Bowl After Singing Bowl of Horizons, a prose poem of my life in sections, part scrapbook, part travelogue, an immigrant poem of the always arriving with its tracings of memories of the singing bowls of horizons traversed, maps a journey across continents...and is embedded in the following nineteen photomontages. The full poem is appended at the end.

For years I have been meaning to re-size and upload this to a better site than where it was. I composed it in 2004 while living in Vancouver, Canada, from family photographs, mostly, and sometimes other images from travel or government sites (which are documented in the file info). I moved with my children to Vancouver in 2003 and returned home in 2005, coming back to Toronto, to the familial and the familiar. I've created a slideshow at Picasa, as well as posted each photo montage poem here (click on them for a larger size). It's long, but I hope you enjoy!

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

From Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

BOWL AFTER SINGING BOWL OF HORIZONS

for my father, D. Richard Clews, 1922-1984


An autobiographic prose poem in 19 sections


I

My father is pulling me
over the ever-changing horizon,
moving from one country to the next.

I am an immigrant,
I am the landed and the converted.
I am one of the millions from elsewhere.

I arrived when I was ten,
and I am still arriving.

I crawl over the globe,
composed of bowl
after singing bowl of horizons,
I am a trajectory;
I have no roots;
only the tracings of memories
of the continents I have lived on.

II

Deft sweep
between earth and sky,
dividing one from the other,
the horizon holds us in place,
the horizon keeps us here.
It surrounds us like a bowl,
an arc, a place of vanishing...

What is on this side
is now, the actual, the real;
what is on the other side is sky,
the unfathomable, mist,
what is disappearing into the beyond.

I am from elsewhere,
over and past the horizon,
from the place of vanishing.

The horizon opens before me
and closes behind me.

III

He is striding
over the landscape
khaki pockets full with stone shards
dust in his hair, on his clothes
hundreds of sample bags in canvas carriers
reading the land, its composition
the way I read a recipe.

My father, the geologist,
when I was two, emptying
our tiny apartment onto a truck,
packing my mother and I into his jeep
journeying deep into the bush in Zambia,
dirt roads bumpy with potholes
untouched raw land, Savannah, grasslands, forest
the jungle closing over us, like vines, tall winding grasses
like branches of baobab trees grown thick as roots in the sky,
pushing the petrol pedal with his snake boots
our surrounding thick with insects
alive with the fauna of jungle animals.
Two hundred miles from the nearest town
our encampment in Kafue National Park
half a century ago, without fridges or stoves or bathrooms
or the TV that didn't come to Africa for another decade,
joining a team of white explorers,
an American mining company prospecting for copper.

Our house, stamped dirt walkways
between mud huts:
living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathroom, outhouse.
We travel from hut to hut the way you walk from room to room.

IV

My playground, all of the outdoors.

Singing bowl of life, the Kafue River flowing clear,
fresh, pure, under a deep, pure sky.
We live among the animals:
slow and awkward giraffes, lazy belching hippos,
crocodiles as sly as water-logged logs,
long slithery pythons, blinding spitting snakes,
deadly black mambas, panoplies of birds,
herds of lumbering African elephants,
buck nimbly dancing over thSavannahah,
ants as huge as the paperclip holding these pages,
and once a lion who was blond and noisy.

V

My father, the prospectors
digging trenches, taking samples
following the flow of the river,
its sediments.

My nanny, who I climb all over,
welcomes me into her brood of children,
and Neddy, my first best friend...
though forbidden, I go often to their village,
sit in dark huts, roofs of thick dried grass
and bright sarongs for doors, eat meals
of mealie-meal, a young white guest...
the Nedembu people, their hospitality
their stories of the many spirits their
rituals appease in the beyond for the here.
On weekends we hear drumming,
and the gigantic ones used to send messages
from village to village, and there is dancing
and singing, this drumbeat in my heart.

VI

I am the only white child.
I am blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned.
I am an English transplant.
I am worshipped, honoured, adored.
I am shy and frightened, and always
ride away on my tricycle as soon as I can.

