ODE TO PABLO NERUDA BY OLIVE SENIOR 1 You did say: Don’t call up my person I am absent. But your signs are still decipherable in the pure stone, in water, in the palm-prints of the labourer. And by those who like me seek the pure voice untrammelled, the courage to speak of things nobler than the self, to write impure poetry that bears witness to the raw and the natural, to be ​the voice from the bottom of the well. I want to pay homage but here in the north, separated by a continent from Santiago, Isla Negra, or my own island home, so far from the sea I can’t strike the right chord; the measure that I tread moves no one else. I find myself drifting and wordless. So I turn to find again something you said about grasping poetry like thread? Here it is: You must spin it fly a thread and climb it . . . This isn’t a matter for deliberation it’s an order. But away from the elements of which my life has been spun I can’t even remember what the knot stands for that I’m feeling in the thread that fills my hand now. The thread tying up the bundle of How-It-Was. The thread that I cling to though you’ve said poetry is of the here-and-now ​revived by the light of each new day. * ​Neruda’s words are in italics The here-and-now eludes me and I worry about clinging too tightly to this thread. For what happens if it becomes too knotted to decipher, too clotted with blood, with mud from the traveller, too broken to tie again, too ravelled, too threadbare? What if you use it all up – for a clothesline that breaks, for a leash the dog runs off with? What if there’s no thread left? And no more where it came from? There, I’ve said it. What if you confidently go to bed leaving a spindle of new thoughts to be processed. Next morning you reach for the thread and it’s gone like smoke – It’s cobweb you’re left with. So Pablo Neruda, although I absolutely agree with many things you have said this thing with the thread I find a bit slippery as if you’d reeled it off without thinking and simply disappeared leaving in the blue this monstrous kite and me the one holding the string. 2 This thread of poetry: Where does it come from? Are you born with it? Is it handed to you like a sweet or a rattle to a child, who takes it without thinking? As I took your kite string? Here’s how I see it: This thread is one that crosses your path like the spider’s web. You walk through unaware The Great Spider still clings to it. So now Spider clings to you, my friend. This is not an accident. You have been chosen Spider’s apprentice. To master language. As Trickster, to spin and weave tales. To prophesy and heal. The go-between serving earth and sky. Sometimes the messenger left dangling. After you have taken the thread – the thread you cannot refuse – you must choose how to handle it. You might cut off bits to skip rope with or play cat’s cradle. That’s fine for joy needs to unwind. But there comes a time when you might be forced to confess: I don’t know what I did with the rest of it. For one day – it’s like that scenario that tantalizes in our nightmares, only this one is real – one day, you are caught in a dragnet. After your arrest you are brought to account before some tribunal that will throw the book at you charging you with theft. Of what? You will ask. And Neruda will reply: For not repaying your debt of poetry to the people who forged you your good life with their blood and their sweat. All you had to do was weave the thread into cloth for those who have only rags, nets for fishermen . . . and a flag for each and every one. You may plead Not Guilty. But perhaps you have already been weighed and found wanting: There are some poets so big they don’t fit in doorways and some merchants so sharp they don’t remember being poor. If found unconvincing you’ll be disconnected, cast away. Alone, you’re left knotted up and wordless. 3 Here’s the real trick (and no one ever tells you this): The thread of poetry to safely travel, the knot of yourself you must first unravel. You have to bathe in your own grave and from the enclosing earth take a look upward at your pride…. Then, you learn to measure You learn to speak, You learn to be. Stripped and skeletal you first navigate the crawl-space that allows you to enter the labyrinth blindly you must trace every inch of the root’s meander the convolutions of the vine the veined stem you must take the measure of the thread born from root reed stem or fleshy leaf the thread purged of sap or resin retted scourged and riven to expose its gut. Immersed in water to cast off impurities its fibrous heart elucidated its old skin shed you’ll encounter the thread born again as sinews of rope its tensile strength corded The thread that can now be woven into strong linen Like jute fibre meshed into string Or like reeds, criss-crossed into sound centered at the cross-roads where the crack of the whip now deflects evil forces clears a path. If you find yourself back here You have mastered the first trick. You can make your way through the needle’s eye pulled up by the thread of your poem dragged down by the weight of words waiting to be strung. The real apprenticeship has begun. 