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    Flicker Tree, The: Okanagan Poems
    Flicker Tree, The: Okanagan Poems
    Flicker Tree, The: Okanagan Poems
    Ebook111 pages40 minutes

    Flicker Tree, The: Okanagan Poems

    By Nancy Holmes

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    About this ebook

    How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes comes to terms with personal grief, she tries to find consolation in the place she shares with other beings. Holmes poetry looks for relationships with the prickly pear cacti, bluebunch wheatgrass, the black bears, the coyotes, and the northern flickers. She seeks to embed herself in the geography and consciousness of this arid Western landscape, one of the most endangered ecosystems in Canada, a landscape of great beauty and spiritual power with its volcanic glaciated mountains and fragile long lakes. The result is poetry that is both elegiac and humorous, with a vision often skewed by the lenses of mass media, anxiety, and the obsessions of the contemporary world. Sometimes disturbed and questioning, sometimes delighted and awed, sometimes troubled by the history of settlers and indigenous peoples, the poems explore our complicity in the destruction of, and our love for, the wild animals, plants, and places around us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRonsdale Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2012
    ISBN9781553801849
    Flicker Tree, The: Okanagan Poems
    Author

    Nancy Holmes

    Nancy Holmes has published several books of poetry: The Flicker Tree (Ronsdale, 2012), Mandorla (Ronsdale, 2005), The Adultery Poems (Ronsdale, 2002), Down to the Golden Chersonese: Victorian Lady Travellers (Sono Nis, 1991) and Valancy and the New World (Kalamalka Press, 1988). She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, went to high school in Toronto and university in Calgary where she received her MA in English. She has lived in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia for many years and teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She is the mother of three grown-up sons and lives in Kelowna BC.

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      Book preview

      Flicker Tree, The - Nancy Holmes

      beings."

      SONG AND SUSTENANCE

      not where fields are pruned into harps

      and forks

      not between scales

      of plate glass and cement

      but in wild spots

      in nests of pine needles

      bitterroot opens its pink mouth

      Living Beings:

      Okanagan Plants

      and Animals

      Earth Star

      Mushrooming in the fall, in the north part of the valley,

      a group of us leaves our cars on a logging road

      and delicately tramples the woods. We’re not on a hunt

      for precious chanterelles or elusive lobsters. Instead

      we’re collecting specimens to study the world of fungi.

      Heads down, rain swept, we gently pry and scoop

      the shaggy manes, the slippery jacks, orange

      witches’ butter, tiplers’ bane, Alaskan

      gold, cafes of tiny pink cocktail

      umbrellas, miniature reefs of creamy coral.

      Logged two or three times, the woods are grazed and thin,

      wrecked with beautiful litter: lichen-crusted

      branches, broken trees, cow patties, muddy

      ruts filled with yellow leaves, needles, shredded

      pine cones, and electric bolts of larch and cottonwood.

      I don’t how or when, but I wander away, get lost.

      I hear nothing but cawing crows, see no one, nothing

      but trenches of tangled logs and unreadable paths

      while all around me mushrooms quietly conduct

      their chemical experiments on the forest floor.

      Then the rain stops. In sunny spokes of light

      the forest preens and patters. A nuthatch skips

      scritch-scratch dancing down a nearby fir.

      No map, no phone, no compass — an orbit of solitude.

      In my hand, a cloth bag of mushroom beings.

      Soon I find a barbed wire fence, follow

      it to a dirt road which leads to a larger road,

      where two guys in a truck stop and give me directions

      to town. They’ll try to find my group and tell them

      I am found. Except no one had noticed that I was lost.

      Far more lost are the fungi, tumbling onto tables

      at the community hall. Damp, trailing moss, our pickings

      lie unveiled, dozens of naked, glistening,

      amputated, knobby treasures. Gills and pores

      are probed and specimens named with book in hand.

      Amongst them sits a marvel called the earth star.

      Its rind unpeels and opens into the shape of a star

      to reveal a globe balanced on that star-skin pedestal.

      If you squeeze the ball, puffs of black spores toot out.

      In awe, we crowd around this entrancing toy,

      in awe at the complexity of life, of nature, revealed

      in this one room so far from the mysterium

      of forest — stunning species, intricate puzzles

      of evolution — splayed before us, pierced,

      lost again, yet still at home, on this earth star.

      Red-Tailed Hawk

      for my father, October 11, 2009

      The morning of the day you died

      a red-tailed hawk launched over

      the light-filled valley. All that air,

      and you struggled for breath.

      New grief is exhausting. All the memories.

      It’s hard to carry them around

      day and night. My dreams

      are long and stormy, tears

      blot my thought.

      From touch to mind,

      from then to now, you made me.

      From the first track laid in the brain,

      to my hand on your stone-like head.

      The wildness of a back alley childhood

      was rich with your gifts — in summer

      raspberries and carrots from gardens you grew,

      in fall, shiny as Christmas wrappers,

      decapitated mallard heads toppled

      by the bloody axe, the feathers, the books,

      your stuttering words of love,

      the many schools, our arguing

      about justice, our restless moving

      across country, rivers, lakes and granite.

      The morning of the day

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