Individual Residencies
2022 | Liz Bahs
All the Flowers
for Anastasia Pelias
The more he moves the tighter
the roots tangle him.
It’s the barking
that stops their car, tells her
to get out and see
what the fuss is.
Below the bridge, a dog
frantic, pale head just above water,
not quite out of reach.
She climbs down, thigh-deep
into the freezing strong
current, grips
his body and pulls, but the roots
tie him.
While her man goes for help,
she stays calm, arms folding
beneath the surface,
tucking beneath the muzzle
to hold his small
head up, to keep
him with her.
Loss is what she’s left with: an almost-too-late tangle of roots, of bedsheets, of sleepless nights in these woods where silence is too loud for her, so soon. First, the blank pages thumbtacked to bare walls, white noise to drown midnight quiet. Then ink on skin as she begins to paint, throws thought to paper in a cabin somewhere way out, laying down the forest’s night sounds: a barking dog, the creak of trees, a gun shot in the blackness.
The morning after she leaves, the car thundering
out the gravel drive, I walk the path to her house.
He is still there. A few stars are left to fade
in this light, just losing its violets and blues.
Commeer till I shah yah her wall I’ve gottah fix, he says,
and I follow him, the door not latched, her wood pile teetering
unused on the porch. Inside, her bedding is balled up on the couch,
the back wall is smeared in black, black in vertical rivers, black
down-stroked in streaks, one black square a picture frame
for the only space left clean on the wall. Charcoal and ink,
the remains of her weeks, her waking hours.
Between her driveway and the creek, beyond the deadwood and the fallen tree, clustered along the mossy bank, there are thousands of them. An ocean world of flowers that weren’t there last week, while the rain rained its heavy clouds, and the snow fell from the trees like a thick ash shroud. They weren’t here while she was.
Among this carpet of leaves, a million periwinkle whorls with white-starred centres. I reach to cut one, then stop and dig instead. The icy ground, damp but giving. I keep at it until my hands are full of blues, a bouquet of thin stems, a stack of leaves and bright petals, all the flowers of this spring ground, for her.
This piece was inspired by my encounters with the artist Anastasia Pelias when we were living in side-by-side remote cabins as part of a residency in the North Georgia Mountains, USA.
My work reveals its form as I begin to write and the writing from my new creative nonfiction project is appearing as a poetry / prose hybrid laced with sequences and haibun. It may be travel-memoir or even part family biography. It plays with questions such as: What does it mean to be from / of a place? and What does it mean to belong? Its language is of botany, sculpture, music, and landscape. I have been inspired by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s approach to questioning her place in the world in her book The Grassling, as well as Betsy Warland and M.C. Richards’s work with breath and centering.
Alongside this creative play, I completed an article I was writing on polyphony in Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poetry collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.