The Apothecary of Flight E-Book

Jane Burn

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 106

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Apothecary of Flight by Jane Burn is a heady flight into the art of poetry itself: its vital importance as a tool for expression; for understanding and translating the self; for articulating the sheer force and joy of poetry and the way, for a person with autism, it can hold, identify and celebrate both the smallest and weightiest of life's experiences and concepts. These unfettered and exquisite poems pulse with the details of both the wild and tame, the sacred and the humane – observing nature and animals with an artist's eye, capturing the ways in which place and time can hold the experiences of the body, memory and identity. This ongoing dialogue with poetry itself sets a visionary path towards discovery – the page as a place to root oneself, a place of deep creative freedom, self-permission, belonging and defiance. Ultimately, the form, presence and physicality of Burn's extraordinary poems move us with compassion towards the happiest solitude of words, and of love.

Leseprobe

The Apothecary of Flight

The Apothecary of Flight

Jane Burn

ISBN: 978-1-913437-96-1

eISBN: 978-1-913437-97-8

Copyright © Jane Burn, 2024.

Cover artwork: © Jane Burn, 2024.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Jane Burn has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published July 2024 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the UK on recycled paper by Imprint Digital.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

The Apothecary of Flight

This poem must be about

An Imaginary Residency Inside an 18th Century Stoneware Jar

Too many dawns are grinding you down

When I was sent to Coventry for real

Translation / Acts

Revelations    01/01/2022

Augury

when I balanced who I am upon the turning of a book

The National Trust Cannot Charge You To Come In

Epiphany / Turning 50

Bear    i    Bear Bear Bear

On Hawkburn Head

Natural Occurrence (Driving Home from The Lakes)

Aisling to Dún a Rí

At High Force

The Effects of Rage

where tulips fade and tongues are put to rest

Mother Crow, Mother Bee, Mother Stone, Mother Sky, Mother Tree

Rose, Redacted

Taraxacum

An Evanescent Garden

Ocular Map       Life as a Series of Roses

The Bones and the Sky

The Women who are Dead

The Unknown Women

Going To Town With An Imaginary Friend

I was a woman today

At The Laing

To sonnets and my best friend / horse

Marsh Angels

As the horse made one slow orbit of its land

Ceridwen

Thwarted Belongingness   (A Pandemic Funeral)

I’m afraid of the ghost of Egas Moniz

I see you  |  hold the secrets of myself

Jeanne, Visions, Trousers, Flames

In November          2021

metapoem / iteration (Dickinson, 568)

Bear    ii    sometimes bear, sometimes poems, sometimes love

I hadn’t heard poetry read out loud before, or talked about as if it was a Real & Important Thing until a brilliant teacher made it so

Pantoum to Maud’s Absolutely Brilliant Door

Imagined Letters Between Emily Dickinson / Joseph Cornell / Myself About 405 /

Ocular Map      To Mary’s Paper Garden

Elizabeth’s Fish

On Writing an Acceptance to the Self

How to Write a Competition Poem

Strophe/Antistrophe/Epode/to being all the parts of me inside a poem

Interoception

I am Road, I am Mother, I am a Better Person Now, I am Failed

Eliza   save yourself from Higgins   run

Hare cannot stop looking at a photograph of E.R. Fightmaster in a meadow

Ocular Map      Three Interpretations

Afterwinter

if I was the tiny seahorse   clung

A long, long story of the dark

When Pauline Sings Big River

Tree   Breathe   Leaf   Shade   Fruit Home   Branch   Wood   Bird

All day, it rained

To the Kilburn Horse, seen from the Leeds to Newcastle train

Miracles

Always Make Friends with a Cloud

Me and the Goldsworthy, Alone

Notes

Note on How & Why I Invented the Ocular Map

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

– Emily Dickinson

The Apothecary of Flight

After ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’, Percy Bysshe Shelley

I am clearing the page of birds     Beneath the thought of feathers

                   is a person who writes

         I will do this

away from the apothecary of flight    and this next work will be

                    a recantation of wings

I will ask who are you, poet?      What if you could not write the sky?

If all the shades of blue are denied?

I will strip away your weight    and guide you away

                            from your bones

You must not whisper   or mutter or skein   but stand

with your poem loud and like a beacon   in your hand

I see you     washing words in water

throwing yourself upon    the elucidation of the sea

        Is it possible to write  yourself clean?   Refrain

from the solution of puddles    Step away from the stream

     (except a stream of consciousness)

I see you     peeping out between the trees!  See how you run

    straight back to your   ornate autarky!

How do you see immortality?   Will you fall

and be devoured by the ground?     Are you the fate of leaves?

Wear your sonnets like a crown    and leave the bosky

to the forest    Our sweetest songs are those that tell

of saddest thought    (how full doth that line make

thy plain heart feel!)      so name things (without shame things!)

     Say it strong

   Make them know that every day

                              is a precipice

Taste instead the tongue’s deliverance

Raise your voice      Speak the clarity of ice

This poem must be about

something of unbearable consequence             something massive, like

the abscission of daffodils      (in a green glass vase on a windowsill)

