Leon Retief. Landart
Friday, April 18th, 2014
Dennebos naby Banff, Alberta
René Bohnen se baie mooi inskrywing oor landkuns, sowel as Susan Smith se kommentaar (‘n Klippie onder jou kaal voet…”) het twee dinge tot gevolg gehad: ten eerste, reg of verkeerd, het ek gedink aan my geliefkoosde Kanadese digter Don Domanski, nie omdat daar noodwendig ‘n direkte en noue verwantskap is tussen sy verse en landkuns nie maar omdat hy die omgewing, die plantegroei, diere, dinge en soms ook die verval in landskappe met sulke ryk metafore ineenvleg met ons menslike ondermaanse ondervindings dat dit werklik tot my spreek – miskien op ‘n ander wyse as wat landkuns dit doen – maar tog ook – en nie minder treffend nie.
Die tweede ding wat ek gedoen het was om ‘n soektog op tou te sit na Kanadese landkunstenaars. Ek dink sulke gediertes is maar dun gesaai maar een sodanige kunstenaar wat ek hier te lande kon vind is Diana Thompson, wat goedgunstiglik toestemming verleen het dat ek foto’s van haar werke vir hierdie inskrywing kon gebruik.
Picea glauca deur Diana Thompson.
In 2001 I went to a remote corner of northern BC with a plan.
I wanted to see if I could make a work of art with only my hands
and what I found around me – nothing else.
What I found were spruce cones, thousands of them.
I spent three weeks gathering and carefully placing cones
around five White Spruce trees.
On one of my days off I hiked to the Llewellyn Glacier.
The way the ice flowed through the valleys influenced the way
that I arranged the cones streaming around the trees.
When it was finished,
I gathered some people around to view it,
documented it, then left it for the squirrels.
René se heeltemal verkeerde beskrywing van haarself as “a bear of very little brain” het my herinner aan Domanski se gedig Ursa Immaculate, so hier is dit:
URSA IMMACULATE
night swept back over the headlands
someone’s sign language alone in the forest
scratching words in the air haunting
narrow spaces between the pines
hieroglyphical pheromones carried on the breeze
anagrammatical gestures almost apparitional
almost perceptible
midnight and a redtail asleep in his negative theology
luciferin shine of fireflies a coyote folding the pleats
of her wound swaying her god with the pain
with the suffering that falls through belief’s chasm
that small caesura between the flesh and bone
I’ve been sitting alone beside the lake subbing
for a rock or a blade of grass watching
the phrase ex nihilo feather the water’s surface
and faces of the Julii shine out from drab houses
of the midge larvae
the moon puts on a clean white shirt and rises
I lean back into the blood of my shoulders
and neck into the pure vowels of my spine
vocalic pins attaching vertebrae to my nerves
what was mutely sung by everything nameless
everything forgotten.
*
solitude is our nourishment and redemption
in a world that is sensed rather than understood
quietude our reprieve from the skin trade
of language so I come to seek refuge here
in the stillness spreading among evergreens
like the dissemination of algae like nightjars flying
through first kisses and Chinese whispers
we should confine ourselves to the present
as Marcus Aurelius wrote but it’s a hard sell
when memories like pollen set ablaze
fall from the air
with their final wish for us in hand
reddening the meditative colours
of each moment white and off-white
pearly counterpoint to words and meaning
moony phosphorescence in the marrow
moonlight makes the world seem more absent
the blood of things more secretive and present
phenomena hushed and all breathing space
lit by a saurian light bioluminescent glow
in the brain stem our reptilian brain
like a pre-existent prayer that sometimes
rises out of story and flesh
I stand up and walk along the water’s edge
beside me a heron’s footprints runs line after line
like typographical errors in the glistening mud
above me moths chaperone the musculature
of stars and the Delphic shudder of a cloud
prophesying a bright green world
it’s difficult to know the sanctitude
of things bloodsqualls metabolized
hatched and cross-hatched blackened down
to flesh and gesture
hard to imagine all the tongues tied in the weeds
all the heartbeats time-lapsed beneath each stone
life incessantly singing to itself in the night
funereal lips and luminous throats
it’s difficult to know the sanctitude
of ourselves as we breathe the rapture of time’s
cadences deep into our lungs along with the given
sum and cipher of human concerns
downshifting them through vein and bone
our entire lives magnetized to a shining point
each day able to be carried away with a sigh
in the end being human is a long and wordless
journey ask the dead caught and released
along the margins of a stag’s breath
ask them as they descend the wooden steps
of the birch trees that go far underground
till they reach Ursa Major Ursa Immaculate
Bear of the Clear Heart.
*
walking along the shore every footstep
a homecoming every blade of bracken
with a finger to its lips
the earth imagining a physical world
my body shoulder-deep in a Dantean fluidity
In the middle of my life, I went astray
And I awoke in a dark woord
in the middle of my life I’m standing
next to the quillwort listening
to nettles grinding their teeth to saplings
asleep in their funereal branches
to my every thought like a breath
loosened from a windowpane
this is the hour when Ursa Major comes as
a supplication stars like bees sworn to light
when all our religions feed the shadows
of uncertainty to its most silent angels
when all our philosophies sound like small
animals beating their children in the grass
this hour is called wearing dark clothes
beneath your skin this is called walking
through the forest with zero gravity behind
your eyes this is called sign language
without an owner emptiness of this hour
this is called the pale jawline of infinity
and flesh called opening your mouth
without a sound.
