Badly stuffed animals

I knew these people who loved their pets so much

they had them put to sleep and stuffed

and mounted in the living room

because they couldn’t bear

the grief of losing openly.

Filled out with wood and wool

articulated with wire

eye sockets packed with glass:

death’s only a pause.

They said don’t be scared

it’s something to share, something

for the visitors.

I knew people who stuffed their pets so badly

that pictures of their loved ones

went up on a website called Badly Stuffed Animals

a place where pets became fixed stars.

Cast in the stone

of their own skin and hair; there the animals were home

in their wrong eyes

and buckled teeth

and skin with old air rumpling through;

with nonsense postures to have and hold them.

There was a farming family I knew, had

a blonde fawn in their living room. There it lay

with legs curled under its body.

Like a houseplant it had been placed

at the foot of the piano that was never opened.

There was something funny about that.

A fawn with a piano for a mother.

The farming family laughed about that.

I once had a lamb. Its mother had died

and the farmer had too many orphans already. Such is life

when life comes too early.

I kept him in the shed. Gave him a cardboard box, stuffed

with towels for a bed. I fed him from a bottle

and visited him at night when I worried

he was scared. When the light came on he ran to me.

His bleating was broken and ridiculous. Of all the lambs

to need a mother! When he grew up the farmer

took him away. You weren’t supposed to be sad

because lambs are for eating

so I sat on the swing and forgot him.

But I cried when we buried our dog in the garden.

Being dead is too easy. You have to remake it.

This owl has a self-conscious look.

That leopard sinks its teeth into a monkey’s head.

That stag’s head lolls its tongue. This little donkey

has a Dali crutch

in place of front legs. That chimpanzee wears

long strings of white pearls

and clutches a sculpture of Jesus on the cross.

Their nonsense postures have and hold them.

Ashleigh Young is an expat writer and editor living in London. Her work has appeared in Booknotes, Turbine, Sport, and Landfall. She is currently finishing a collection of poems. 2009 was a big year for Ashleigh, she was the winner of the 2009 Landfall Essay Competition and the recipient of the 2009 Adam Foundation Award in Creative Writing. Ashleigh also appears in Best NZ Poems 2009 and this year in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. This is far from overnight success though, Ashleigh has been working hard behind the scenes and has been appearing in print since 2003 with a poem in Sport. She's been a regular contributor to Booknotes since 2005. Ashleigh started blogging from London, it a great, curious, read.

This is a new poem from her forthcoming book of poetry, it's classic Ashleigh - beautiful and disturbing and awkward all at the same time. Ashleigh had a poem here last year too.

For more Tuesday Poems go to the Tuesday Poem hub.

Picture via Old Chum.

Sometime last year my dad and I were sitting in the backyard of my old flat in Wellington, drinking cups of tea and sharing our traditional “parents visiting” silence, when suddenly the chair he was sitting on just disintegrated. The wood crumbled, the fabric gave way, and Dad folded up and fell through a hole in the middle where the seat had been. “My god,” he said. He hauled himself out of the hole, a bit breathless, and peered at the pieces of rotten, porous wood and torn vinyl lying on the grass. “Look at that! It’s just completely … gone.” After I’d finished laughing, I wanted to write it down. Not the most sympathetic response, I know. Well, every writer has a chip of ice in his heart.

Here’s my conundrum – I’ll see or hear something I find interesting or peculiar or funny, and I’ll think that the thing holds great creative promise. “Whooee, I’m definitely going to talk about that,” I say to myself. The hands of my brain are rubbing together at this point. Then after a few gung-ho attempts, looking for a home for the thing in the form of a poem or essay or article, I flatline. The bright shard has no apparent connection with anything else. I can’t find any meaning to couch it inside. (As you can see, I’ve cunningly solved the problem of the homeless scene of my dad busting through the chair – it lives on this blog now, so it’s Helen’s responsibility. You’ve got to give it away …)

I’ve been thinking about a book called Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson in which the central argument is that “Eureka!” moments – moments of dazzling, goggle-eyed clarity – do not happen. Johnson argues that you have to stalk those moments, bait them, wire-tap them. I don’t think he’s referring to disintegrating chairs when he talks about the spark: he’s referring more to a sense of connection; the feeling that you’ve discovered the links between seemingly disparate elements, or that you’ve realised the wider significance of a moment. And the spark is also about the excitement of possibility. No matter how quiet and routine a day, there’s always the possibility that a hole in the middle is about to open up and you’ll fall through (see how the chair comes back to resonate there?). You have to keep the proverbial eye out.

