Introduction to Poetry

Here are the books:
English 43: Introduction to Poetry
CCSF
Spring 2019

Moya Cannon: "The Hidden Rhythms of the Wood"

SYMPATHETIC VIBRATION

          for Kathleen

'You never strike a note,
you always take the note.'

Did it take her many
of her eighty quiet passionate years
to earn that knowledge,
or was it given.

Music, the dark tender secret of it,
is locked into the wood of every tree.
Yearly, it betrays its presence
in minute fistfuls of uncrumpling green.

No stroke or blade can release the music
which is salve to ease the world's wounds,
which tells and, modulating, retells
the story of our own groping roots,
of the deep sky from which they retreat
and, in retreating, reach -- 
the tree's great symphony of leaf.

No stroke or blade can bring us that release
but sometimes, where wildness has not been stilled,
hands, informed by years of patient love, 
can come to know the hidden rhythms of the wood,
can touch bow to gut
and take the note,
as the heart yields and yields
and sings.

--Moya Cannon
from Oar

Moya Cannon: "Tending" and "Hunter's Moon"

I think if you even merely browse this blog that my appreciation for the poetry of Moya Cannon is very strong.  Here are two more that I wish to share:


TENDING

When a wood fire burns down and falls apart
the fire in each log dies quickly
unless burnt ends are tilted together --
a moment's touch, recognition;
gold and blue flame
wraps the singing wood.

--Moya Cannon


HUNTER'S MOON

There are perhaps no accidents,
no coincidences.
When we stumble against people, books, rare moments
          out of time,
these are illuminations --
like the hunter's moon that sails tonight in its high clouds,
casting light into our black harbour,
where four black turf boats
tug at their ropes,
hunger for the islands.

--Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon: "Emptinesses Which Hold"

NAUSTS

There are emptinesses which hold

the leveret's form in spring grass;

the tern's hasty nest in the shore pebbles;

nausts in a silvery island inlet.

Boat-shaped absences,

they slope to seaward,

parallel as potato drills,

curved a little for access --

a mooring stone, fore and aft,

and a flat stone high up

to guide the tarred bow

or a hooker, pucan, or punt

when the high tide lifted it

up and in, then ebbed,

leaving it tilted to one side,

in its shingly nest.

--Moya Cannon

'WE ARE WHAT WE EAT'

That's what she said,

'Every seven years

almost every cell in our body is replaced.'

I thought of her own art,

how faithfully rendered

the miraculous lines, the miraculous lives,

of feather and bone --

and I remembered an oak rib,

honeycombed with shipworm,

given as a keepsake to another friend,

who had sailed from Dublin to the Faroes

in a wooden fishing hooker,

which was later rebuilt.

These boats are rebuilt, renamed,

until every plank and rib

has been replaced so often

that nothing remains

except the boat's original lines

and a piece of silver,

hidden under the mast.

--Moya Cannon

Salvage Work (small): sculpture mix; blue slip; clear glazing; copper wire; twig; twine.

Moya Cannon: "Who Conducts the Music of Our Dreams?"

ALMA,

I woke up saying the word,
just as, a few mornings earlier, I had woken up
saying 'The Silk Road'.
Who conducts the music our our dreams?
leaving us with only one clear note -- a word for 'soul'
or a name for the most sensuous, the most tortured, of early roads,
a name given at a distance, in hindsight,
by someone who had never travelled it --
not even once clear road either, but several,
a web of camel routes through thorn and sand and storm,
mule tracks over frozen mountain gaps
to where silk worms chewed on mulberry leaves,
spun from their bodies the strong filaments of dreams.

--Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon's "Reed-Making"

REED-MAKING

for Cormac

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
      Blaise Pascal


A strip of cane is whittled, gouged thin,
cut in two;
its concave sides are held together;
tapered ends bound, with waxed thread,
to a brass funnel,
then fitted into a chanter.

If one turns out well
and is played in
by a fine musician,
the lips of the reed
will come to vibrate in sympathy,
and all things will flow through them --
joy, grief, despair, and again, joy --
stories told in secret to a tree;
told to a reed;
carried back on a channel of air
into life's bright rooms.

