[Poneme] Featured Poet: Jennifer Compton

Jen Crawford jencrawford at gmail.com 
Fri Sep 16 12:07:58 EST 2005 
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Jen Compton's feature appears below. Thank you kindly, Compton.

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So -  now it is my turn to dance in the spotlight

And I find myself in a slapdash and harried sort of mood. So I shall 
start with proffering three poems and their explications I wrote for 
possible inclusion in an anthology to be published by the Live Poets 
Society.
 

Bark Soup Winter

The people cover their bones with furs
drink bark soup to tether them to life.

Too many of us, for these times, gathered
around the meaningless, low-burning fire.

My fetish is housed in that one tree among many.
It is known I will live in that house until the thaw.

Or so I believed when I chose the woman
I would return in when the great snow left.

My soup was brewed from the bark of the one tree
that has always been able to free us from this life.

I drank it because I was a young man and easily dead.
But when I woke to myself with weapons in my hand

to hunt the white death, hunger, out of our valley
it was not as we had plaited it together in our story.

I did not want to return. I could not.
I threw my simple weapons down.
 

Parker & Quink - Ginninderra Press 2004

"I liked writing this young man's story. He imagined himself to be what 
I used to call in my childhood, a Red Indian. His story was one I 
carried in my head for a long time. It didn't occur to me to write it. 
Then one night it occurred to me to write it."
 
 

Nom de Plume

I met an old friend in a dream.
He was going under a pseudonym.
Eric Blair. That's how I knew it was him.
But he would never have used that name.
 

Parker & Quink Ginninderra Press 2004
"This poem was simply about a dream I had about an old friend. I woke 
with the four lines on my lips. But I had to struggle to find a title."
 
 

The Children

They were knocking on the bedroom window.
I rolled over in bed and said to my lover
There are two children knocking on the window.
Well - he growled - I'm not their father.

But they kept on, they wouldn't stop.
A boy of near five and his younger sister.
It seemed they were looking for their mother.
But he was plainly not their father.

Parker & Quink Ginninderra Press 2004

"I was nervous about having children. It was something I had to be 
convinced about. Eventually, they convinced me. They were very sure I 
was their mother. And they were very sure who their father was. The 
boy, on a later occasion, even promised to be good. But as my cousin 
said - Never trust a soul who wants to incarnate."

And now it might be time to offer you something new.
Now, let me see, what shall it be? Excuse me while I go away and browse 
around in my poetry files for a little.
Ah. This will do. It has a poneme connection. The first two lines I 
wrote for our renga, and they got rejected but I liked them too much to 
lose them so I wrote the rest of the poem. I haven't sold it anywhere 
yet so maybe it doesn't come off. I have read it a couple of times at 
readings and it seems to go down quite well. Especially if I explain it 
is about the experience of being on the internet  "talking" (well it 
feels like talking) to people on a site I frequent.
 

making up for lost time

as all around the house nature groans urgently
I lean into the secret wire that takes me to the world

tonight, the frog will not hop like one wet gumboot
along the verandah, no, nor the stiff-necked almost

owl gaze into the heart of light that moths crave
these were occasions on another night, before

the frogs dwindled, hid under stones
bogongs were not summoned by the rains

there were no rains, and no frog song neither
out in the paddock, and spreading further out

a soundscape with a vanishing point
the tap of my keys pattering like rain

when our house was lit up to the skies
tonight, a thread of silk is flung, I risk

a shaded lamp, and a white-blue haze
humming up off the liquid crystal screen

darkness comes down from the cathedral ceiling
covering me like a blanket as I crouch at the lens

of the apparatus, apprehensive of the image to be
captured in a flash in the pan, the ferocious blaze

the frog songs begin again, as frogs succeed
as the wheel creaks and stirs and begins to roll

the seeking fingers locking like a pumpkin vine
that has trawled blue vacancy and found a void

seizing something! anything! and going for it
coiling and grasping willy nilly - just like love
 

((And one more for luck. (Please forgive my strange mood. I have had 
much to try me lately.))
 

By Moonlight

You didn't know where Moscow is or who Mozart was.
I touched you and asked you to dance but your face collapsed.
As you slammed the pupils of your eyes shut you unleashed
a powerful one-note perfume, like a carapace, like a cicatrice.

I loved you. I remember you by moonlight, inaccurately,
with the white hair-slide of false hope curving like your shy smile.
I remember you by moonlight, accurately, suddenly barefoot,
suddenly adroit, as the white horse lay and groaned in his sleep.

The moon swayed, the pine trees,
on your boundary, like a premonition,
switched perspective, becoming foreground
with smooth, elusive panache. Trees can do that.

I'll take my teeth out and out them in a glass beside the bed.
So I can't bite. This is my last and best gift. Such sentiment!
 

(I thought this one would be a long poem. It is a farewell to a friend 
who had proved to be a very bad friend. I had to rid myself of 
something. It took a long time and I couldn't say what I wanted to say, 
so I put it to one side. And when I went back later I realised that I 
had written a sonnet and I had said everything I wanted to say. This is 
a poem I will always like, in spite of what anyone else thinks or says 
about it. But I would very much like to hear what other people think.)
 

regards to all - jennifer Compton
 
 
 
 
 

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