CHRISTOPHER WOODMAN

New poems from Brown Water: Poems from Paradise, a work in progress by Baan Hom Samunphrai's  resident poet, repairman, gardener and, of course, Homprang's husband.

 

   C. & H. in the Wind River Mountains, Wyoming, July 2007

 

 

 

 

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Address:
Christopher Woodman

93/2 Moo 12
Tawangtan, Saraphi,
Chiang Mai 50140,

THAILAND


e-mail:
christopher@homprang.com

website:
 www.homprang.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLICK BELOW TO
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Baan Hom Samunphrai

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Address:
Christopher Woodman

93/2 Moo 12
Tawangtan, Saraphi,
Chiang Mai 50140,

THAILAND


e-mail:
christopher@homprang.com

website:
 www.homprang.com


Christopher Woodman
      Top of the Page

 

 

 

 

 

 




    THE 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, Kuhn 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 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 older than 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!
 

 

 

 

    TO WHOM FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW
                               from “Brown Water: Poems from Paradise”

What we offer to the world
is also what
we think the world has got
and what we really mean belongs to us,
our sense of what we have to give
so distorted by our sense
of what we're owed
it masks, or dresses up as lost,
the gentle gift!—
two sides of the mighty Self
so jealously defined and
finely pampered they become
our cause célèbre and raison d'étre—
the only thing a man would die for
in a public war, after all,
yet stoops to hide in private,
locks-up, launders—then, phew, just in time
trots out as life's sweet truth
painfully discovered
in some dry dead-sea cave
or lent us, rent from an old saint's
threadbare life or wholly-
other gazer!

Listen,
that delicate young monk
sitting cross-legged on the funeral mat
with coke and fan under
the cartoon clock
is just announcing on his microphone
what the Once-Born taught
to save you time!
Refrain from lies and too much sex,
he says, for evangelical success, even in death,
that's how we sell ourselves,
rushing to establish
what we're not
and will not stand for
but, of course, expect to stand
us in good stead!
 

 

____________________

Every local Thai event is attended by monks who sit upstairs in the small wooden houses with microphones, the chants being  broadcast over the village P.A. system.  As the monks do not eat from noon until  four the next morning, they are  served only bottles of soda with straws during the long  ceremonies.

The Buddha often referred to himself as the 'Tathagata,' the Once-Born--"the One Who Creates No More Ripples."  It was, and remains to this day, the truly unique aspect both of the Buddha's teaching and of his person that no position was, is, or ever could be  taken up with regard to anything.

 

 



 

                GANESH IN THE HOUSE
                            
from “Brown Water: Poems from Paradise”

In my father’s house
there are many mansions
just as in my village
there are many poor houses
                 with mansions between them—


mansions with gables and finials
and small shiny servants
                                kneeling by elephants,
horses, buffalo-carts and palanquins,
peacocks unfolding their fans as the girls
with big breasts fall silent, and smiling
bow brightly uncovered like bells
as they bear at the banquet
                                    on small silver trays
tiny thimbles of whisky and water—


water-born courtyards of perfume
and smoky inhalations,
sacred waxed alcoves curtained off
with tall scented cushions
               in damask and rice-green velvet,
melon-shaped with vast muslin oceans
filled out on the spirit-born breeze
like a lover, like a mother,
                                           like a mouse—


and all of them quiet and assembled 
for the rare private blink
                               of the god in the house,
huge, whale-still, like Herod but holy
with those wide-awake eyes and garish
like a mountain in a recess—

the gargantuan trunk right there,
gob-smacked, stuck right in your face—
                                  yikes, the size of him!

 
So swing low, O God of Bright Presence!
Sri Power, swing O Prince of Pubescence!

O Bounteous, O Fat One!—
         sweet the spectacular pink Substance,
the perfect round belly, wide hips,
the radiant pure mind and broad sceptre—
oh the long, spangled prepuce,
                 the swooning, the monolith pout
with the make-up, the swaying unseemly
back and forth on one massive leg—
oh the bells on the ankle, the tinkling,
           the trampling in time with the snout!


O Ganesh, to garnish life’s platter
                  with the wink of good fortune—


O Shiva, to shiver & lather us more—


O Brahma, to make it all happen,
what we want
                                      more than anything
that happens to the gods
everyday in these mansions
up there on the humungous dwarf leg,
garlanded, stage-struck & beribboned
with incense and candles—


                                         any morning at 8
with a glass of cool water,
and an orange on a blue plastic plate,
swaying in the mansion, up on one leg—


any morning in my father’s house, 
oh heavenly mansion for the passionate,
ponderoso and intelligent,
                             girly-sweet god of Siam!

 

____________________

A large proportion of Thai religious beliefs and practices are Hindu rather than Buddhist in origin. This is nowhere clearer than in the spirit houses that are so important to every Thai family and business, including our own. Small but elaborate, these miniature palaces often contain a Shiva figure in the innermost courtyard along with Ganesha, the much-loved elephant-headed god. Ritual gifts of food, water, flowers and incense are offered up at these shrines everyday all over the country, and if a prayer is answered, the supplicant leaves in return a tiny ceramic elephant, horse, dancing girl, or some other useful object as a gift for the deity who has obliged.

Our cook spends the first 30 minutes of each day preparing food and ritual offerings for our spirit houses, and at the end of each day carefully gathers together what's left to make a feast for our chickens and dogs.
 

 

 

               
              
MONSOON WATER
                                                  from “Brown Water: Poems from Paradise”

The gracious draught in the cleft shell,
the cool reprieve, support, belief
dipped from an old clay pot
held out at noon
with torn hands
under the corrugate,
that's pure celestial water—
though every western winner knows
the village well is far more controversial,
the undressed orchid's
purple parts and linen
more dramatically confessed
and soapy moss around the edges
positively pubic.

I wai.
I drink the lot.

Even the sweaty jewels of last night's
frog-storm chorus
cling to the moist hope
that living
may be worth
the heart-breaking thirst
that's sure enough
to follow!

                                    published in  RUNES: A Review of Poetry (2004)

___________________

A cool drink  of water is offered to the visitor at every Thai portal and  doorway, however exalted or humble it may be. The wai  is the quintessential Thai greeting in which the palms are placed together at chin level,  fingertips  pointing upward. The gesture denotes respect, gratitude and prayer.

The only universal human gesture close to it is the hands raised high up over the head with the palms wide apart, indicating surrender.

 

 

   

"Homprang Healing," a watercolor  by Inga Schmalz,  Baan Hom Samunphrai,  March 30th, 2009
 

                                                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 seventeen years later has appeared, or is just about to appear, 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. He lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and says he's never done anything so hard in his life!

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 has completed two other very different books of poetry, Galileo's Secret and Gold Leaf on the Waters!--both of which are busy looking for publishers.

Christopher Woodman says of himself: I've never been workshopped, you see--they weren't  invented until I was over forty. 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," a poem by Christopher Woodman in the Fall issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal, has just been nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. (see below)

 

                            Four very different poems from over the years:

 



                        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)

 

 

 

 

                   Daedalus  Brief

If you jump high enough to know
exactly how to stay afloat

if you suspend your breath
just at the point the next begins

and spread your shoulders 
gently out like this and this

feeling each porous blade
expand with gently harnessed air

your altitude a little lower than
the height which makes you think

but higher than the space below
while having nowhere else to go

then you, my son, will never have
to stretch for some new stunt to please

or words to pray  
or be.

                        published in  Fire Readings, Shakespeare & Co., (Paris 1992)

 

 

   

 

 

 

    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
 

 

 

 

           


              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)

 

 

CLICK HERE to see another aspect of Christopher Woodman's work:

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