MY FRANGIPANI TREE

"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 older than your father, and Kip is the poet’s childhood nickname. (‘Kip’ is much easier for a Thai 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), hospital, school 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.  

;

:

A NEW BIO 

CHRISTOPHER WOODMAN was born in New York City in 1939. He was educated as an undergraduate at Columbia College, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Yale, and a Kellett Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, where his dissertation, "Polyphonic Narrative in Elizabethan Literature," was initially supervised by C.S.Lewis. He continued as a Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge, and was at the same time Chairman of the Cambridge University Buddhist Society where he was instrumental in helping the young Lama, Trungpa Rimpoche, become it's  President. The two were exactly the same age - 26.

Following an unhappy sojourn with Trungpa in Eskdalemuir, Scotland, Christopher returned to England as a single parent in 1970' and worked there as a schoolteacher, and eventually as a blue-water sailor/journalist with his 3 children on board. After a two year voyage he sailed into New York harbor, and in 1982 became Head of the English Department at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Preparatory School with a mandate to rebuild it -- one of the most rewarding as well as challenging experiences of his life. 10 years later he began  building a new sailboat in France, and also to write poetry seriously. He published his first poems in Paris in the early '90s while working for France Telecom in the winters and sailing from the Hebrides to the Cyclades in the summers.

That stage of his life came to an abrupt halt in 1994 when his paraplegic older brother was hit by a pickup truck in his wheelchair in Northern Thailand. He abandoned his boat and built a house for Tony in a rice paddy in Chiang Mai, and cared for him there until his death 12 years later. Since then he and his Thai doctor-wife, Homprang Chaleekanha, have been developing a Traditional Medicine School in the same house, and that's where he lives and continues with his poetry to this day.

Having defined himself as a poet on the Seine at 50, he now finds himself at 85 with three books of poetry on the banks of the Mae Ping. His dream is that one of those books may yet bring him home to share what he has been doing with people who speak his language and love to read and talk about poetry.

Although Christopher Woodman has never been in a writing workshop, worked with an editor, or stood up at a poetry reading in his life, his poems have been accepted for publication by some of the finest journals in America including The Atlanta Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Chariton Review, The Cumberland Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and RUNES, A Review of Poetry, and in the end one of his most unlikely as well as most erotic poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

“Some of the poems have certainly had their day,” he says, "but the books, oh the books. They are my latest as well as my very best work, and if the poems were deemed worthy to be published by such editors, shouldn’t the books get a chance to be read? And they're so new!"

For more on the "connundrum" above you can visit the Introduction to Christopher Woodman's  Wordpress blog, Cowpattyhammer.

About the Author contains more background on the last 25 years of his life, and may help in understanding better his late blooming as a poet as well as the decade of isolation he refers to above.

*          *          *

Christopher Woodman's most recent book, FIG LEAF SUTRAS, a Memoir in Poems, 1995-2025,* is built around poetry that anyone can understand about subjects that nobody understands. In addition, he has completed two other very different books, GALILEO'S SECRET, Two Decades of Poems Under House Arrest, and LA-CROIX-MA-FILLE: Hexes, Ruins, Riddles & Relics. A number of the poems in all three books have been published over the years. And the books have been recognized as well in a number of recent national competitions, but none has yet been published.

And finally, on the additional page, you can read his long poem, "Connemara Trousers."Although 6 parts of it were published in The Kenyon Reviewin.  Part VII was only recently added to it. Called  "Why Up So Late on the Village Green Then, Pietà, After All those Flags, the Honor,"  it is among his most personal as well as most civic poems.

CLICK HERE to see an example of Christopher Woodman's more ambitious work,
a long poem  from LA CROIX MA FILLE: Hexes, Ruins, Riddles & Relics.