Pilgrimage; a poet’s response
The poet places language beyond the reach of time: or, more accurately, the poet approaches language as if it were a place, an assembly point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained – John Berger, 1984.
While travelling through and in between the glacial-volcanic landscapes of Iceland, language evaded me. Slowly, over the following few years, I made sense of the profound unravelling landscapes. They moved deep within, they became me. Poetry eventually arrived. In offering ‘a place, an assembly point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained’, it was my only means of approaching experience.
The poems I showed at the ISSC were part of this body of work. Short, haiku-like phrases; breathy, abstracted, distant, close. Lines and phrases came like dust, while walking through Reykjavík, or standing in the window at night. In their abstractions they spoke to my deep stirring emotion. The glacier within responding to the glacier without.
In the beginning, a movement underground.
A stirring
A coiling
A becoming unstuck.
Soft red visions slowly thickening and open.
Now, walking through Reykjavík, I remember.
A lupin flower, the edge of solidness, the bellowing walls.
My love from the mountain is close.
Soft red visions slowly thicken.
Part of Iceland now, I am coated in the world.
Steaming slowly in hot springs,
I remembered the stars weep too, /And tears of space.
Unravelling form, physical movement, breathing it.
Snow fills the window,
Snow fills the black amnesias of me.
Volcanic ash smothering my feet,
To think of the edge of dust, the valley of the spiralling tear.
O unmarked parts of space!
My heart drenched water yet again. A glimpse then of the angel. She!