In meditation, I imagine those ebony people,
their dark eyes, so shiny they reflect you back to yourself,
huge baobab trees, cerulean skies, flies and mosquitoes,
spectral warmth of sun, their hair, curly and fuzzy, soft,
bushy, that I love to touch, their language, its short
fast syllables that I speak better than English,
the vivid patterns of their wrap around clothes,
and elegance, carrying huge baskets of fruit on their heads,
their sensual movement, the way they speak
like a music of rivers flowing into the Falls,
and try to understand why,
why not a black child?

VII

Lorries come and go
carrying supplies, medicine in
samples of rock and soil out.
Before the rainy season
a convoy of trucks appear,
sacks of flour, rice, potatoes,
cans of condensed milk, powdered milk,
fruit, vegetables, corned beef,
crates of beer, wine, coffee, tea
a truckload of toilet paper,
everything a civilized group needs.

Then the land closes in, and the rains come,
and flood our dirt roads, and everybody stays in,
waiting, playing cards, arguing, writing reports,
struggling with mosquitoes and isolation.

VIII

For four years, collecting samples
waiting out the rainy seasons,
flying into town and back
in the small bush plane,
then the mining company
looking for copper shuts camp
and we journey out of the jungle.

Out of the back of the jeep,
the horizon like a green snake
holding the earth on this side.

The dome of the jungle sky
unfolds from the earth
clear blue in daytime,
dense black in night-time,
clustered with billions of stars,
the great lights of the sky,
calling us beyond
our imaginings.

For the last time
that dome of night sky
unfathomably rich with stars.

The lights ahead spread like stars,
each town we come to,
streetlights, cars, movement, energy,
the rectangular glow of office buildings,
lights emanating from windows
of rows of warm houses
kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms,
places to eat, relax, sleep,
everywhere this light
twinkling if you are ascending or descending
in an airplane,
meaning, always, inhabitation.

Everywhere in the world.

IX

The world of the jungle vanishes
behind the horizon as we journey on
now a family of five, to Lusaka,
capital of Zambia.

No soft earth underfoot here,
concrete and tarmac,
stiff school desks, whites only,
our house in the suburbs,
the tiny concrete box out back
with a mattress and shower
for the black servants,
my playmates, my friends, my teachers,
my soul mates, this apartheid.

X

Loneliness
in the shadows
of my bedroom
in our brick house
where only the angels
offer comfort.

Angels whose wings
are like iridescent
rainbows in the spray
over Victoria Falls, Mosi-oa-Tunya,
the smoke that
thunders.

XI

My father pulls us through the southern tip
of the continent,
leaving Lusaka, a year later,
on our way to England,
whirling through the eyehole of Capetown,
birth place of my parents,
here, grandparents, aunts and uncles,
and dozens of cousins, all strangers.
I am seven years old, the merry-go-round
in the park my favourite place,
spinning around and around,
as I thread the horizons of my life.

I am learning to make friends
and to leave them.

XII

Curl of ocean foam, white sand beach, mountain flat on top
this picturesque picture remains.
Boarding a huge ocean liner,
relatives like mirages, people I am connected to but do not know,
waving, waving goodbye.

I am leaving something I have never known,
extended family, a brood of belonging, an understanding of heritage.
I am an immigrant, always from elsewhere, always under my
eyelids another vision plays its scenes.

The ship, like a village on the ocean, massive, luxurious.
From the porthole in my cabin
the slosh of ocean blue against blue sky.
Only this stark horizon of the leaving of Africa.

A man dresses as Neptune as we cross the equator.
Long flowing white scraggly hair, stamping his trident on the deck,
a sack wrapped around his torso, judging.
Beautiful women are captured by crew,
their hair scrubbed with flour and water,
thrown into the pool.
People are drinking and cheering.
The whole ship parties.
I hide while I watch,
not wanting to be dowsed with flour and water,
not wanting my hair turned into solid snake strands.
My brothers and I are twirled in streamers
as we race from Neptune's helpers.

XIII

Tropical heat, its comfort radiating
everywhere, the freedom of sundresses and shorts
drifts into the haze beyond the horizon as the air cools,
cooler, approaching the English shore,
grey, dismal, raining landscape.

