The Huntress E-Book

Pascale Petit

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 47

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, this is the third collection from a poet of powerful emotions and vivid imagery. The Huntress underlines the author's reputation as a questing poet capable of outstanding imagistic flourishes and surprising associations. In this emotional follow-up to The Zoo Father, a daughter is haunted by her mentally ill mother until a series of remarkable transformations help her to conquer painful childhood memories. Over the course of the collection, the feared mother becomes a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess, a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, and then a ghost orchid, yet in the central poem the daughter becomes a cosmic stag and escapes her mother-huntress.

Leseprobe

For Brian

Also by Pascale Petit

Icefall Climbing

Heart of a Deer

Tying the Song (Co-edited with Mimi Khalvati)

The Zoo Father

El Padre Zoológical/The Zoo Father

The Wounded Deer

The Huntress

Pascale Petit

seren

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd

Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3BN

www.seren-books.com

The right of Pascale Petit to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Copyright Pascale Petit, 2005

ISBN 9781781720455

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior per-mission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Printed by Bell & Bain, Glasgow.

Cover:

Back cover portrait of the author by Brian Fraser.

CONTENTS

Three Horses 7

The Snake House 8

The Summoner 9

The Den 10

Portrait of My Mother as Xipe Totec 11

House of Darkness 12

The Rattlesnake Mother 13

Her Mouse Daughter 14

My Mother’s Mirror 15

The Feast 17

After the Washing-Up 18

Portrait of My Mother as Coatlicue 19

Visit of the Were-Deer 20

My Mother’s Wings 21

Portrait of My Brother

as an Endurance Runner 22

The Mantis Mother 23

The Mineral Mother 24

The Children’s Asylum 25

A Cure 26

My Mother’s Tongue 27

The Witch Bottle 28

The Singing Bowl 29

Mother of Pearl 30

My Mother’s Perfume 31

The Ghost Orchid 32

When I Talk With My Mother 33

Descent into the Cirque de Navacel e 34

The Limestone Madonna in

the Grotte des Demoiselles 35

A Hornets’ Nest 37

The Spell 38

The Dragonfly Daughter 39

The Grass Snake 41

Song Orchids 42

At the Gate of Secrets 43

Lunettes 49

Oxygen 50

The Orchid Hunter 51

Noon in the Orchid House, Kew Gardens 52

The Mirror Orchid 53

House of Solitude 56

Carving the Dead Elm of Le Caylar 57

The Door Flower 59

Unearthly Languages 62

A Piano Flower 63

Acknowledgements 64

Three Horses

Come in. Come in, and see what no-one has witnessed. You step in and you’re outside. So outside. There are no humans, just three horses in a field, the sky pressing against your forehead, urging you to acknowledge something is wrong. Three horses. Two foals drink from a trough and are normal. You recognise your brother. You must look now at the big palomino mare, at her face which is twice the size it should be. You walk up, just as I used to walk in, closing the front door behind me. Every molecule in the room told my eyes to look away but a daughter must meet her mother’s gaze. Those bulging hazel eyes weeping blood – inhuman, beyond the animal. A daughter must put out her hand and touch her mother’s muzzle – huge and red-brown, against the open field of the carpet. No firm bone under the creased flesh, as if her body is being digested from the inside. Her breath comes hard. Run your fingers along the furrows and find the straps of the halter buried in the bag of her neck. Do what was required of me, what I did not know how to do – cut her free. See, just above her nostrils, the two punctures of a rattlesnake’s fangs. She’ll hobble to the trough and recover. You’ll be allowed to leave, you’ll be released.

The Snake House

It’s time to go up to your front door, Mother, and ring the rattling buzzer of a bell, the door with two curved fangs. I go in, into the muscular throat of the hall, down the tunnel that’s closing now to a pinpoint of light. I’m in the swallowing living-room, washing it for you, half-alive, like a man preparing for the rain-dance in the dry arroyo. He reaches into the pit and washes the snakes so that later when he dances with the ‘little mothers’ in his mouth, they won’t bite. I’m a child playing in the pen with my pet rattlers, giving them bread and milk. As long as I’m unscared they won’t strike. And you’re saying, “Only a girl-child can do this”. My cheeks are almost seamless now, countless grafts hide the necrosis.

The Summoner

“But we never see you” my brother shouts, as if she’s there with him – our divine mother – and her home is Kukulcan’s shrine. The air fills with fever feathers, her eyes blue quetzal eggs that split open like rattlesnake pupils. The rain hisses its warning, the green-lightning bird strikes. Oh the spirals I’ve drawn counterclockwise to uncoil her power. The diamondbacks I’ve caught and eaten raw. I have eaten a snake’s heart to let light into my heart I have come back with serpent stealth singing my snake songs, older and strong. I have sacrificed my life to the rattler-god. But my brother still stands in her granny flat, among her sacks of soiled nighties, her lithium pill dispenser, her last lipstick-smeared fag, its ash. And her unmade bed behind him. Where if I search long enough with my viper’s heat-sensors, I will find what I came for – the snake head that even decapitated will still have the reflex to bite me.

The Den

In the silence of my own home I hear the buzz like a shivering of icy leaves. The back of my neck tickles and I glimpse the rattler’s tail