MY FRANGIPANI TREE

"So that's the girl you want, is it?"
Homprang mocks me—
                         "the one you write

          Whispers woe
          In the grieving mead
          With the sweet white flowers
          And the bitter seed?

"But oh mai dai, Lung Kip, mai dai!
you have no taste—no culture!
The malingering one
cannot be grown
in a pleasant home like ours,
or grace a commoner's garden."

And then the Princess Sirindhorn,
that loyal Siamese angel sister,
changes the name, rewrites
the misbegotten tree's
girl-story.

She was too grim before, you see—
Lan Tõme, the older generation groaned—
'Storm Torn Tree of  Grief,'
                            'Sorrow's Thunder!'
Only the Wat could weather such regret,
the Princess recently announced
on government radio,
only the holy Wat could grin
at such despair,
                      or say, or bear it.

She knew before her gift no trusty Thai
would ever deem to have
              the Lan Tõme tree at home—
it only graced the temple yard or wept
its sweet white scent
at the village crematorium.
Now its mournful shade's been
cast anew as a lovely girl that says
"Come live with me, I'm Leela Wadee—

            My willowy breeze
            Plays in your gentle tree!"

it's springing up all over.

Oh, I'd love to say "okay, please do,"
but water too pulls worlds apart,
I know, and air makes rain
                                  and floods us—
the bright skinned undulating breeze
wrapped in the silk sarong
with the smiling limbs
and the black, black hair
blows up another sort of thunder.
I'm just a man who gets things done
and know that girls like this
                  shake down the oak and split
the hardest western beam asunder.

But the pool of Siamese meaning says
mai pen rai, "make no ado"—
                                     that's better.
For flexibility in mind and limb
is always free just like
this groaning, gracious tree—

and wife Homprang,
now it's Leela Wadee,
is free
even with me
and let's me say
I love to grieve a storm—
and gaily with me grows it.

                                  published in  The Atlanta Review (Fall, 2009)

___________________

Homprang (‘delicate odor of the cheek’)  Chaleekanha is the poet’s doctor-wife.

Mai dai  means it can’t be done, that it’s never been done before and will never be done any time soon—or, for that matter, ever.

The poet is called Lung Kip in Thailand.  Lung means uncle, or any man older than your father, and Kip is the poet’s childhood nickname. (‘Kip’ is much easier for a Thai to pronounce than ‘Christopher’ with its crush of syllables and consonants. His grown-up name sounds cacophonic to the Siamese ear.)

The Frangipani Tree was called Lan Tõme until it was recently  renamed Leela Wadee by the King's daughter, Her Royal Highness Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, as a gift to the Thai people. Before the Princess’ intervention this most beautiful and fragrant of all trees could only be grown in a Thai wat (temple), hospital, school or palace. It was simply too risky to have a tree with a name like that around the house.

Mai pen rai means it doesn't matter--which it doesn't only because you've obviously already gone and done it.
 

;

A NEW BIO 
composed for his birthday, December. 7th, 2021

updated July 31st, 2024

CHRISTOPHER WOODMAN was born in New York City in 1939. He was educated as an undergraduate at Columbia College, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Yale, and a Kellett Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, where his dissertation, "Polyphonic Narrative in Elizabethan Literature," was initially supervised by C.S.Lewis. He continued as a Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge, and was at the same time Chairman of the Cambridge University Buddhist Society where he was instrumental in helping the young Lama, Trungpa Rimpoche, become it's  President. The two were exactly the same age - 26.

Following an unhappy sojourn with Trungpa in Eskdalemuir, Scotland, Christopher returned to England as a single parent in 1970' and worked there as a schoolteacher, and eventually as a blue-water sailor/journalist with his 3 children on board. After a two year voyage he sailed into New York harbor, and in 1982 became Head of the English Department at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Preparatory School with a mandate to rebuild it -- one of the most rewarding as well as challenging experiences of his life. 10 years later he began  building a new sailboat in France, and also to write poetry seriously. He published his first poems in Paris in the early '90s while working for France Telecom in the winters and sailing from the Hebrides to the Cyclades in the summers. The west coast of Ireland and Brittany inspired him profoundly -- his poetry is full of them.

That stage of his life came to an abrupt halt in 1994 when his paraplegic older brother was hit by a pickup truck in his wheelchair in Northern Thailand. He abandoned his boat and built a house for Tony in a rice paddy in Chiang Mai, and cared for him there until his death 12 years later. Since then he and his Thai doctor-wife, Homprang Chaleekanha, have been developing a Traditional Medicine School in the same house, and that's where he lives and continues with his poetry to this day.

