Brown Water

Pure water's
like perfection
teased out

of vacant skies
like seeded rain,
the formula or prayer 

                                                        that takes no charge
                                                        for what's the matter,
                                                        shorts nor rots

not hermit cells
or stains or leaves
alive deposits—

but oh, brown water!
how you slough us off,
your load of wandering earth

melting our floors, how you butter
up our floury lives like batter,
sweeten all our beds

and leave like fossils in the rocks
our most indecent
moments' truth

as wonders,
thick and harder
than our higher thoughts

and all unclean
enough to live beside
like angel dirt

                                                       forever
                                                       free of
                                                       failure!

 

      
        So What's the Matter?

"Most is missing!"
                      that's the matter—
mass, purpose, motion,
Newton's whole fairy faith
in father facts—

yet all our own hypothetical retreats
are still couched in netted wisps
like touchstone quarks
                      and Higgs' bosons,
theories finely particled by men in gowns
whose frantic gills like drowning fish
mouth desperate attempts at
               prophecy and public prayer—
so dry and airless is it crying out of water!

But even more is missing when
we scuba men who would believe
dive faceless to the holy floor
that used to lie 10 fathoms deep—
only to find the old truths warped
like pickled herring shards in sixty feet
                       of brackish water—
our fathers' lips and eyes
pecked out from prehistoric shells
like snails from skulls by hairy crabs
            and prodigals and license,
our whole stomach-churning century
much too free to peak and chew
                                   too steep and fast—
sighted so with plugged-in mugs and sockets!

Yes, the matter does
                   go missing when
mass, purpose, motion's gone—
the brightest fishers choke on air,
the strongest breathers
                                  drowning!

Where Homprang lives fish walk
on finny hands across the village track
each night for sport,
and tall, silk-tailed mermaids drag boys down
to love them in the crazy, muddy water.
No one has a bird in hand,
or book, or just says no
or buckles up—
there's no insurance cover,
rule of law, right of way for
sex or guilt, or any sort of justice,
certainly no one waits upon
or tempts the Gates of Heaven when
death's terrifying fairness only opens up
to life again—
until one gets it right, of course,
at last,
                and goes

(so deep runs the dried-up well,
so sighted blinks the hollow)

then

not any action's left undone,
redemption's bought
or grace abounds—

no nanosecond gained
or purpose lost, or mass,
or priestly expert's
                          extrication—

just simple man's commotion!

______________

The Higgs' Boson is the so-called "God particle" within the atom that may contain the weight of things. It
remains theoretical, along with weight itself, and so far even its traces have never been observed.

Homprang  ('Delicate Odor of the Cheek')  Chaleekanha is the name of the poet's wife.

"Simple man's commotion" is the critic I.A.Richard's definition of human emotions.

 

                                                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 fifteen years later has appeared in journals as fine and diverse as
                   Exquisite Corpse, Phase and Cycle, The Chariton Review, The Cumberland Poetry Review,
                   The Kenyon Review, 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 as hard as this in his life.

                   Brown Water: Poems from Paradise is a work in progress attempting to create poetry that
                   anyone can understand. 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!

     Two sad love poems and a rape from GALILEO'S SECRET: a book of new poems and old riddles 

Au Revoir, Héloïse, Abelard

Sand drifts even
            under their fingers—

they touch dunes,
            they touch each

other's trackless forms
            that sift like shadows,

lengthen like their days,
            the indecisive hours spent

not in life but works,
            the only wet a mirage

of parting lips, the only
            spring departing words

thick like an oasis thought
            but too rehearsed to notice.

She stoops to leave
            as she always does—

not to be so quite
            undone he bows too,

lowering his eyes not
            to see how she shakes,

how white she is,
            how flushed, her eyes

like his snow-blind,
            ears deafened by

the sound of glaciers calving
            and the splintering feet.

 

 

   Looking at Love again, Closely

Speechless before
the wit of
too much time 

the wisest heart in thrall
falls stricken

tongue entangled in
the brilliant
whorls
like Sappho’s
fragrant fingertips
limned again
in clay
around Love’s eyes

the penned lashes
larks

flights in kohl
which rise counter-
point against
the years
and wrestle down
life's mounting
grief
with pinioned joy!

 

Leda Takes Another Lover

She closes her eyes
because that makes him curious.

He watches her feigning—
she can hear his shoulders,
the outline of his listening.

She raises her arms to test him—

they smell like three pears
the sun has been around all day
and now like high-flying circus girls
taut & pliant in the orchard wings
whisper what it might be like
to swan and sip champagne
and hang behind a fan all evening.

He is the dew on her darkening.

He rises up along her arms like moths.
She quickens like crickets rushed
by his shadows and swallows.
She cries out like lavender.

He feathers her brilliantly—
her armpits,
her arches!

 

 

CLICK HERE to see a poem from Christopher Woodman's earlier work,

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