Damp and wet and cold, I shiver for months.
When I discover the snow one morning
I cry, the cold, my feet burn, my hands, red and frosted.
We live in Frinton-by-the-Sea for a year,
then move to Barnet for two years.

My accent is strange,
my skin, sun-browned.
I am shy, an outsider
who doesn't fit in
until my Zambian accent
submerges under an English one
and my skin becomes as pale as cream.
I look and sound like any English school girl.
Africa is not a very romantic continent to come from.

XIV

My father is always away working,
in Zimbabwe prospecting in the fields,
now Uganda researching his PhD thesis,
then home to write in the tiny room we share,
by day, his study, by night, my bedroom,
then offered two positions, in Australia, in Canada,
deciding that Canada is better for raising children
he leaves half a year early to find and furnish a home.
My father, the geochemist, running a lab in Toronto
by the airport, hundreds of bags of soil samples arriving daily.
Later he runs the company, travels, publishes, speaks
at conferences, becomes a world authority in his field,
always bringing gifts, charms for my bracelets,
from every continent, country, state, province,
Indian elephant, English teapot, Mexican sombrero,
Egyptian cobra, Polynesian fish, tiny silver clogs from Holland,
a French Eiffel Tower, Chinese pagoda, Norwegian reindeer,
memories of his travels, tiny chinking bells wherever I go.

XV

The journey across the Atlantic, stormy, cold,
the ocean a heave of blue and black depth, icebergs float
nearby near Canada, land of extremes we are coming to.
My father prepares us, shows us pictures
of the hot, steam-filled Summers and the cold, snowy Winters.
He says Canada is like America, but less violent, safer.

Canada, an answer to the apartheid he chose to withdraw from
to protect his family and his family's family. Without us,
he would have stayed to fight the system from within.
The P.O.W. who did not want his sons conscripted
in a battle he did not believe in: Give Africa to its rightful peoples.
The man who struggled with Apartheid in his bones,
the food he was raised on, the way it built his culture,
and the clash of a contradictory belief in democracy,
education for all, a fair and just society for all.
South Africa, what he escaped from, returning once,
twenty-two years later, a memory of pain.
He did not live to see liberation.

XVI

They are shouting, Canada! Canada!
I run to the top deck and hold the railing
looking at the land that is drawing us in.
My first sighting, the evergreen forests on the St. Lawrence.
Tall, straight, fern-straight trees, imposing, not letting you in,
this grandeur, these trees that survive heat and cold and high winds,
not like the overflowing chaos of a tropical jungle.

We land in Montreal at night, car lights, street lights, train lights,
throwing bags from one vehicle to another, as if in a dream
and catch a train to Toronto...
Toronto, where I live for 40 years of the four seasons,
school, university, falling in love, marrying, having children, becoming
a single mother, this not uncommon story.

Yet the child who arrived here is always drawing another landscape
behind the horizon of this city.

I look Canadian, I sound Canadian, I know the history
of this country and who the prime minister is.
But I am a counterfeit Canadian.
I have traversed continents, my accent replaced three times.
In the back of my consciousness
the two great continents have not drifted apart but remain fused,
under the layer of the North American continent
the African subcontinent.

These lands, different as they are, interlace,
svelte pine forests and the tangle of jungle,
crowds of shoppers on Queen Street and the amassing
of villagers before a dance and feast,
cars, trucks, trolleys, noise of the city, ambulance sirens screaming
and the jungle at night, roar of animals, prey and predator, sounds of death.

Two transparent layers vying for authenticity.

I carry dual citizenship.
My overlay, Canadian; my underlay, other.

XVII

I am not a woman of colour, my accent, not foreign,
my ethnicity not carried like a passport, I'm not from
romantic Europe, or the lush Greek Islands,
or the exotic Middle East, nor the Russian expanse,
no cradle of Western art and thought,
nor South America, its pre-Columbian heritage,
or the panorama of Oriental countries, their
early writing and ornate art, and architecture,
nor sensual and spiritual India, rich with culture,
and even Egypt�s wonders classified Ancient Near East
as if to distance it from the peoples without a holy book
of their own, the strange black shadow, the land
of warring tribes, of wooden stone art, where
starvation and AIDS kills millions, an orphaned land,
the primitive continent.