Having defined himself as a poet on the Seine at 50, he now finds himself at 84 with three books of poetry on the banks of the Mae Ping. His dream is that one of those books may yet bring him home to share what he has been doing with people who speak his language and love to read and talk about poetry.

Although Christopher Woodman has never been in a writing workshop, worked with an editor, or stood up at a poetry reading in his life, his poems have been accepted for publication by some of the finest journals in America including The Atlanta Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Chariton Review, The Cumberland Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and RUNES, A Review of Poetry, and in the end one of his most unlikely as well as most erotic poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. But that was 12 years ago -- since then Christopher Woodman has not managed to publish a single poem what is more one of his 3 books.

“Some of the poems have certainly had their day,” he says, "but the books, oh the books. They are my latest as well as my very best work, and if the poems were deemed worthy to be published by such editors, shouldn’t the books get a chance to be read? And they're so new!"

For more on the "connundrum" above you can visit the Introduction to Christopher Woodman's  Wordpress blog, Cowpattyhammer.

About the Author contains more background on the last 25 years of his life, and may help in understanding better his late blooming as a poet as well as the decade of isolation he refers to above.

*          *          *

Christopher Woodman's most recent book, FIG LEAF SUTRAS, a Memoir in Poems, 1990-2020, is built around poetry that anyone can understand about subjects that nobody understands. In addition, he has completed two other very different books, GALILEO'S SECRET, Two Decades of Poems Under House Arrest, and LA-CROIX-MA-FILLE: Hexes, Ruins, Riddles & Relics. A number of the poems in all three books have been published over the years -- you can see a few of them below. And the books too have been recognized in a number of recent national competitions, but none has yet been published. "That's the next step," he says, and feels it has to be coming up soon.

At the very bottom of this page you can read "He Mistakes Her Kingdom for a Horse."  It was published in the Fall 2009 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal, and subsequently nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize.

And finally, on the last page, you can read his long poem, "Connemara Trousers." Although 6 parts of it were published in The Kenyon Review in 1992, Part VII was only recently added to it. Called  "Why Up So Late on the Village Green Then, Pietà, After All those Flags, the Honor,"  it is among his most personal as well as most civic poems.

Christopher Woodman says of himself:

"I've never been 'work-shopped,' you see -- they were a rarity until I was over being educated, and I never studied Modern Poetry during all my 11 years of degree work in English Literature on both sides of the Atlantic.  But I'm a writer now, not a teacher or a student, and I don't read like a teacher or a student either. Indeed you have to read me as I am, a kind of new old-world wheelwright. I've reinvented it, so to speak, spokes, grease and all, and for me that means it has to turn, and it has to go somewhere, and carry something. A poem's a service thing for me, man's most accomplished tool -- older even than the axe, and sharper. It's fire, it's water--it's what makes life wake up and know it's alive, and good, and truly worth dying for!"

    A Short Selection of Published Poems in very different styles, 1990 - 2020.
                                   "Just as a poet has to live with what gets published, however
                                           dated  or inadequate -- he grows with what doesn't."

.

           'GRAVITY AND GRACE'    

The naked figure that you see
struggling from this rock
embraces his despair
with every mallet blow
                        and marble flake,
shouldering his way
ever deeper into form.

The chips that fly are free
but he
            little by little
freezes in the aspect of revolt,
complacent in the notice on the base
which reads upside down as

            Bondage is release    
            from Freedom.

This is the trap of art,
to promise flight in stone or steel,
the gravity defying act
that would escape the politics
of weight and mass and fault
which fill address books
with the names of those
who have died,
               or disappeared,
or simply moved away.

Yet had the artist left those chips
assembled in their caul of stone
this particular slave
could have slept
the unconditional life
                         ungrieved
the rock rested,
and for all eternity
even the manacles of stress
that crack the earth's mantle
could not have sighed a path
                                   to his release.

                                             published in  Phase and Cycle (1990)

          PASS WORD

The trick is
to stay outside
even when it’s lonely,  
cold and not the thing to do
at all.

The trick is
to stay outside
even when there’s  
no one there to say
it’s so much better weather
where the well is,
the depths plumbed
inside.

