Stuff to Read

Author: gordsellar

  • Feeding

    Tiger’s first best meal is to take the hot guts
    of a slaughtered pig stolen from a nearby village
    and slash them to shreds, stirring them into the blood
    of the hog, to make himself a vicious, fine soup
    such as the Eldest Tigers eat when past middle-age,
    when they smoke and discuss the madness of the present,
    sipping ridiculously foul and pungent liquors.

    Monkey sits watching as his huge orange paws wrangle
    the chopsticks, and she smiles, unfraid to grin as he lets out
    from a single talon finger a claw so long it could slay a man,
    yet used only to skewer a precise bit of meat and pop it
    into his mouth; then she turns back to her own meal.

    – Gord Sellar, April 2004

  • Monkey’s Clever Tail

    One day Monkey was called before the Monkey Council.
    She was to prove the the prehensility of her tail,
    her cleverest organ by far. She smoothed down
    the sleek black fur of her body, and then picked
    away her doubts like fleas from the forest of her scalp—
    biting down hard on each one to extinguish its wriggle.

    Wearing a brutally-fanged smile, she swung straight down
    into the grove where the Monkey Council sat waiting.
    Monkey-question after monkey-question they asked,
    and all the while, the ballet of her tail astonished
    those among the Council fortunate enough to have been
    born imbued with something one might call a “soul”.
    She restarted the heart of Oldest Grandfather Monkey
    with a squeeze of her tail, when the shock of her acrobatics
    sent him over the border to the far side of sleep.
    Fruit rained down where she swatted the trunks of great trees,
    and she calculated the best way of skinning bananas
    using nothing more than a tray of sand and her tail.

    At the end of the exam, decorously squeezing
    the proffered tails of the Monkey Council one by one,
    she shook them firmly, as a proper civilized Monkey
    does, and swung off, following the river back home
    bearing confidence enough in her successes, and
    remembering Tiger’s having felt such envy,
    wishing aloud to the moon that his own striped tail
    could ever be anything like half as clever as hers.

    – Gord Sellar, April 2004

  • Bones

    In the old days, Tiger’s den was littered with bones;
    remnants of long-ago feasts and forgotten mistakes.
    Long ago, he’d curl up in the chill of night,
    letting the bones dig into his body as he slept.

    He’d think to himself, if only some dog or bear
    would come and steal away these bones, clean up
    this damned den. And random beasts passed through
    leaving more bones, till his den became a graveyard.

    Finally fed up, night by night a single bone removed
    he’d bear it out between his vicious teeth,
    each day sleeping a little bit cozier, until
    there were none left, and his den was left bare.

    A few weeks passed, in this immaculate state,
    before the walls of his newly-clean den echoed
    a chittering sound from just beyond the cave,
    a chittering voice from just at the edge of his life.

  • Tiger & Monkey Return

    There was a time when Tiger smoked
    –not cigarettes, not that sort of thing–
    and cast his bleary eyes about him, round
    the den of a strange sweet family in India.

    That was in the days when Monkey swung
    and hung among thickets of foreign pines,
    snatching up unattended beer and potato chips
    and chittering her way through foreign tongues.

    Their feet touched the Joseon soil again
    on the very same day, the same hour.

  • One Spring

    Beneath a mutant cherry-blossom tree,
    Tiger reclined. Monkey chittered with glee,
    scooped up three pawfuls of fallen pink
    petals, and sprayed them onto his crown.

    He snorted, a little amused, and took a puff,
    then showed her a line of foul old fine-drawn teeth.
    Hanging from a branch, she blinked and shook
    it, and onto them both, petals rained down endless.

    – Gord Sellar

    No, I haven’t taken up smoking. It’s just that there’s an old Korean proverb about “back in the old days” and it begins, “Back when the tigers smoked…” I like to play with this, my sign in the Chinese zodiac being a Tiger.

    But there really are mutant cherry blossom trees in Jeonju, with this gigantic fat blossoms that stay in bloom longer than normal ones. They’re not mutant so much as genetically engineered to be that way, I’m told. But they look like mutant trees in the X-Men sense of the word.

  • Hymenaios (for Isabella and Martin)

    We drank down our doubts, savoured the questions and accidents,
    and what’s left is an empty cup to be filled, today.
    Almost the first miracle in the world, making wine
    for a day like this. We know, in this world, our arms
    cannot reach forever; we remember Spanish-tinted dreams
    spanning whole jungles separating us, heavy nights spent
    dreaming one anothers’ voices and tongues—of a day
    like this. And we seal a pledge bounded by the inevitable,
    but look to the boundless; we would pledge it in every tongue
    in the world, if we could. But though we cannot, behold
    us anyway, dear friends. Today we become our love.

    Notes: Hymenaios is the name of the Greek god of marriage, as well as the traditional song of the bridesmaids, but in general it’s also a general-purpose term for a “wedding song”. (The poem I wrote for my other sister’s wedding, an epithalamion, is apparently one specific type of hymenaios which was traditionally sung accompanying the bridal couple to the bedchamber. According to what I can find online, anyway. The hymenaios is the more all-encompassing category… but I’m not wholly sure.)