I carry Africa like a proud heritage.

XVIII

I was born in a country in the lower end of Africa
with perfect weather, not too hot, or cold, or humid,
lush, rich, flowing, abundant.
Now that country is ravaged by disease, poverty, a despotic government.
Now it is the saddest country in Africa.
That is where I am from.

I did not grow on Canadian soil,
my mother was not nourished by these skies,
she didn't carry me through three starkly different seasons
and deliver me into a fourth season
as different from the other three as ice from snow.

I am an African transplant.

I was born under a canopy of stars in a small mining town,
Sinoia, in Southern Rhodiesia, an English colony.
My mother says my head was covered in blonde wet curls.
A white child in the black country of Zimbabwe.

I am a colonial transplant.

XIX

Do I belong anywhere?

Lured by warmer winters, the lush green
rainforest that bathes the city in one long season
most like Spring, a horizon of ocean and mountain,
I leave Toronto for Vancouver.

Outside my window the twinkling of lights of houses
like stars nestled against the mountain.

How many of us are from elsewhere,
carrying our memories?

As I write, I see many belongings,
glossy-haired Native Indians, the original beholders,
and English and French colonial settlers
and their descendants, stars, spreading,
inhabiting this expanse of northern land.
And peoples from every country on the globe,
arriving, living their lives from this moment, here,
other horizons, translucent memories, but here, their families,
a dance of many-hued races, colours, a multi-ethnicity.
These charms singing, these horizons of singing bowls.


Copyright 2004 by Brenda Clews

I am drifting numbly through the days, spending most of my time alone.

My son is working through massive issues and I want to support him in that process in any and all ways I can.

The 'ex' or 'father' is being inexplicably, oh, can I say it, cruel, refusing to speak, even hanging up on me, not paying child support for our daughter who lives with me and is returning at last to school to take a night course that may help her get back on course.

I have employment worries as my employment insurance is coming to an end, and while I have a good independent business idea have not been able to afford the courses I need to prepare myself for marketing my services.

I continue to look for work while feeling caught in a nethersphere of possibilities all of which are indistinct like balloons you can't quite catch and which you're not sure if you could whether they could carry you to a place of security.

Of course I worry continually about my son in the midst of his bifurcated family that is warring with itself continually, if that metaphor is apt.

One of the main reasons I moved to Vancouver, a move that only lasted two years, was to remove my children from this situation in the hopes that they might regain their inner strength and happiness and energy to forge their lives. It didn't happen - I wasn't able to find full-time work and so we returned to Ontario. Where the worst things happened. Everything I feared with the 'other' household came to pass. The effects have been disastrous. In retrospect, I wonder if we should have remained on the other side of the country because we would have become used to West Coast life eventually and it might have been much healthier for all of us. My kids would never agree to this vision of what life 'could have been like' of mine, but I wonder if I'd just 'stuck it out' in Vancouver if somehow we could have bypassed the breakdowns both of my children have experienced since returning and once again spending all or a large part of their time in the other household (and I would include the total and irrational rejection of my son for an entire year by his father/the other household as part of the 'problems' generated by that household).

With no answers, but many ruminations, I drift humbly through the days, spending most of my time alone in intense meditation.

Perhaps it is life that is the poetic itself: the 'messiness of reality,' the chaotic undercurrents.

Back-dated a post of the The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss as the first entry of this blog in 2003 (when I wrote the poem). It's a birthday gift, I suppose.

It's also a celebration of finally being able to copy everything from my old 2003 iMac - OSX 10.2.8 - (which still runs like a charm) onto a storage hard drive successfully. I found the poem and its image among the documents from the old iMac and was able to post it along with an embedded link to a reading of the poem (my first poetry recording).

Which feels good.

While I should have sent "Bliss Queen" out to literary journals (I have read it at a few university conferences, and at various poetry readings and received postitive feedback from the academic crowd -being taken aside for private commendations afterwards), my blog is my journal and having it here starting this writerly enterprise seems right.