What generates music?
Gouged, bound wood,
or wind, or breath,
playing on a tension between
what is bound and what is free --
wind blows across the holes in a hollow steel gate,
and blood leaps in response --
a hare alerted in tall grass.

--Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon's "Prodigal"

PRODIGAL

Dark mutter tongue
rescue me,
I am drawn into outrageous worlds
where there is no pain or innocence,
only the little quiet sorrows
and the elegant joys of power.

Someone
businesslike in his desires
has torn out the moon by its roots.
Oh, my tin king is down now mother
down and broken,
my clear browed king
who seemed to know no hungers
has killed himself.
Old gutter mother
I am bereft now,
my heart has learnt nothing
but the stab of its own hungers
and the murky truth of a half-obsolete language
that holds at least the resonance 
of the throbbing, wandering earth.

Try to find me stones and mud now mother
give me somewhere to start,
green and struggling, a blade under snow,
for this place and age demand relentlessly
something I will never learn to give.

--Moya Cannon,
from Oar

The Flow Of Music: Two Poems From Moya Cannon

VIOL


Wherever music comes from
it much come through an instrument.
Perhaps that is why we love the instrument best
which is most like us--


a long neck,
a throat that loves touch,
gut,
a body that resonates,


and life, the bow of hair and wood
which works us through the necessary cacophonous hours,
which welds dark and light into one deep tone,
which plays us, reluctant, into music.




VIOLA D'AMORE


Sometimes love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill,
and, like the hidden strings of the viola d'amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.


--Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon's "Thalassa"

THALASSA

Having got up, decided to go home,
how often do we find ourselves
walking in the wrong direction.

Some echo under the stones
seduces our feet
leads them down again
by the grey, agitated sea.

--Moya Cannon

Moya Cannon: "Isolde's Tower, Essex Quay"

ISOLDE'S TOWER, ESSEX QUAY

It is our fictions which make us real.
--Robert Kroetch

Is there no end
to what can be dug up
out of the mud of a riverbank,

no end
to what can be dug up
out of the floodplains of a language?

This is no more
than the sunken stump
of a watchtower on a city wall,
built long after any Isolde might have lived,
built over since a dozen times,
uncovered now in some new work--
a tower's old root in black water
behind a Dublin bus stop;

and the story is no more than a story.
Tristan drifted in here on the tide to be healed,
taken in because of his music,
and a long yarn spun on
of which they'd say--

Had not the lovers of whom this story tells
Endured sorrow for the sake of love
They would never have comforted so many.

Moya Cannon: "'Taom'" and "Hazelnuts"

'TAOM'

The unexpected tide,

the great wave,

uncontained, breasts the rock,

overwhelms the heart, in spring or winter.

Surfacing from a fading language,

the word comes when needed.

A dark sound surges and ebbs,

its accuracy steadying the heart.

Certain kernals of sound

reverberate like seasoned timber,

unmuted truths of a people's winters

stirrings of a thousand different springs.

There are small unassailable words

that diminish caesars;

territories of the voice

that intimate across death and generation

how a secret was imparted--

that first articulation,

when a vowel was caught

between a strong and a tender consonant;

when someone, in anguish

made a new and mortal sound

that lived until now,

a testimony

to waves succumbed to

and survived.

*'Taom' is an Irish word which means "an overwhelming wave of emotion"

--Moya Cannon,

from Oar,

Salmon Publishing, Bridge Mills, Galway, Ireland.

1994.

HAZELNUTS

I thought that I knew what they meant

when they said that wisdom is a hazelnut.

You have to search the scrub

for hazel thickets,

gather the ripened nuts,

crack the hard shells,

and only then taste the sweetness at wisdom's kernel.

But perhaps it is simpler.

Perhaps it is we who wait in thickets

for fate to find us

and break us between its teeth

before we can start to know anything.

--Moya Cannon,

from The Parchment Boat,

The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland.

1997.