4 So this knot that I’ve been feeling, this pearl of anxiety I’ll make part of this rosary of the Alpha and Omega which could serve as the necklace for Brahma for Buddha Muhammed the Virgin Mary for Oya. But really it need not be more than my simple mnemonic to remind of that journey I myself took long ago through the roots through the vines. The songs of the heartwood, the calligraphy of the veins of the leaves almost lost in my meanderings. I needed, Neruda, this kite-string to jerk me back to the source of creation, to that mantra of obligation A chain-link of miles strung out across oceans a creole spider-work of many hands. The beads telling not decades but centuries. Like this strand of those ancestors handed a one-way passage to the clearing-house for the convict, the criminal and cut-throat, the patriot and the rebel, the pious pilgrim, the debtor, the poor, the downtrodden, the foolish, the brave heart, the no-hope younger son. A lifeline to the plantations – the only one other than swinging as seaman, as buccaneer, as pirate from the rigging, the yard-arm, the gallows. Here’s a bead for the spirit necklace of that other lineage. The ones bound in chains dragged across the Atlantic in vessels, full-rigged. Their vocal chords ripped with their names on the tips of their tongues. Washed away in salt water the cartography of home. Survivors of these crossings transplanted shoots, planted their children’s navel cords to become the roots and the vines for my string. And a special bead for a few I never knew: the ones who flew the ones who didn’t touch salt so stayed fluid as air light as the web of the spider. Flew back on the wings that they wove from obligation pulled by the strings of ancestral desire. But the ones that will never die out are too gelatinous to be strung, being seaweed themselves like floating sargassos on the currents of life. Spirit pirates with no roots of their own. The same ones who forged the chains of indenture, brokered sugar cane sweetened with slave blood. Their tentacles still as far-reaching and fatal as the entanglements of the constrictor of vegetal growth: the Strangler Fig. So much more unstated as my legacy. Not found in my blood but possessing me. The fibres of belonging to this world. 5 I’ve had to weave a cloth to wrap it all up in, a bundle for carrying for I’m travelling too. But not flying – too much salt in my veins. I’ve been seeking a thread to tie up the bundle which has been growing unwieldy with the cries and the whispers of the ones I can’t name: The lost ones, the limboed, the un-cared for, the un-loved. The mortified, the discarded, the “disappeared”. All resting uneasy on my conscience. Along with the poems I failed to deliver or neglected to write and not saying: “I love you” enough. Yes, we each have our measure, and our burden to carry but sometimes the cries are so piercing, we are silenced. And there are times like this when having crossed the abyss I want to feel free to fly kites if I wish or just dangle from a thread like the spider. So I’m seeking that old woman, the wizard of the cords who used to tie up the wind with three knots in a bundle and sell it to sailors: “Mark well, my good man. Loosen this knot for light breezes, this one to send you clipping along and this – woe betide – for a battering.” Yes, I let loose the hurricane. And I’m sorry about the damage but I forgot which knot was which – that’s the problem with raw thread it – all looks the same. But my hurricane heart feels better for its roaring, for scouring the world. For it’s the strong wind that cleanses, that unburdens and purifies. It uplifted the fallen. And broke the thread. But I’ll mend it and restring with fresh beads. 6 I wanted more than woman’s knotted portion so I refused to learn the way of thread: sewing, embroidery, darning, weaving, tapestry, knitting or crochet do not appear on my CV. But look at this: In the sky a kite still aloft and the one holding the thread is me. Maybe I’ll accept after all my commission as apprentice Spider who spins from her gut the threads for flying, for tying up words that spilled, hanging out tales long unspoken, reeling in songs, casting off dances. And perhaps for binding up wounds? With strips and remnants left over (and with bits and pieces of this kite I’m reeling in) I can make a costume for the dancing fools the masqueraders who dress in rags and tatters Egungun Jonkonnu Pitchy-Patchy Pierrot and Gombay the ones who dance the ancestors. Perhaps when they dance they’ll let the wind spin their strips and their tatters into thread flying ready to be climbed. Or feather them into birds on the ascendant, their wings lightly stirring up the ocean below the Middle Passage. Perhaps they’ll spin off into rainbow-hued streamers plummeting the spaces of Earth into which all those millions “disappeared” Awaking and setting free the dreamers. For sometimes It’s hard to tell if we close our eyes or if night opens in us other starred eyes, if it burrows into the wall of our dream till some door opens. 7 And so, my trickster powers evolving, I’m learning like you, Pablo Neruda veteran tightrope walker, to swing more easily ​between joy and obligation. Here it is: this poem I’ve made for you like a quilt from thread and strips as a way of thanking you – not for all your other gifts (for that would require a book) – but simply in exchange for your kite which – as you have seen – I’ve turned to good use. And for allowing me to explore boundlessness. For witnessing how the thread of poetry can serve for binding up and for un-binding. And for the bounty of these lines which have unwound themselves 8 “God is dead” wrote Nietzsche. “Heaven is empty” wrote Kandinsky, “God is dead”. You, Pablo Neruda, saw instead The heavens unfastened and open.