and the way they embody a matter of great importance          possibly

the sadness of the ageing process          beauty’s brief skin         or

our inevitable deaths                 otherwise

it runs the risk of being just another poem about flowers         Just

another poem about         their overwhelming scent           their dust

spent for no reason        impotent on the sill’s embroidered cloth

The water’s false hope of life everlasting           The unquenchable thirst

that their poor yellow heads will never understand         This must not be

just another poem about wilting       or confusion at the absence

of rain that they somehow still sense     their petals slanted

toward the day, politely asking for light         My mother

hated me, I tell them       They answer     yes, my dearwe know

An Imaginary Residency Inside an 18th Century Stoneware Jar

For the last month, this jar has been more than home. It has been

lonelier than I ever imagined but I have made a friend of echoes —

have lined this space with song. I must react and interact, inhabit

this vessel until it becomes my second skin. I wrote about durability,

longevity. How the outside is speckled like a tree sparrow’s egg —

the pretty daubs of petal, crude and bold. I wrote about each change

to the circle of light, or dusk, or dark above my head. Sometimes,

the air cools to dew point and the glazed inside cries. It was odd

at first to see something so cold and hard weep but I think it best

to let it have its grief. Come within — for you may read, if you wish,

my ledger of scents. Being alone for so long has sharpened my sense

of this cavity’s past, its bearing of oil, wine, water, vinegar, milk —

the people that have borne it in their arms, against their chests

like a heavy child. I smell their breath, for they have held their faces

above, like peculiar moons. I write in the language of kilns —

dunt and fettling, greenware, sintering. I have measured this place

for sound — for the trace of every voice that has echoed down.

The jar’s body is ringed, in memory of the potter who raised it

on their wheel. Sometimes dizziness sets in. I have learned the peril

of corners — how they try to send you straight, how they attract

the shadows. I live without them happily now, forever in the round.

I must tend the hairline crack, threading from the base and feeding upon

an old weakness. The jar no longer rings true. It returns the noise

of faulty bone. You are welcome to join a workshop here but

take care; clay has a way of drawing impurities out. I am eager

for stories — the jar’s destiny is to swallow whatever we give. Please

fill me with your words. I ask you all this same question,

after you climb in — sotell me: what did you once hold?

Too many dawns are grinding you down

Each of them fingered under the door, like a rankling note

from enemy hands; sly and meant to leave a bitter edge — time

today will wear all shapes of mean. Start and intend to go on. Start

by lapping at dirty words. Fail to speak in skylarks. The night

has never been enough. You do not savour morning as you should.

Shift your unreadiness — you must rise, unassembled and scarecrow

the mattress on broomstick bones; beware the sham of half-light clinging

round your bed. Raise your skin and flail its ballast of unkempt sleep.

You have been disrupted, fouled aware by a clock’s meddling bleat.

Sometimes you have come. Sometimes you have cried—

you know this from the salt, scribbled upon your cheeks. The air still

claims you have no kin. You are not loved. These are the curses

that coil inside your unsuspecting head—

the breaths that you take from the dark.

When I was sent to Coventry for real

Coventry is a shithole, the posh bloke from up the road said.

My son will not be going to university there. I want to unpack everything

about his comment — it’s a real onion of a thing to say.

There are so many layers of privilege, I don’t know where to begin.

When I was sent to Coventry for real, everyone made that same joke.

What did you do to deserve that?

It’s an unkind fate, to be cut from the herd —

to be marked with shame, to be shunned. Coventry

is one of the best places I have ever been.

So many excuses to stop, spend some moments in wonder.

In the Precinct, a poem is carved into rills — the water weaves

with words; history speaks from beneath its shallow shine.

Lady Godiva was sent to Coventry too. In Broadgate, she is skinned

with verdigris bronze, written into the signs of local shops.

In the ’50s clock tower, she is chimed out every hour

from automatic doors. She says nothing.

I went out early so I could be alone with the Cathedral’s stones.

In the bombed part, I cried for the broken blooms of glass that cling

the blitzed tracery like lozenges of multi-coloured fruit.

Just like this place, I thought that I was broken once — we are stories

of ruin yet built ourselves brand-new. How amazing

that the skeleton remains — its scars are truth and truth is

the most wonderful thing. Heaven is limitless. Prayers are birds

and snow, sun, stars, and sky. Its psalms were honest, rough, and wild.

I didn’t go there for perfect — I did not mind the yellow hazard sign

in front of the Baptistery Window, nor the other folk wandering about.

This place told me its pain. The window wall of light is etched

with gorgeous ghosts. The tapestry’s green is the Elysian Fields.

If this is Coventry, I thought, then I’ll stay.

The silence here is beautiful.

Translation / Acts

Sperm and egg translate [sometimes] to flesh, wet womb to dry air,

water’s peace to screams. Need translates to milk — to a gum’s burden

of invading teeth / bone to longer bone,

dense to brittle. Night is traded for day,

sensations / perceptions of dark / interpretations of light — asleep

for awake, insomniac to agony, unconsciousness to consciousness,

fatigue to [maybe] less fatigue, [brief] solace

to overwhelming fear — prone to an image

of wings / of the risen Christ / prone to stay the fuck right here / need help.

Bladder empties out to shame / relief, thirst to slake [should there be supply],

sour breath to minty fresh — [if possible]

dirty to clean, hungry [if food exists] to fed,

energy to attempt, journey [in inches or miles] to arrival, travail

to frustration / pleasing ourselves / clocking in to [hopefully] some reward.

Deadlines become procrastination / achievement.

Skill turns to product / catastrophe. Potential

is fulfilled / morphs into waste, the future to futility / infamy / discovery /

erasure / regret. Laundry into angels pegged to a line / an undefeatable pile.

Time present submits to time past, and

years are rewritten / written off / unwritten.

You live / you hope / pain or fail — illness to illness / wellness to illness,

broken to fixed, fixed to broken, to more broken [plus all the shapes of health

between]. Love translates to loved in return /

loving [or not loving] oneself / unloved / to feeling

[being made to feel] unlovable / used to love [and don’t, any longer]. Need

into compromise / intransigence, differences into solutions / a massive row.

Trust into confidence / faith / gaslighting /

                   violence/ [in]security / doubt. Friend

to community / support / misunderstanding / loneliness. Hearts turn to stone,

grief to marrow, found to lost / rediscovered / Tears to tantrums / relief / futility.