  • Pooja

    by Gord Sellar

    The day’s weight sank it into its detritus,
    dust-drenched hair, the leftover shakes
    and groaning belly soothed by sweet, cool lemonade;
    against the dingy whisper of strange bedsheets,
    exhaustion a decrescendo planed into longing
    as the cusp of sleep slips closer and closer,
    my thumb, tip to the middle of palm, smoothing
    soft across forehead, exactly just like this;
    the swirling edge of a half-memory diluted
    into weariness, the French-tinged voices returning
    from Laure and Jérome, deep in that wintry night
    of snow and apple wine and tales of poojas
    in Nepal, the scent of a sweet pink paste
    from the crushed bodies of hundreds of flowers
    never seen by them, spread from cheek to forehead
    and back; a safety fixed on the fate of travelers,
    beloved wanderers at the doorway out. And strange,
    in my wandering, I dream of anointing you,
    the dinge of this upper room suddenly flooded
    with the brilliant sweet aroma of these blooms.

    — Agra, winter 2004

  • Prediction

    Walking, wondering: which one could it be?

    Conservative pant-suit and mother’s pearls?
    Jeans and jiggle and purple shriek of hair?
    You cannot sample or say, one of each,
    please. You are distracted: you recognize
    the shoulders of a lost lover in this stranger’s,
    or a certain movement of the head in another’s.

    Each single glance you make is a kind of haunting:
    the world you’d lived in, old dreams of tomorrow,
    dreams without the sinking sump of a barren ocean,
    or a hole in the sky so big your arm fits through.
    The future is a girl hidden on a crowded subway
    train, in a corner, watching us all patiently,
    whom nobody notices, waiting to arrive at last.

    Walking down the length of the train, dodging
    people hawking cheap electronics in a foreign
    tongue, eyes turned out across the Han river,
    hoping they’re not talking about coming wars,
    or exhaling beneath their breaths, the next great plague;
    maybe, just perhaps, they’ll mumble us to utopia.
    Then you realize she might not be on this train at all.

    — Gord Sellar, 29 October 2003, Seoul

    This is just a little poem I wrote in my head one morning, and I spent a chunk of time fixing it, getting things closer to right. I don’t usually talk about what poems are about, but for my second-language readers it helps… I’ve been thinking a lot lately about, prediction, I guess…. about writing about the future, like I do in my SF writing, and about thinking about the future. What does it mean to think about the future? Is the future what we really think about when we think about the future? I think we often think of the past, or of things we are afraid of or things we love or have loved, or hate or have hated. In science fiction, the future is usually a kind of special imaginary description of the present or the recent past, dressed up in science-fiction clothing.

    How tenuous and chancy, this whole endeavour of considering the future! The future is almost always something we don’t expect… and yet when it comes, we often say we knew it would happen. And we’re usually lying. One thing we can be sure of is that the future will surprise us… sooner or later, anyway.

     

  • DaDeumie SoRi

    At last. I think perhaps I understand,
    standing at this bus’s rest-stop half
    the way to Seoul; sweet guitars abloom
    in my ears, and coffee steam a haze
    around my face, standing, silently
    staring. The woman absently sweeps
    the floor, puts coffee on, bringing out
    the breads, arranges the newspapers,
    turns around the doorway’s closed sign.
    Someone else’s drabbest morning chores
    from outside, fascinate. Some strange
    mesmerism is at work in these dull things:
    irreplaceable, necessary. Imagine…
    the world’s things, every one where it belongs.

    — Gord Sellar,
    Published in Diet Soap #4

    The DaDeumie is a traditional tool of the traditional Korean housewife. In the times preceding the use of modern heated irons, clothes were pressed by beating them with the DaDeumie, a pair of unweildy wooden sticks that were used in a method somewhat reminiscent of a drummer practicing patterns on a snare drum… a constant tok-tok-tok-tok-tok sound of the cloth muffling the impact of the wood against the stone beneath was the result. As the Korean word for “sound” is SoRi, this sound was called the DaDeumie SoRi. According to a a student and friend of mine, this sound was famously described by a scholar or poet as one of the five most beautiful sounds in Korea. When I first heard this, I was shocked at the idea that a rather cumbersome and taxing physical task that wives were stuck performing could be beautiful. But now, I think I understand a little… the question of whose work, and how it is performed, is less the issue of beauty than the fact that when done it is a part of that dream we humans have to have a well-ordered world around us, and well-ordered selves within, so that the inner and outer tranquility and order are a tinned reflection of one another; nobody can say which reflects which, but the harmony is apparent to all, just the same.

    By the way, I have tried the DaDeumie, and let me tell you, those housewives must have been strong and had great endurance.

    Oh, and, let it be known this is only the second draft of this poem. I may change it later. But my friend Sun Hwa asked to see it, so I have posted it.

  • Iksan Haiku

    epicurean,
    made our way through streets not paved
    for boots the size of ours

    — Gord Sellar, 11 August 2003.

    This poem just kind of came to me tonight, as I pack the last big piles of photos and papers for my move to Jeonju. I will miss Iksan, really I will, no matter how much I may like Jeonju and no matter how good for me the move might actually be in terms of needing a change. I had to cheat a little on the meter, but… anyway, I think it captures the way some of my favorite foreigners live in Iksan…

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