Direct url: http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2004/10/great-bliss-queens-mansion-of-flaming.html

bon vivant dog walk, melting neighbourhood, passersby smiling at each other, slushy lakes sloshed through joyfully in waterproof boots

bruised tailbone is sore, but it's okay and the point is not to focus on it, not on such an afternoon of thick blue presided over by a winter sun

spoke to my son by phone and he seems to be recuperating, says he feels physically alright although perhaps not quite so emotionally but things are fine

I'll see him during the week, when we can talk more

I've woken with a different understanding of the last two decades with my son. In the pre-dawn darkness, I make notes, trace underlying connections, am open to what patterns are emerging.

The patterns are like deep ocean currents and not what the current weather is.

Do you have these experiences? This afternoon I went to a mall to buy some groceries and on my return decided to walk the dog to free up the evening, when I had hoped to go dancing. Normally I wear snow pants to dog walk, but had leggings on under my jeans and that seemed warm enough. I undid a back button and slid my cell phone in, an HTC Touch I've had about a year. Doing the button up, I thought,

'What if I fall? The phone will smash.'

So I undid the button, took the phone out and slid it into a front pocket.

'That's safer.'

I can't remember if I've ever had 'a thought' travel through my mind of a potential fall before, not one where I've taken a precaution 'just in case.'

I did fall. I haven't fallen so harshly on my tail bone since my daughter was a baby, and that was skating on ice and it took a full season to heal. Eighteen years ago. Today I was playing with the dog in the snow and slid on a path that was snow-packed and icy. I lay in the snow for long minutes not sure if I had seriously hurt myself, no-one nearby. As the pain dimmed I carefully rose, on my feet, knees bent then straight, bent at the waist, then slowly lifting myself upright. Seemed okay.

Though sore. So I took Ibuprofen and stayed home and watched The Squid and the Whale, which was an emotional experience since my children also have lived/are living a bifurcated life between two households.

Back to the topic of this post. It happens. Falls in Winter. That's not the point. The point is that I moved my touch screen cell phone out of the back pocket for an event that I've never thought about before and which did happen. An accident - at the angle of the snow path to the sidewalk I'd gotten my dog way too excited and she raced towards me, careening into me and causing me to lose my balance.

Is it that we must immediately cross 'negative' thoughts with 'that won't happen' when we think them, otherwise... they happen?

My cell is safe, my tail bone perhaps a little bruised, and, yeah, lucky, but. Should I have dismissed 'the thought' of a possible fall when I had it?

Was it a premonition, or did the thought create the event?

If you've had these sorts of experiences, I'd love to hear.

Gradually I am coming back to the life that I live. My son has moved to his Dad's and except for a few short calls or times he's been by to pick up clothing and journals, there's been no contact between us. I feel bereft. Of course I do. But I understand his need to break with where he broke down is paramount at present. I trust him. He knows I love him, and that I am here for him, and that he always has a home with me. Unconditionally and without reservation, this love, this home.

Because I haven't any addiction patterns or problems in my background, I didn't recognize what was happening to him, nor was I much help, I'm afraid.

All I had to give was what I hoped was sustaining love, and through his being able to count on that steady love, the strength that he needed.

And who knows in the way of the mystery of things if his being here for a year, despite the difficulties, didn't also help to give him the courage to make the changes he needs to make.

I also hope his father is repairing their relationship, for that is very necessary for this young man.

He needs all the support that those who love him can give.

I found this at Phil Bolsta's site. An 87 year old woman doing the salsa. She is amazing, at that age or any other. It's breath-holding to watch her turns and flips and dives. This is a woman with rhythm! She certainly resuscitates 'old age' and wow, is she inspiring. Indeed she is.

Even in the midst of the bare aftermath of the crisis my family is still going through, there is still wonderment and so I wanted to share the joy of this video.

