The Wily Filipino

Song, after Beltane.

Jean Gier's disquieting poem ("Out of this lead grow a willow. Out of this willow grow a man. Out of this man grow a coffin. Out of this coffin grow a raven. Out of this raven grow a hair. Out of this hair grow a dress. Out of this dress grow a woman. Out of this woman grow a snake...") reads to me, at least, as a wonderfully eerie sequel of sorts to the Maypole Song from Anthony Shaffer's film The Wicker Man:

In the woods there grew a tree,
And a very fine tree was he.
And on that tree there was a limb,
And on that limb there was a branch,
And on that branch there was a spray,
And on that spray there was a nest,
And in that nest there was an egg,
And in that egg there was a bird,
And on that bird there was a feather,
And on that feather was a bed,
And on that bed there was a girl,
And on that girl there was a man,
And from that man there was a seed.
And from that seed there was a boy,
And from that boy there was man,
And from that man there was a grave,
And on that grave there grew a tree.
In the Summerisle wood.

The fact that it was posted on May 2, right after May Day, made that connection for me, as a parallel and no less natural progression. In Gier's poem, however, the earthly (and earthy) cycle of birth and death and rebirth is "disrupted," as it were, by cogs and bombs and thimbles and shovels. I think it has to do with fecundity, all right, but not a straightforward flowering into a tree or Maypole, but into a veritable thicket of language.

Images are entangled with one another, the artificial with the natural, leaves with words, the thimble from the maggot, the eye from the well. What I see here instead -- no, not "instead," but alongside that natural cycle (I think that brutally dissonant "grow" shoves the reader perpetually into the present) -- is the birthing and rebirthing of metaphors and, finally, almost painfully, the poet herself. "Out of this thigh grow I," the poem ends. Born by words, born through words, borne by words, the poet and the poem emerges.

[The permalink doesn't work -- damned Blogspot! -- so just go to her blog and scroll down to May 2.]

Posted by the wily filipino at May 4, 2003 01:50 PM