Poem: "Pilgrim Flask"

For the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (next Saturday, people, in Salem), I have been asked to write an ekphrastic on an artefact from the Peabody Essex Museum. I wrote on this blue and white porcelain flask.



(Image from the Peabody Essex Museum website)



Pilgrim Flask

Here we have thirst
And patience, from the first
—Marianne Moore, “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish”


Ming Dynasty export to Spain, which sailed
or rode the longest overland trade route
to come to rest on its one spreading foot,
on a sideboard or centre mantelpiece,
the coat of arms a country’s golden age,
silver harvested from deep American mines,
spices ferried back from the Philippines,
this bottle makes a beautiful wedding gift.

Please take it, sister, though it’s eight years late.
I could not give it earlier. Away
from home, I was studying to be a poet.
Angry, too, when your faith didn’t accept
the fact that I am gay. Time has returned
material fact back to a means of faith.
A thing of cobalt blue and lotus white,
this old fortune recalls an older form.

Inflated goatskin on the saddlebags,
it saved a restless man dying of thirst.
For the faithful, the clay ampulla held
the holy olive from the healing shrine.
Please take it home and put it on display,
this worldly relic, this ceramic camel.
No saints, but we ride on a pilgrimage.
No water, but we hold on to the flask.

for YP

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more