behind, or just
nothing signifying rock.

And all the while the thankless keel,
poised between your greased root
and the empyrean

strokes its
blind shadow
on the bar.
                                          
                                    published in  The Cumberland Poetry Review  (1997)

              Interment

Open up the sheets, fair weepers,
roll back the stone from this bed.
Yes, we've been on strong medication
and taken heavy punches too
to come down to you dutifully like this!
No mother wants a grown-up son
more perfectly assured, more naked
yet perfectly disposed across her lap—
all hard ardor emptied from his side,
blent knees drawn-up to let him hang
from his two hands in greater comfort.
No bird bows between two wider wings,
no swallow stoops more gracefully
in heavier, more final light,
no paper-dry carapace of the cicada
hangs more split silent at the hatch.

So open up the sheets, shining weepers,
roll back the stone from this bed—
we embrace your loosening resignation,
we take refuge in the white marble
churchyard of your ever-widening lap.

                                                               St. Gervais,
                                                               Vendredi Saint

                                                            published in  RUNES: A Review of Poetry (2002)

    He mistakes her kingdom for a horse

He heard horses
when she meant writing,

he heard sweat,
the creamy lather where

the taut skin
works against the leather.

He heard writing
when she meant

riding her journal,
the words a broad back

beneath her, pressed
up and caught between

her long phrases and the
need to be heard by him,

the naked verb,
the taut joy ridden

but prepositional,
the taut thorn,

a word, a horse 
working between them.

                                    published in  The Beloit Poetry Journal  (Fall 2009)
                                   Nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize: the Best of the Small Presses
 

CLICK HERE to see an example of Christopher Woodman's more ambitious work:

GOLD LEAF ON THE WATERS, a book of poems & relics.