Blowing Smoke
for the curve of dismounts
o
She lifts her head to gift the stars white
smoke and my lips are drawn to the floral
arch of her neck, inching higher, the swirl
her fragrant exhalations make becoming night:
breath to air, dust to dust – we are mortals
drenched in a hummingbird sensation of time.
oo
I have known moments like this; my naked torso
brown as the bark of the mango tree I’ve mounted,
its leaves camouflage while I watch my playmates
seeking me, excitement choking me the same way
her moving fingers make my breath hover. She catches
me in the corner of her eye, my lips tremble on her
skin before the giggle becomes sound; lightning to thunder.
ooo
Sometimes I was found – some girl or boy throwing stones,
breaking the amnios of leaves that protected me – but most
times I just got tired of waiting and shimmied down. Love
is a little like that – the playmates plentiful as pollen grains
yet only a few bursting beyond the red bubble of lust
to the heart, the after-giggle, where the smoke-rings go.
This week’s poem is by the Ghanaian-British writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes. It’s from the Eros section of his newly published collection, The Geez (“Geez” being pronounced as “gaze”). Here, in a sneak preview of an interview with the Poetry Book Society, who chose The Geez as their winter recommendation, the poet explains his major sources for the collection. The long, intense act of looking unites specific, personal experiences of “photography and loss” and has strong political resonance, brought home by his first encounter with a photo series by Yagazie Emezi called Consumption of the Black Model, where she had written in the preamble, “Often times … the black body becomes a canvas to project fetishised narratives.”
Born in the UK, raised in Ghana, working in both countries in an impressive variety of genres and media, Parkes makes the language of his poems shimmeringly reflective and connective. Blowing Smoke is a love poem, but adds so much else that the term becomes reductive, one-dimensional. Love is certainly in the air, but so are many complicating emotional narratives, time-frames, sensations. The confluence of highs and lows, the swirl of the ascent and the various forms of the “curve of dismounts” the epigraph refers to, contain lyric multitudes.
A visionary, almost hallucinatory “she” presides over the first stanza. As she “lifts her head to gift the stars white / smoke” she is flower-like and in upward motion, with “the floral / arch of her neck” suggesting a stalk rising among clustered blossoms exhaling fragrance. This flower is alive and mutable, and elicits an entranced approach from the speaker, but after the lovely “swirl” of that quatrain, sealed by the rhyme of “night” with “white”, the tone drops to a more meditative level, “dust to dust” being a particularly specific acknowledgment of mortality. But the strange magic of lived experience isn’t abandoned: it reignites in the observation of “mortals / drenched in a hummingbird sensation of time”, a thrilling encapsulation of motion and stasis.
A grammatical tense and time shift denotes the coming-down and standing-back of the new stanza. (“I have known moments like this.”) Recollections of a childhood game of hide-and-seek infiltrate the erotic narrative. Hiding from his playmates induces a sense of metamorphosis for the speaker, whose “naked torso” is “brown as the bark of the mango tree I’ve mounted”. He is disguised and safely contained in a womb of leaves. Later in the same stanza, the terrific excitement of waiting to be caught conjures an erotic present – “the same way her moving fingers make my breath hover”. The “moving fingers” image is tactfully tactile, and, again, sexuality seems to evoke mortality, with a reminder of Omar Khayyam’s “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, / Moves on”. Eros re-emerges in the delicate and enthralling passage that concludes the stanza and integrates the gasps and giggles of children’s and adults’ games.
The stones tossed up at the tree by “some girl or boy” draw the hider from his camouflage. Being found is being born; it means the destruction of his amnion (synonym for amnios, the inner membrane sac protecting the developing embryo). Does this allegory foreshadow not only sexual relationships but more dangerous kinds of exile and self-exposure, destruction by more ferocious and damaging forms of stone-throwing? The poem keeps possibilities open, without losing the primary focus. In hide-and-seek, the protagonist won’t always be found. This is a level of disappointment to which love also may descend. The child, unfound, gets bored and sets himself free. The lover brings a beautiful reconciliation of regret and acceptance to the failed game: “the playmates plentiful as pollen grains / yet only a few bursting beyond the red bubble of lust / to the heart, the after-giggle, where the smoke-rings go.”
The visual device used to divide the three stanzas suggests accumulating, lingering smoke-rings. It shows us that these insubstantialities can be recycled, caught and released when craft, imagination, passion and wit flower on a poem’s page.
