Poems to Evje

Tamzin Pinkerton

01.03.23

How is it 
you’ve grown to harden
what you love?
A dust lust
lurks in your blood.
Come -
let the stream
move between
your toes.

07.03.23

Alone on the jetty
I was nearly
the lapping of the fjord
and the white winter sun,
when a long, tired freighter,
though not close,
dragged into the bay
with heavy growl
and choked perfect air,
so I left.

Another day,
quiet on the quay
I became a ripple on the sea
glinting cold sun,
when a tanker,
heavy with stolen spoils
pushed into the firth
filthy in noise and smoke.
And I trembled with the pine needles 
and the fine breeze,
as the doomed leviathan
sloped by
and was gone.

15.03.23

Evje:
you are as quiet now
as before
golf course and chainsaw -
wide open
to cluttered sky
with no desire 
for height -
meeting tampered cells
with gentle ripple,
bottle caps
with soft clay.
Pylons march
to your north
but unrushed,
you are still bay.
Today
I offer you
a woody Y,
stone O,
and oyster-shell U.
Do you recognise me?
I am the one
that rivers and rivers
and might be sea.

16.03.23 (Munch gallery, with Evje in mind)

To the water’s edge
to dance
with rising sun.

To the water’s edge
to taste salt air
and darkness come.

To the water’s edge
to scream
red sky.

To the water’s edge
to live
and to die.

05.04.23

Silence
between stems
and bones -
between chainsaw blade
and hopeful bark.
Silence between earth
and heart.
Between water
and stone.

06.04.23

How many reminders do you need?
The rain calls at your skin
and dances on your tongue.
Each drop dares:
open beyond yourself.
The sky is a teeming pallet.

12.04.23

Ripple to me and away -
my bed is flesh as yours is clay.
We long for fish and oyster play,
while swans delight with landing spray.
Your seaweed tangles many ways
through cosmic nights and loving days.
Small nuthatch has still more to say:
the spring’s all here though tired eyes stray.

13.04.23

Dear wide bay -
what do you become
if I open to you?
Who am I 
to your becoming,
in my opening,
our shared change?
But your sky-mirror remembers
our changlessness:
we return
to the many livings
we are.

13.04.23

Today the sky is grey and the wind eager, ushering rain.  A cormorant flies towards you, ahead of me, leading me as I approach your shore.  Your surface trembles with a million small dances that wave across you like starlings at sunset.  Today I stand amongst last year’s reeds, on your northern marshy edge.  I greet you, ask how you are today and get no spectacular reply.  No noble herons or curious deer.  You just are.  ‘I just am - as birds paddle within me and sing around me, as rain comes, as machines pass in the distance not knowing I’m here - an unfound mystery.’  You teach me how to be.  And you remain mysterious to me too, though found and though I am knowing you more closely with each visit.  Stay mysterious.  Today (as often), I feel myself soothed by being near you - and a mirror bay again opens in my belly.  My inside bay (our inside bay?) holds, allows, creates and responds.  And I realise (again) that for me to be present, open and responsive to you so that you might be the same to me and so we reinforce each other’s aliveness, I need to practise being present and open and responsive - that my visits to you are made more profound because of my Ridhwan work and daily sits, sensing experience and inquiries.  The scots pine beyond the window where I’m writing (am home now) waves its branches like the nodding of a head.  We leave here in a few weeks.  Already I’m sad at the prospect of leaving you - though you’ll remain, and I’ll seek your turquoise kin beneath the snow tipped mountains of the arctic as I long for whale encounters.  

Today began with my teacher Marion reading Rilke’s A Walk: …we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; / it has an inner light, even from a distance - / and changes us, even if we do not reach it, / into something else, which, hardly sensing it, / we already are….’  Change me into what I am, ungraspable Evje.

20.04.23

Dear bay,
how graciously 
you let be
in every weather.
Abiding with you,
even favourite futures
are stilled.

Watered,
I let be
the day’s mosquitos 
troubling my surface,
the shore
that might have been pristine,
the bed
that wants to teem;
and join
your rippling love
of sky.

25.04.23

You scuttle over tarmac
between quick cars,
dodge golf balls
spraying flat forest,
fast-walk beneath
screaming power lines,
and plough through
a wall of chainsaws.
From the path leading to the bay
you collect a starbucks cup
and a red plastic comb from her edge.
And then sit
on the jetty 
floating on Evje
as she ripples the word:
stay.

25.04.23

(After last big group session)

Rivering
is letting in
all willing streams,
is collecting
all rain and beam,
while homing eider,
beaver, bream,
and offering drink
to wider sea.
Rivering 
is dissolving
the I that seems,
is quivering
with life that gleans
more life, more making,
limpid seeing.
Rivering
is remembering
-and again-
our belonging
in mystery,
in sandy bed
of each idea.
Rivering
is rippling
to all time flings,
is knowing
all that flow within,
is water meeting
water being.