nicholas in vietnam

I suppose that I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to write one supercharged post laying out everything I felt about my third survey. It was intense and, more than a week after getting back and relaxing over the Tet holiday, I still don’t feel near an official statement of any kind. I suppose it will come out in dribs and drabs.
We have two new prospective housemates, Nathan and Vi, who are also raring to set up a creative writing group. The group – just four members so far – met for the first time on Wednesday in our ludicrous pearl inlay and sausage curlicue Chinese living-room. Understanding Nathan and Vi’s approach to poetry is a bit of a headshift for me. They are fresh out of studying it in the States and Nathan, at least, is deeply into meter and stuff which I like the sound of but am clueless about. Basically what strikes me is that they have been writing about funny, absent, imaginary or nonsensical things, writing a poem a week about whatever.
It’s liberating to write nonsense with a rhythm and I do so, sitting at the big wooden desk, working through the unruly tower of scrap paper created by redundant saola datasheets. Some cool-sounding lines emerge.
To start with it’s gibberish:

Moon is sailing in the egret water
People in the shallows follow after
Brains are seeking silence in the garden
Elves remain ecstatic in the arbour

Then later:

Hawk that grasps the wire and falls away
Falls into the closure of the day
Endless rides of mist and broken trees
Memory returns to what it is.

Which kind of sounds like something

And I start getting fired up. It doesn’t take long before I’m full of emotion and I can’t write just anything any more. Facing me on the desk are two pictures, one on the computer screen and one on the wall. They are beautiful pictures which I selected for their beauty and their meaning and somehow the fact that they’re both there, and that they’re both pictures seems to demand of me something. Well, not demand, that long avocet-smile on what looks like an ultrasound screen, is somehow welcoming…
But I’m not able to write a poem about these pictures, or to do anything other than describe them and make bland statements. And I think that perhaps I should have written a poem a week about nothing at all, perhaps that would have – bit by bit and as things surfaced – given me the capacity to hold the force that would come later. I wish I could go back and say to myself ‘Write now while you have nothing to write about in preparation for the time when you have too much!’
Anyway here are the pictures. We need more pictures on this blog.