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    Salt and Ashes
    Salt and Ashes
    Salt and Ashes
    Ebook116 pages33 minutes

    Salt and Ashes

    By Adrienne Drobnies

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Out of dried tears and burnt matter comes fertile ground, new nourishment. A woman traveller walks up and down a mountain, back and forth through a quarter of Grenoble over the course of many months, experiencing anticipatory grief and later bereavement over the loss of a spouse. With little to anchor her, claim her, as she walks poems begin to seek her out. Poems of dislocation, cultural migration, rage, healing and transformation spring forth and set root – poems that transform the vocabulary of science, its language and concepts, into poems that encounter the natural world with an intensity and clarity that direct us to the core of our humanity and the tender parts of our being.

    These poems are crafted out of the language of dreams, mythologies, and inventions. Laced with subtle humour, irony and surprising turns, they return us to the place of origin seen anew. Like the egg and bitter herbs dipped in salt at the Seder Table, they remind us that beyond pain and grief, the only peace we have is the one we construct for ourselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSignature Editions
    Release dateJul 21, 2022
    ISBN9781773241111
    Salt and Ashes
    Author

    Adrienne Drobnies

    Adrienne Drobnies has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley; she has worked at Simon Fraser University and the Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver. Her origins are in Texas and California and she has spent most of her life in Toronto and Vancouver. A graduate of the Simon Fraser University Writer's Studio, her poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines, including The Antigonish Review, Event, Riddle Fence, The Toronto Quarterly, and The Maynard, as well as The Cider Press Review and Sow's Ear's Review in the US, and Popshot Magazine in the UK. She is an editor of a collection of poetry in French, Poèmes sur Mesure, by Alain Fournier. Her poetry has received honourable mention in the Compton Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Vallum Award for poetry. Her long poem "Randonnées" won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Award for Best Suite of Poems by an Emerging Poet and was a finalist for the CBC literary award for poetry.

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      Book preview

      Salt and Ashes - Adrienne Drobnies

      I

      Witch Hazel Song

      Red Rover come over and show me

      the games you learned as a child.

      How to wield scissors with a vengeance,

      how to spank a cat, beat your brother’s

      head against a wooden bench.

      How to be invisible and how not to be.

      A shoe hits a face. A slap stings.

      Crank up the wind inside you and wind it down.

      Red Rover, your burns heal slowly

      and scorpions hide under blankets.

      The taste of soap in your mouth

      empties your insides –

      vomit is mopped up with bleach.

      A wooden floor smacks the chin.

      Splinters are painfully pulled. Car doors slam.

      Show me how scars last on ring fingers,

      ice burns as much as fire, and I don’t know

      how she got those welts. Teach me the rules

      you learned as a child and how a switch cut

      from witch hazel is a lesson in pain and power.

      It’s a blue day

      and the goddess of the year has not been kind

      The full moon in March is worth being wary of

      Remember it was the dog who sniffed Odysseus out

      not the child

      not the mate

      A woman won’t wait

      Why should she?

      I wonder

      where was I

      and how old

      when Joanne Kyger

      born the same year

      as my mother

      sailed between

      San Francisco

      and Japan

      I – a small child –

      beaten, shredding curtains

      with a vengeance

      watched the Kennedy assassinations –

      the first one when I was in California

      the second in Texas

      find myself in another place

      menacing hospitality

      no man to scowl away the suitors

      The Sacred Yew

      My old aunt Myrtle

      harder than

      the hard wood of her name

      Any noun can be verbed she said

      and set the table for dinner

      green print tablecloth and blue plastic glasses

      Grandma Bech’s everyday china and art deco wedding silver

      acrid smell of polish under my nails

      I climbed the crêpe myrtle

      a child shrouded in its leaves

      came face to face with the hard-eyed cicada

      scrambled down

      not returning

      for weeks

      Years later the insect is just a specimen

      in biology class – with organs

      large enough to see

      Taxus tree

      made to bow and bend

      yields a poison drug

      from the botanical trash heap

      of mould and groaning wood

      for the canker that moans in the flesh

      Ring Dance

      It’s possible we once danced

      by the light of the solstice moon,

      runcible drunk, hunched over

      streetcar tracks to flatten a penny –

      the only coin we had to offer

      against a thundering weight.

      We don’t know whether passion

      will be renewed at the same address

      where ceiling plaster sprinkled our hair

      like crumbly feta, garnish to the salt stink

      of pleasure. Can we count on postal carriers

      to negotiate a contract for delivery of

      Enjoying the preview?
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