Raincatcher deur Diana Thompson
The enormous red cedar trees in the Great Bear Rainforset were a source of fiber for the indigenous people of the area.. They wove their clothes, hats and baskets from cedar bark
and roots. By draping the tree with pale green cotton yarn (the kind used for knitting sweaters)
in shapes that echoed the curve of the branches, I was speaking about
the physical connection between our bodies and the body of the tree.
The cotton cord would fall off (rot off) within a few months in the saturated Great Bear Rainforest.
(Tests at my home, where it rains less, have shown it only lasted three months )
MADONNA OF THE DIAPHANOUS LIFE
sunlight on pine boughs saints asleep in the Great Bear
the Great Bear asleep in the North Mountain everything waiting
for the next words to be spoken something to stir water and gravel
to braid soil and light a few phrases left over
from the creation of the world and it sparrow’s heart.
*
Tuesday blank hours of summer lazing in the heat
time presupposes time endlessness of afternoons lost
in their own alchemical sense of surfaces and shadows
bees hyperkinetic across meadows each takes at least
sixteen days to make sixteen afternoons of heaven’s push
and heed transubstantiation afternoons into flesh
flesh into honey.
*
a new day in the Annapolis Valley crows like prayer wheels
spinning above spruce spires water bears rehydrated
antsqualls in flight the calligraphy of a spider’s web torn
by the wind topography of a feather abandoned shoe
in the mud its laces tied around the hour ready to begin
again to accompany us on our journey our little junkets
along the edges of oblivion treasures of the begotten
and half-begotten such resplendence such intransitive
moments such fortunes near at hand.
*
deadfall of light and its amenities retinal light leaking into
the blindness of chickweed white clover leaning
into the sun’s maculae ferns lifting their fronds rhizomes
sending up parts of speech to answer the call to ascension
chlorophyll our eternal contemporary old friend with green
raiments and pockets full of maps to places we’ll never go
or even think of going not faraway destinations just here
in that spot three feet away.
*
water’s shorthand in the gully its signature carried downstream
countersigned by the river authenticated by the sea wave sway
and memory pointing to the horizon’s keel upturned
and freeze-framed where the stars abound just beyond the blue
abound and take us in where no one else will we live
in meridian light forever we live our life on a waterdrop
with its young-bearing rapture and weight
Queen of Breath Madonna of the Diaphanous Life.
*
cliff swallow above the valley floor her mind a bit of night sky
flying through daylight galaxies and stars turning in synch
with her every move a celestial static around her body and wings
like a steady rain falling inside a cathedral while on the ground
a bit of moss on a branch about a cloud of mosquitoes
coming back from the other side with angels on their breath.
*
a vole`s divinity beneath the ground cover blush of isness
in every leaf the ungod of things holding on to secrets
ministering to the dark and arabesque waters of the past
hue of the curlew`s cry colour of inclement silver midday
patdown of absence our absence our postbeliefs carried
off by the breeze no one to stand in for us to take our burdens
down to the river and ferry them along to take our words away
only the redtail to watch over us only that redtail and that cloud.
*
a cloud marl-coloured a cool rinse drifting along
the whole world listening to its silent approach and fade
little voice like a pale acolyte from Thrace lost in prayer
while we align ourselves with a grace that glosses up the sheen
of our disaffections sitting with weeds and stones
like Skellig monks contemplating the sea waiting for the future
coming through dry grass through the split-ends.
*
our future waits well beyond our hubris and intent its pulse
far off and oversewn with foliage its incremental heartbeat
rising from the forest floor twice removed from human ken
then twice again the dead nibble at those roots to no avail
desire pillows its light but finds no resting place no physic
or balm for our ten thousand vulnerabilities only the nightly
asceticism of a stargaze into the firmament into photospheres
and waterdrops a swallow`s mind above the given world.
*
we spend our days wherever we find ourselves always suited up
in our storylines with very little to show outside
of language not even enough to place on our eyelids as we sleep
our sinews and bones jotting down notes our demise
written in our little catechism of anecdotes in those sad chapters
dim and vacant as prescriptions of an afterlife circumstances
wearing us down and away from the earth on every page.
*
there`s something about us that inhibits our ability to amend
the stillness to a deeper stillness to inhabit quietude to live in
the world there are not enough reliquaries to hold our saintless
bones not enough reasons to bring us back from perdition
meanwhile we long and belie that longing as we write our
confessions black ink on black paper meanwhile the sun moves
through nostalgia`s ether meanwhile something has sicced
the dog rose on the bracken and called the chlorella home.
WILDERNESS OF THE RAINDROP
clambering up the bluff Hokusai`s wave behind me now
still moving around the circumference of the earth
still carrying sea glass and dead sailors ashore
the forest comes to meet me at the edge with open arms
and the psalm of a breeze zephyr of feral sighs
bending being just a bit closer to the ground
closer to the centre of things to the last light of day
I stand watching the Atlantic darken watching
the great wilderness of the raindrop at my feet
a rabbit`s skullcap and mouse tibia in the grass
cup white empty cup and spoon
place setting for one for the voice that has drifted
far from its body utterance lost in the undergrowth
up here the lisp of the forgotten can be heard every night
every night the unclottable arteries of the afterlife empty
their black stories onto the rocks below to be carried
out to sea to be finned gilled deepened by whitecaps
and fathoms caught in net a universe away.
Diana Thompson se webwerf is te sien by: http://www.dianathompson.net/gallery/gallery.html
(© Leon Retief)