Johnson has a basic (I was going to say “helpful”, but one writer’s helpful is another writer’s hamstring) strategy for courting the spark of connection. “I have this Microsoft Word document that I call my spark file,” he says. “I’ve been keeping it for about six years now, and that’s where I write down every little half-baked, quarter-baked idea I have for anything … I spend no time organising it, but I try to reread the entire document once every couple of months.” An idea that once seemed cryptic or lacklustre may unexpectedly gleam weeks or months or years later: “because it connects to something else – and suddenly, it’s ready.”

Incredible: “Suddenly, it’s ready”! Almost without registering it, the simple act of collection becomes an act of creation. In the same way that big discussions and debates and ideas tend to come out of great cities – anywhere a multitude of connections are available – so too does story out of a network of fragments. Maybe the close proximity of elements allows us to better comprehend the possibilities. Johnson has a tidy way of putting it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”

The man makes sense! And in some ways I’ve been keeping an ad-hoc spark file for years, too – in notebooks, ancient Word documents, bookmarked pages, emails – and some of the connections I’ve made from these have become pieces of work that, for a time at least, feel meaningful.

But still, the anomalies haunt me.

The other day my brother JP told me about this old song lyric he’d come across. “Do you expect me to just quote King Lear/ While you hit me with your deck-chair?” When I read those lines I really felt like writing something. I thought about what might’ve led to that deranged moment of conflict. The old high-school copy of King Lear strewn on the floor. The expression on the singer’s face when his lover picked up the chair. The deck chair folded up for maximum impact. And I thought about the 18-year-old who wrote those lines. Maybe I should be worried that I found this scene of domestic violence so intriguing. I sat down a wrote a few lines that turned into a sort of terrible poem. In short, nothing good came of it. Many other lines and scenes and characters have failed to connect, have failed to become whole. They’re the lost souls of our manuscripts, trapped in some kind of purgatory.

You could call these things part of “the garbage heap” of experience, as Natalie Goldberg puts it in good old Writing Down the Bones (the garbage heap she describes is really more of a compost pile, where the eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and “old steak bones of our minds” become fertile soil), but I think more than enough analogies have been drawn between composting and experience and the fertile soil coming out of the fingertips etcetera.

Not everything we experience can be part of our work. Some things are homeless. They flicker in and out of view but do not light up what surrounds them. Maybe the trick is to reflect this understanding in what we write – to acknowledge the broken chairs but to not, every time, attempt to rebuild them. (The one my dad fell through – a beloved old red chair from the basement of an early Wellington flat – was irreparable.)

You can read more about Ashleigh here. She is an amazing poet and essayist and now has her own blog. She has appeared here before with a Tuesday Poem.

Russell Sprouts

For a long time, I thought that the sprouts

had the name of my father: Russell.

That was the sound of someone

moving in the vegetable garden.

Because one night he laid himself down in the dirt

and went to sleep. From the places where his eyes were

and mouth, hands, and feet

pale green plants sprouted, warm and bitter,

bearing his name: Russell.

If anyone could lie so still under soil

so as not to upset

the new sprouts from growing,

naturally, it was him – it was only him, the quietest one,

upon whom they felt

at home. When morning came

he brushed soil from his hair and swam

a silent length, backstroke,

in the pool: early light

enfolding his skin

in leaves of palest green. Before we woke

he was up and over the window ledge

in a perfect Olympian vault

and through the curtains, with barely a rustle.

Ashleigh says:

My first poem ever published was in the School Journal in 1992. I think I was eight? Does that count? It was called "Winter and Spring" and was pretty terrible.

Some how I doubt it Ashleigh!

For more Tuesday Poems go to the Tuesday Poem hub.