From The Brain and the Leaf
The human brain, so frail, so perishable, so full of inexhaustible dreams and hungers, burns by power of the leaf.
Loren Eisley
First I see a single leaf.
Light, veined, shapely, green.
Then I see a single brain.
Convoluted. Soft. White and black.
I see both, one after the other.
Imaginatively. In the internal air.
I imagine them with my own brain,
the one I will never actually see
because it is housed
as if in a bank vault
for the time of my life.
But it must be inseparable
– somehow – from the imagined brain
and the imagined leaf.
*
I realise I have fallen in love
with the imagined leaf.
I simply love that leaf.
Instinctively. But still
I will force myself to include it
In the same image, at the same time
as the imagined brain
even though I am afraid
that the mass, fleshiness and colour
of the imagined brain will detract
from the definition
and life of the leaf.
*
It does. And I discover
that it is harder for my brain
to see two things at once
than it is to see them singly
and that, as a consequence, the effort
to see also detracts from the clarity
of seeing and therefore
from the imagined leaf.
Though not from the love
of the leaf which seems to be
in a place – a hidden compartment
of the vault, a lower region of my body? –
from which neither my mind,
or time, can displace it. I cannot
imagine not loving the imagined leaf.
(Well, I can imagine it, since you
can imagine almost anything,
but it wouldn’t be true.)
The leaf has taken a life
in my mind defying gravity:
being at the same time
the small, ordinary leaf that it is,
every other individual leaf
and all leaves on all trees.
Try for a moment to imagine
the number of leaves on all trees
or even a few trees. Unimaginable!
The small heart-shaped leaf
(upside down) in my mind
even represents the long waving leaves
of the three cabbage-tree heads
I can see from this window.
About this poem
This poem was originally published online as part of a SPL project, supported by Creative New Zealand, which commissioned Scottish writers to introduce a New Zealand poem. The introduction is by the poet and land-artist Gerry Loose, who has also been a poet in residence in gardens.
In the first lines of Small Stories of Devotion, Dinah Hawken gives us her intention: 'I'll stop shuffling under my New Zealand cool, I'll come out / and tell the stories in an eager childlike way'. She's speaking of that long poem-sequence, ostensibly telling someone else's dreams in a heightened linguistically explorative way which contains both the wonder of children and a poetry of vibrant life -- celebration, but it's true of all her work.
The poems are new, clean, clear, in apparently simple language (can there be such a thing?); they are free from the excess baggage of poetic fireworks – metaphors are not in evidence; the poems are fresh with that sense of discovering things for the first time. The relationships of her poems are not only with women and men, but with plants and stones, with water and with birds. Her wisdom (that's what it is) embraces these things and directs us to re-examine them for ourselves: ‘Let Me Put In A Word For Trees' reads in its entirety: 'Let me put in a word for breathing. / Let me put in a word for trees. / Let me put in a word for breathing.'
Hawken's poems work subtly, insisting on things as things, but also as the general symbol of things and the symbol of those particular things. A rooted and grounded poetry, but without ever forgetting that she's the observer, not in any obtrusive way, but another living person, alive in her body.
'The Brain and the Leaf' is not the poem I intended to write about, which was Small Stories of Devotion, for its symphonic intelligence and its leaps and twists, but I keep returning to the cadences of the former. They insinuate themselves in both the memory and the ear; like plainsong, like Gregorian chant, there's a driving simplicity, an elegant moving round a theme.
First I see a single leaf.
Light, veined, shapely, green.
Then I see a single brain.
Convoluted. Soft. White and black.
There we have the central thesis round which the body of the poem revolves; quiet, meditative, insisting on the fact, then revealing that both are seen imaginatively. In the 'internal air.' The use of the word 'air' gives us at once both a sense of space and of music. Both are imagined ‘with my own brain, / the one I will never actually see' and the meditation begins.
Hawken, in much of her work, is fluently at ease with words which sometimes seem exotic, a language perhaps unfamiliar to our ears, the names of place and of plants of New Zealand: rewarewa, hinau, rimu, Parihaka, Paekakariki, Opunake, Kakaramea. In 'The Brain and the Leaf' she's at ease with the utter simplicity of our common language, a mastery that demonstrates afresh the power of each word in the poem, ringing like a bell, and like a bell, repeated, chiming from passage to passage:
Try for a moment to imagine
the number of leaves on all trees
or even a few trees. Unimaginable!
And boldly:
I realise I have fallen in love
with the imagined leaf.
The elegance of the device moves into a larger meditation on the brain and imagination, without ever relinquishing the actual leaf, the actual brain ‘I have seen a real human brain. / At the Med School in Dunedin' . . . . ‘I have seen a sheep's brain. / In the kitchen, in Hawera' and beyond, to vision, both inward and scientific (My brother // by the way studies seeing: / how parts of the cortex and the eyes // actually work together.)
The poem's power is in its quiet determination to thoughtfully dissect leaf and brain and our perception of both, and in the rigour of its exclusions and the richness of its sparse language.
Hawken's imagination wanders deliberately into the everyday territory familiar from her other poetry: ‘Deryn tells me // that she bought zucchini flowers / in the market in Umbria, stuffed them / with breadcrumbs, garlic and herbs'.
The poem deftly serves us vision itself; clean and clear; midway through the poem Hawken writes:
And I don't know how you account
for that kind of looking,
but it is similar to the way a word
-- say inkling – that you might have been
searching for systematically
in the dictionary of your brain
suddenly appears effortlessly
when you loosen and begin musing.
-- demonstrating in a neat and graceful way that she does know how to account for that kind of looking; and we're lucky she puts it into practice.
