|
 Anne
Kennedy,
poet, writer, photographer and broadcaster, came from Orcas Island,
off the coast of Washington state, to live in Galway, Ireland
in 1977. Her first book Buck Mountain Poems, published
by Salmon in 1989, is based on her Orcas experiences. The
Dog Kubla Dreams My Life, also from Salmon, was published
in 1994. A keen documentor of history, in 1993 she contributed
an oral history project to the Duke Ellington archive in the Smithsonian
Museum of American History. Anne Kennedy died on 29th September
1998.
"The
quietly dazzling poems of The Dog Kubla Dreams My Life
result from scruple, craft and a compassionate vision of the human
predicament across decades and on both sides of the Atlantic,
as Anne Kennedy continues to compose that rare species of poems
that cannot be written quickly but must be lived image by image,
and which comprise a powerful witnessing to sorrow and sanctuary.
Her words shimmer with an excitement at once beautiful and wise,
and which I believe will be with us for a long time."
R.T. SMITH
Poems
from
The Dog Kubla Dreams My Life
by ANNE KENNEDY
With
One Continuous Breath
I
have stepped out
onto that same perch of grass
a thousand times,
it is my Heraclitean stream.
You, jingling your car keys,
me, wearing the low-cut lilac dress,
eager for the Italian meal,
unsure, always unsure.
Only your hieratic gestures;
tipping the head waiter,
calling him by name,
assure me you too are uncertain.
Up
on the hill our house
dissolving in a sea of lights,
under chaparral, granite decomposing
our oranges slightly sour,
more lemons than we could ever use,
the jacaranda;
life in such profusion.
Again
and again I step
out of the car your father gave us,
too posh
too grand for newly marrieds.
The grass springs sere under my lilac sandals,
petal sleeves, beehive, eyes absurdly kohled.
With
one continuous breath
I absorb the pungent night air,
never dreaming
that from all our years together
this moment only will sting.
Cairo
Rain
straifes our city bus.
Beside me, a lady with tinted glasses remarks
she has no umbrella,
she lost it months ago in Paddington Station,
that cave of bears.
No doubt some station master's daughter
is sporting it through London's seamless streets
or, knowing how they clean the trains,
it lies still furled in a corner of the luggage rack.
She can see it lying there;
(she'd give anything to have it back).
'Oh,
I've had other umbrellas,
a green one once with a broken spine
that I couldn't lose in a fit,
but this umbrella was special
because it doubled as a third leg.
I need that, you see, a disguised walking stick
and the handle, a carved bird.
Ah,
but one takes one's comforts
in the ordinary little courtesies.
Just today a lovely man gave me a lift
when I asked directions
to a furniture showroom out the road,
'Hop-in', he said and I was young again,
I was twenty and life was full of adventure.
I've
bought myself a little house, you see,
and I want to furnish it.
Today was a very lucky day for me,
asking directions,
but nowhere in the world have I met people
who know so little about where they are -
the men are desperate but the women are worse.
Is
it because they live under their
husband's protection?
Women do that, you know, they follow money,
they do, you know, they really do.
Myself, I'm a tough old bird, a wanderer, a solo.
Did you kow the French are building
a tunnel under Cairo?
Must be bread and butter in it.
The women here wouldn't even know
where Egypt is.'
The
fierce low sun bulleting in
the scumbled bus
lights up her purple-tinted glasses.
I am hurtling beneath baking city streets;
I see Cairo.
Schrodinger's
Cat
Cat
Schrodinger put you inside a box
forever sealed
concealing your fate.
We will never know until
we look inside the metaphor
if you are in there or not.
Fat,
substantial cat
waxing and waning
like the moon in the dark,
rising in some minds
setting in others.
There may be an infinity of cats
in there by now
in as many worlds as minds will manufacture.
Oh
wondrous cat, galactic cat,
universes pulsate in the folds of your fur
and your star-crossed fate
purrs in the interior
of your sturdy, experimental box.
Tiny atoms erode under your nose
releasing or note releasing
the lethal gas of proof.
Whether
you are dead or alive
you exist, kitten and cat in an instant,
both springing forth and lying still.
Abstract you have substance
you never had in life.
Quotidian feline,
like the sacred cat of the Pharaohs
guarding the hinged lid
of all our dark uncertainties.
Burial
Instructions
I
don't want to be cremated,
my clothes sent home in a bag,
my ashes sifted from the furnace grate
for my Claddagh ring
and gold fillings.
No,
plant me,
like my Grandmother's blazing dahlias
in the subsuming earth,
where I can be lifted,
where there's a chance of resurrection.
How
about the hump-backed hill
beyond Barna
riddled with Celtic crosses,
or the sun-shot meadow on Orcas
facing steaming Mt. Baker.
On
second thought
Westwood is best,
beside my mother
where the mocking-bird sang
the night she was buried.
You
might know the spot
because that's where they placed
Marilyn's ashes
in a pale marble crypt
looking across at our family plot.
They
say it's Joe
provides the perpetual rose,
but no one knows for certain.
Be sure you put me in the ground
where I will have a chance to rise.
(Copyright
Anne Kennedy, 1994. All Rights Reserved.)
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