Heather Hodges
Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 06:27PM Heather Napualani Hodges received her BA in English with a focus in creative writing from Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon. She studied under the nurturing gaze of poets Mary Szybist and Jerry Harp, who helped her with this little thing called inertia. She is currently working on a collaborative visual art/writing installation project entitled Pieces, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with visual artist Julie Jansen. Each day something is created, placed carefully, then left behind. She is busy upending cups and overturning couches in an attempt to raise enough money to apply for an MFA creative writing program. Her fingers are crossed. Her toes, too.
The Sadnesses of Galileo
**
The man
standing alone in the room.
What poise.
The oscillation so quick he is quite still.
Home: the ribcage of a tepid hummingbird.
**
The room adjusting its bearing around him.
The compass commanding different directions,
the dialects turned delicate.
The demure contents of the room
mapping the syllabic constellation of the idol’s posture,
pirouetting around the body,
calling that faith.
**
But look, the body is idle!
**
The barbaric ballerinas we all are descended from, loyal, delicious.
**
The flowers hesitating at the threshold;
their sudden breath in, signalling the tragedy.
**
The morning bereft
by the sudden loss of birds.
The vernacular taking hold in the branches outside.
Something dark rustling. The small king crying out his large fear.
**
The man standing alone in the room,
trying to make everything better.
Exchanging the martyring orbit for a sorrowful honor of shoes.
**
This is what we came to,
this petite act:
the filling in of afternoon.
Naming the calendar days after a series of discontinued loyalties.
**
The horrifying fact: nothing is ever sudden.
**
Oh, but you should have been born a threaded ruin instead of a man.
It is not a mark of patience or grace that you are still standing within the same walls.
The walls tried to take their leave, but you, tiny tethered creature, tiptoed after.
**
Disassembled now.
like so many things;
undeserving of the room.
**
Recant the passage of days, quick, before they settle in and take hold, asking for bread and milk.
Unsing the faith, but do it fully.
Things have a way of coming back.
Untended
She: untended,
garden unwinding beneath her
tree letting go of the roots.
And shrinking back into hardened seeds, things run.
Hurried gathering in of a thousand small scents.
The bird's mouth withdrawing a siren from the air
to climb back into the pieces of broken egg.
The morning restored to stillness.
A careful process of reversal.
Her white hair growing calmly back up from the floorboards, pulling past the velvet armchair, moving the curtains, shifting you in your seat.
Entire inches climbing back. The scalp shivering as it becomes the loom.
The head growing smaller, softer, tiny ball of pale clay,
falling quickly up through the space between someone's parted legs.
The legs closing. The promise whispered backwards.
The people waltzing counterclockwise.
The terrace holding the bodies.
The hands releasing their hold,
The sky falling outside,
untended.
Intricate origami cities.
Houses full of families
unfolding.
The window gone, now the roof, now the fence, now the patriarch,
flattening into piles and piles of shiny paper.
The water pulling itself back across the table to jump into the upright cup you have only just begun to hold.
A child crying under a blanket,
The movements practiced a thousand times.
The fabric stretching to accommodate the body.
The thread unstitching itself
to let in the cold.
Heather
Reader Comments (8)
***
If anyone would like to track the progress of PIECES, the ongoing writing/art installation that I mentioned beforehand, it can be found on this website:
http://piecesbuenosaires.blogspot.com/
thank you for reading!!! I would love to hear what you think!
cheers,
-Heather
***
Hey Heather,
I love your poetry. It's like reading velvet!
We are all about poetry at school right now as the Grade 2's embark on their Expressions unit. Do you miss us???
Say a big hello to Julie too. Your project sounds very exciting. I will watch it as it progresses. Take care.
Adios.
As i read your poems my soul slowed, sighed, and i became a resident in an origami city........ the walls unfolded, i saw her hair, smelt the velvet, and caressed the fabric.
Ms. Hodges blows gentle, trembling life into a far away long ago figure we never really knew -- until -- until we let her poem, "The Sadnesses of Galileo", take us by the hand gently, and lead us down willingly into the meandering paths of Galileo's soul.
And we discover, in her poem, that when it comes to courage, to cowardice, to truth and to hypocrisy, Galileo is not so alone as he might have thought himself to be: no, we are all right there with him.
A dazzling piece of --- wisdom. Plain and simple: wisdom.
Ms. Hodges poem takes me, as an amazing good poem sometimes will, to places I did not really intend to go -- fifty-two years ago, when I was in my teens.
