Weighting Paddy
“…What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle”
- Louise Gluck - Harvest
My father lugged,
A sack of paddy out of the store-room,
Annexed to the kitchen,
Down on to the ground opposite it,
Where, beneath the king-coconut tree,
The old boulder stood.
As he emptied about half of its contents,
Into a huge metal bucket,
Dust rose and floated in the wind.
He’d, then, pour a few pails of water
Into the paddy bucket.
Soon, the chaff surfaced like dead fish,
While the fecund seeds sank to the bottom.
Life is heavier than death for certain.
My father picked chaff off the water,
His hands forming a bowl
And his fingers a filter
Simultaneously
And dropped it into a bucket.
Handful by handful,
He then cast the good paddy
That had soaked up the water
Into an older gunny sack.
Between us, we carried the dripping sack,
Into a murky corner in the kitchen,
And placed it there.
My father returned to fetch,
The hefty polygon of granite,
An odd heirloom,
Useless but for this very purpose.
At that murky corner in the store-room
Next to the garden implements
Caked with mud and covered in cobwebs,
The half-filled, wet sack,
Was literally sandwiched.
Between the rock’s crushing weight,
And the dusty floor.
Now there were all the conditions needed
To drain life out of living being
The suffocating weight, the darkness,
And the solitude and so on;
It was counter-intuitive,
But, by experience,
I knew it’d induce life rather than kill it.
Then I reckon
Perhaps, it’s from such sordid misery
That the greatest lives spring.
Words - Jayashantha
Jayawardhana
****
Hummingbird Tantra
Everybody wants to let go,
but how do you let go if you
don’t hold things?
—Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest
Red draws their tiny eye, and every hummingbird
feeder you can buy blooms a plastic, stoic
ruby, effigy of flower, tadasana of red. Already
they have eaten me out of sugar, but forgetful today
I’ve left the sliding porch door wide, and on my couch
a cheery wool blanket, paintbrush red. I hear
the ruckus first, think, bee, think, rattler, come rushing
and find that small bright bird thrashing and
vrrrhing over the sofa, dashing itself on the western
pane, wings a frenzied blur. A dull, haptic terror
takes me: how can I catch it without harm to one
or both? That fierce little beak with which it
streaks after its fellow nectar-seekers? How will I not
rasp the lime-dark shine from its wings, like a moth,
with my hands made for grasping human things?
As I pull on my thick gardening gloves, somehow
it seems to still, lets me take it lightly between
thumb and index. What a pose: Woman Pinching
Hummingbird, no flex, no stretch, a great suspension,
a less than saintly clutching. Two billion heart
beats a life, they say, for bird and man, and if that’s
truly the plan, with this one’s scared heart fluttering
a thousand a minute, what life is already guttering
in my petit grip. Without rushing, mind above
the fear of slip, I pass through the porch door,
my hand falling and then rising to implore the bird
to go, and so it does, rippling down to the apple
grove like a petal in a rapid, zipping me to the
moment as I stand gasping, gasping for air. Woman
Letting Go. The next day, I drive two slow hours
to town, buy a pound of sugar to feed this incandescent
time bomb, short-lived, minute, voracious
god.
Words - CORRIE WILLIAMSON
Corrie Williamson is the author of the poetry collections ‘The River Where You Forgot My Name’, a finalist for the 2019 Montana Book Award, and Sweet Husk.
She was the 2020 PEN Northwest / Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency fellow, and her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Pleiades, and The Southern Review. She lives in Lewistown, Montana.
****
‘Bird-Understander’
These are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurt
you have offered them
to me I am only
giving them back
if only I could show you
how very useless
they are not
Words - Craig Arnold
The raw honesty of Craig Arnold’s poetry makes ‘Bird-Understander’ an easy pick for our list of the most beautiful love poems. In this piece, Arnold recounts a moment with his partner that makes his love grow even stronger. The language is simple yet evocative, putting a strong metaphor in the reader’s mind and facilitating a deeper understanding of Arnold’s feelings.