Tuesday Poem: The Construction of the Nest

The construction of the nest
By Mary McCallum

There is a touch of sparrowness
about her, about me, a touch
of sparrow's nest.

She is feathers and flight and freckled
eggs, I am a place, well,
I am a place of rest.

I wait, all attentiveness,
for the thrum of those wings
that wormish breath,

to hold those noisy bones,
while mine rasp and scrape
like an old man’s chest.

Here I am, unheld, unmet -
and yet,
I know this now as I know the wind:

I, once shabby sticks and grass,
needed her to alight here,
her to gather me in.

The air is bitter, prinked
with rain,
when will  I see you, sweet, again?

__________________________

Go to the Tuesday Poem blog for the featured poet this week and links to 23 other poems by poets from NZ, the US, Ireland and Athens. Click on the badge to get there.

The Construction of the Nest is my first fully-fledged Tuesday Poem - inspired by the TP postings and written to publish here - and I am very pleased with it. (My other Tuesday Poems were written a while back and polished up for the blog.)

It began last Tuesday, in fact. Sated by Tuesday Poems, I went for a walk and misheard a woman talking to a friend, it sounded like she said 'sparrowness', and it seemed such a perfect word I was surprised I hadn't heard it before. Immediately the word attached itself to a friend of mine, and a friendship, and then ricocheted off  ... 'Wormish breath' simply fell from the sky and seems to me to be perfect in so many ways, not least because it echoes Middle English poetry (which is rich pickings). 'Prinked' also arrived before I had time to think. I liked its onomatopoeaic sound for rain. When it was in the poem, I checked its meaning (think of 'primp' but more showy than that.)

The idea behind this poem is something I've been thinking about lately: how we assume certain things about relationships (who's dependent on whom etc) when they're always much more complicated than that  ....  a bit like a nest that paradoxically provides shelter and yet only exists because a bird requires it and gives it shape.

I had a bit of driving to do yesterday and the day before, and I used the time to say the poem out loud - over and over - as I used to do with poems when I was walking to university thirty years ago. The Tuesday Poem project is wholly responsible for thrusting me back into that wildly poetic time. How could I not be? I'm reading over 25 poems a week now, with a good swag of them in one day, and then finding myself starting a poem, and another, and another, and then needing to finish them to put them online.

It doesn't take much to think myself back to my Aro Valley flat in 1980, and my friend Sandra and I sprawled on the carpet arguing whether it was Coleridge or Wordsworth who deserved our love (yes, love), or to Bill Manhire's Original Composition class and Kirsty Gunn introducing her latest 'thing'. Or to a poem I wrote about camellias that I recited over and over on my way to university. I see the route (the zig-zag, the clockmender's, the skinny steps) and overlaid - fat and clear - are words:  the pale petals will burn ....  That sort of thing.

I never tire of sounding words out and hearing the way they work. I find new meanings that way - for example, the way 'sweet' works in the final line of The Construction. I also chew and spit the gristly bits  until I hope they're gone. The final stanza of my Tuesday Poem this week came when I thought it was finished. The best poems in the TP blogroll, have reminded me again and again that a good poem needs to move beyond description and metaphor, and deepen the mystery, so I hung on in there a little longer than usual with this one.

Hence the bitter, prinked air, my sweet.