My son is at his Dad's, recuperating. Since there is no communication between households, I have to rely on what my daughter tells me. Apparently they are looking into rehab for 6 months, which I feel is too long. Because the girlfriend's son is dealing with ongoing addiction problems, my son cannot live there. Adrian, my son, is, of course, welcome to live here, without any conditions or reservations. There is a whole network of support in Toronto for him, from my entire family, who visited him frequently in the hospital and have offered any and all help he needs, to friends of mine who have contacts in various organizations and can connect him to young men in similar circumstances, to the wonderful and loving friends he has made during his year here, as well as the various doctors and therapists he's been seeing in Toronto.

The room that became his in the basement has a separate entrance and so I could not 'keep an eye' on his comings and goings, but then it would not be 'my thing' to oversee him since he's an adult.

My approach is one based on trust. On openness. On a 'good enough' relationship where he felt he could talk to me.

For the most part, we have had this. The couple of weeks before his breakdown, he had become more distant, but then he was much busier with college, so the encroaching difficulties were masqued. The weekend of the binge, though, which began during the power blackout, he was nearly unapproachable and was obviously in emotional difficulty and would not call a distress centre. He was angry and depressed and questioned the meaning of life, how he felt trapped, how little he saw ahead in the way of positive change. The night he took the acetaminophen, I talked with him for 2 hours, and then his sister talked with him for another 2 hours, but I think he was just desperate to exit the vicious cycle of addictions that he had not been able to break out of with will power alone.

In most ways, his life was going well. As he said in hospital, he was actually happy with his life. He liked his part-time job, liked the people he worked with, liked living in downtown Toronto, liked me, his sister, and our dog, liked his classes and the people in them, and liked the women he's dated and become good friends with, and was perhaps developing a closer relationship with someone who had become more special than the rest. He wasn't sure why he wanted to end it.

I don't know why either, since I could see that he was starting to come 'into his own,' and it was exciting to see him creating a new life for himself here. He's been seeing someone at CAM-h, an addictions centre, where the philosophy is 'harm reduction,' and it wasn't working for him. In fact, and I hate to say it, he seemed better before the CAM-h therapy, something his father insisted on as a 'condition' for visiting, because Adrian had been clear of everything for half a year or so and was working on giving up his 'vices.' Rehab is 'abstinence-based' and that would be a better approach. Once he starts on a binge, it's hard to stop. And I think that's what happened - and it spun out of control, and it was the addiction cycle that tore at him, made him desperate, rather than his actual day-to-day life here.

He was so mad at its control - the addictions, what they represent, which is very personal and very complex - that control over him, the addictions: a master who was a monster from within, the addictions: what he would do to annihilate inner pain, a cycle which caused more pain than it relieved, that he would sacrifice his life to it to appease it. Like destroying the host that the virus was over-running. Short-circuiting the process by removing the victim. Or so it felt through the days I spent sitting beside him in hospital.

And perhaps he has done the miraculous thing he wanted to do. Deep within. Where it counts. A true success that no-one can guess or truly know about except him.

As I write this, I find myself bowing to my beautiful son, in recognition and honour.

Thank you to those of you who dropped by with a message of warmth, support, healing. I deeply appreciate...

My son will be discharged from hospital tomorrow or the next day, miracle that he is, and is going to stay at his Dad's for a bit until he can go into a rehab program. His Dad's is not an ideal place for him to go, and there is his Dad's girlfriend's son, who is not a good influence, but neither is my apartment ideal. While neither place is quite right or appropriate to his needs, I support his desire to go there, where he may find some inner healing from the unexpected, sudden and total rejection he received from his Dad at the turn of the year last year when he was banished and wasn't allowed to return even to pick up his belongings after the few days he was spending with me over Christmas. He slept on my couch for 4 months before we cleaned out a room downstairs. It hasn't been an ideal situation here, though we all tried to make the best of it that we could.

In many ways I felt helpless to 'fix' or 'heal' what the other household had done to him, and saw difficulties, or perhaps it's better to call them wounds, of the heart, of the spirit, that were scary and deep.

So, in a day or so I will bid him adieu with the hope that the 'other' parent may find compassion within to rescind some of what has passed so that this dear, intelligent, and sensitive young man may heal inwardly and find a greater peace in his world.