I can still see him, "Mr. Ezra", a grizzled old man and imagine him reading Ms. Hodges" poem at full volume, glaring at the inmates seated around the hospital's cafeteria table and roaring: "Now, by God, that's what I call poetry, and that's what I call a poet!"
And I can see him, too, turning on those politicians and psychiatrists who kept him imprisoned for years without a trial, and spitting out to them: "Now read this, you hypocritical SOB's, and you will understand MY case except for one thing: Unlike Galileo, I did NOT recant!"
Ms. Hodges' poem goes right to the heart of the matter.
We boys knew him knew him then as a gnarled, bitter old man whose scraggly reddish grey hair and beard framed eyes that glared right through you, and we called him "Mr Ezra" (because in Virginia you always referred to your elders as "Mr." ).
He called us a lot of different names, many in languages we didn't speak, but which his tone made sure we understood. He sat there and criticized our tennis game. He would grab and keep any tennis balls we knocked off the court ( like Galileo's planets). And then he would suddenly throw them back onto the court at high speed, ordering us: "Now deal with that! Get your racquet on it! Move!"
Ms. Hodges's extraordinary poem about Galileo brought all this and Mr. Ezra back to me. What a gift she has. Her poem helped me understand more today about Galileo, about ourselves, and about our old "Mr Ezra" than I ever understood before.
Ms. Hodges' poem evokes in me another Galileo, a Galileo of the soul: the old man we called "Mr Ezra" so long ago.
It wasn't until college, that I learned that the world called him by his more complete name.*
But as I knew him then, and know him even a bit better now because of where Ms. Hodges' poem took me, I believe our Mr. Ezra would have devoured Ms. Hodges's poem.
He would have wolfed it down like a good Idaho steak (that's where he told us he was from), smacked his greasy lips and pronounced: "Now that's what I call a real damn poem: It's got everything -- bloody meat, charred fat, gristle and real bone a man can gnaw on!"
And then he would have shouted : "Get your racquet on it. Deal with it! Move!"
Reading "The Sadnesses of Galileo", I believe old Ezra would have growled, "That Hodges woman is one hell of a poet!"
I think she is, too, and look forward to more of her work. Soon!
---- Written by A Man nearing 70
*Note: I learned that our Mr. Ezra's last name was: Pound. The events are true.
"Untended" is mesmerizing.
"The scalp shivering as it becomes the loom." is one of the most unexpected phrases I have ever encountered.
And it shows a scene I never before imagined, and will never forget.
And then she writes: "The thread unstitching itself to let in the cold."
Makes we want to curl up tightly into a ball and hold on tight before, I too, am swept into the author's quiet torrent.
Too late!
You've NEVER been to this Buenos Aires ----- even if you were born there!
After reading the two wonderful poems by Heather Hodges, I decided to try her suggestion and go to her own BLOG:
http://piecesbuenosaires.blogspot.com/
Turns out she publishes in partnership with another fabulous creative, a visual artist, Julie Jansen.
These two are a wonder: non-stop marvels of voluptuousity (if that's a word) of art and writing and seeing BA a new way, an intimate way, a give-away way!
Makes me smile, chuckle, laugh out loud and then realize I've got a lump in my throat, and maybe a quiet cry.
I actually check back several times a day to see the latest creations cooked up by these two prolific, innovative writer-artists.
I also keep checking back here to see if Heather has any more poems published here on Splash of Red. Is that possible some day?
Thank you!
Heather,
Thank you for your words.
You create intricate imagery for my mind to decipher, such as “the ribcage of a tepid hummingbird”. I can feel the wings of this tiny bird beating in a rhythmic whir, and imagine the small ribcage contained inside.
And your interesting juxtaposition of ideas: “The barbaric ballerinas we all are descended from, loyal, delicious”. Barbaric ballerinas….this combination of words causes me to redefine both simultaneously.
And Unintended takes me on a journey that I wouldn’t imagine, left to my own devises.
“The morning restored to stillness”, somehow this line brings hope. It brings quiet. It brings a sense of peace, even if fleeting.
“The thread unstitching itself to let in the cold” causes the inanimate object of “thread” to spring to life for me. This choice, made by the thread, to unstitch. I can see the action occurring, and it makes me ask questions. Why would the thread want to let in the cold? Isn’t that what it is designed to do for us? The stitching together of something, somehow creating a new barrier, a new border between two things?
Thank you for your voice, and sharing it with the rest of us.
The images created in "Untended" are amazing. It made me think about how life evolves to a particular moment in time and place. It's an opportunity to consider that putting one's life in reverse would take one back to a place they had been to long ago and then realize that all those moments are what got one to his/her current moment in time.