Undertow
by: Louise Haywood , December 13, 2021
by: Louise Haywood , December 13, 2021
undertow
lou haywood [1]
in this darkness, this place of unknowing, weighted and weightless, waiting for the tug
Oh mother, oh mother, why have you forsaken me?
Nor does she know she’s wiping me
out. She doesn’t know I take her
anxiety personally, feel annihilated
Not to be seen by the mother is not to
exist, and being seen thought Winnicott, is the
condition for creative looking. It’s no
Katherine Angel citing Vivian Gornick [1]
O mamá, ¿qué fareyo? [2]
sobre mar vem quem frores d’amor tem;
mirarei, madre, as torres de Jeen.[3]
Does a flower sleep?
Does a branch, touched once by a bird? [4]
When the dawn comes,
ego dormio
shall I awaken?
reaching
I can t separate the lungs from
the air.[5]
outside, inside, neither, or both at once,
This is a life, an environment
at the edge
that is pretty resilient, but what does it disallow? [6]
disavow?
a capacidade de alterar,
de reorientar
o campo epistemológico
ou
o tecido discursivo
Jean Ullmo cited in Erín Moure, p.68.
tecido discursivo, tejido discursivo, tissu discursif, discursive thread fabric tissue flesh
a material unconscious
punctus
me and not me
light, dark, neither, or both at once
What’s more, love and hate are not opposites, but are developmentally entangled. [7]
punctus
me and not me
light, dark, neither, or both at once
this sea of me, swelling,
The mouth of the sea?
a compression, a constriction, a binding, a tying
A lung’s mouth too common in an aching world [8]
where there is breath, there is life
there is breath, there is life
breath, life
One day death breath death will come!
Out of the air! [9]
REFERENCES
[1] Special thanks are due to Dr Harriet Cook, who introduced me to Moure’s O cadoiro, Kyra Ho, for challenging me to write my feminism, to Isabelle McNeill and Anna Misiak for guiding me gently.
[1] Daddy Issues, p. 66107.
[2] A formulaic phrase in the traditional female voice often ventriloquized in male poet’s work…or in anonymous songs. A male sexual fantasy about nubility and female sexual availability. A pan-European (pan-Mediterranean?) trace of women’s work songs. Wait a minute, is it gender marked? ‘The father is not, in fact, instructing his the daughters on the woeful ways of men, but is addressing his audience in his pride about them.’ (Angel 2019: 56).
[3] Paio Gomes Charinho, ‘Ai Santiago, padrom sabido’. https://cantigas.fcsh.unl.pt/cantiga.asp?cdcant=852&tr=4&pv=sim. Correct to MedDB. Base de datos da lírica profana galego-portuguesa (online database). Version 3.6.1. Santiago de Compostela: Centro Ramón Piñeiro para a Investigación en Humanidades, [accessed: you did access it?] (ISSN 1989-4546). I don’t know…the Lisbon database seems authoritative to me. Maybe you should compare the versions? A literature review? ‘patriarchy, like all power, is productive as well as repressive’ (Angel 2019: 67).
[4] Erín Moure translucinating, Ayras Nunes Clerigo, 2007, 64.How she flies through time to alight. A dreaming, a sleeping, awakening to tremble and touch.
[5] Erín Moure, María Pérez Balteira [ ] #1392. All deletions are my own. My own deletions. Own.
[6] Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues, p. 42. Why am I not seen? Not heard? Am I here?
[7] Angel 2007: 75.
[8] Erín Moure, O cadoiro, p. 8, oh darling one, oh fragile goddess, despite your cuitas suffering absence you do not bathe wash your soft wool shift fall down alone.
[9] Erín Moure, O cadoiro, p. 14.
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