With such encouragement
who would not try the door,
and even now I feel the knob   
flower in my hand,
O those hundred-thousand gentle sea-fronds
nestling in the palm,
curling slowly up the thigh
in arcs of flame
fire-fraught with wanting
only this.

As for me before the door,
belted and distraught,
hoping only for a turning,
must I know this       
sloughing off of petals
gilt and master work for
ancients in those towering days
before the shutters closed upon
the vault beneath
the floor?

But the secret now,
then as now,
O best beloved,
is to stay
outside—

where the word is more
than ever
even when it’s wet
beside the Seine.

                                                                                                                                               published in  Fire Readings,  A Collection of Contemporary Writing  from the 
                                                                                                                               Shakespeare & Co. Fire Benefit. (Paris, 1991)

             Like Every Angel Born

Your old lover comes to you
when your face is to the wall.

That's why he’s damp and mossy,
that's why his eyes are sharp like mice
venturing out just after all the noise
has died down in the country kitchen.
His hips are narrow like the cellar stairs
he eases himself down slowly, step by step—
his German shepherd's crippled grace
is eager to please with its dark slouch
even as it frightens the children
dreaming like lanterns on your lawn.

He scents your confusion in the doorway—
even when you’re hiding your smile,
even when you’re keeping your hands
securely occupied with not having
anything to do once you’re in bed.

He can smell your breasts cascading quietly
under the fresh sheets like waterfalls—
their odor is round like wading pools
that reflect last summer's softest clouds,
and the picnics too, with the white doves
tumbling at the back of the orchard.

You roll over and straighten out
your legs—your hips are ramparts,
your moat is filled with water.

He turns away, back to work as usual
with all his hands under the hapless car.
You see only his Reeboks in the grass
sticking out irreverently beneath you.
You hear the clink of his tools,
his breathing, the wires and filters
unraveling your secrets in his fingers.

The nuts and bolts are all that matters
when it's coming apart in his hands.

You phone him up in the silence
to be sure he's still there
under the jacked-up wreck.
You ask him if he loves you.
He says he's not too sure
but it's coming apart
like it should.

Such greasy reticence leaves footprints
all over your freshly washed resolve—
down on your hands and knees again
you’re washing the stains in widening arcs.
Like wings greening in the battered snow
the strokes show how to wipe clean
a sweaty heart bent upon its own
ungraciously divine descent,
how to release the grime at last,
to groom like every angel born.

                                                           published in  The Chariton Review  (1994)

           Leadline

Sound out the falling fathoms,
sing as the markers fold back
and slip each beneath the surface

until the last strip stops short,
catches its breath as it spreads
its wings and flutters thanks.

Sprig of green, you mark
the summit of my need that rises
gabled from the latest depths.

You signal just how high a man
must roll his trousers up
to walk home across the flood,

or how to stay put even when the
humped tide hangs over the edge
like water hanging in a glass—

while far below your cupped lead
charged with tallow gently lifts
whatever stain such limits hold,

a trace of flecked shell, or sand,
or mud settling back behind, or just
nothing signifying rock.

And all the while the thankless keel,
poised between your greased root
and the empyrean

strokes its
blind shadow
on the bar.
                                          
                                    published in  The Cumberland Poetry Review  (1997)

 Interment

Open up the sheets, fair weepers,
roll back the stone from this bed.
Yes, we've been on strong medication
and taken heavy punches too
to come down to you dutifully like this!
No mother wants a grown-up son
more perfectly assured, more naked
yet perfectly disposed across her lap—
all hard ardor emptied from his side,
blent knees drawn-up to let him hang
from his two hands in greater comfort.
No bird bows between two wider wings,
no swallow stoops more gracefully
in heavier, more final light,
no paper-dry carapace of the cicada
hangs more split silent at the hatch.

So open up the sheets, shining weepers,
roll back the stone from this bed—
we embrace your loosening resignation,
we take refuge in the white marble
churchyard of your ever-widening lap.

St. Gervais,
Vendredi Saint

                                                            published in  RUNES: A Review of Poetry (2002)

LEONARDO AMONGST WOMEN

The bulk not the vectors
is what old Merlin draws,
the wash of his own weight
shot through silk in motion.

Thus the kneeling girl that
God wants even more than he,
sheen of eggplant fish and
satin light on rose paper.

Yet even the new faithful
schooled to ask too much
study not the secret in the folds
but just the pale hands clasped
in prayer, the inviolable eyes
raised to praise everything but
the veiled act taking place
preposterously below—

precisely where the raw clay plug
cradled in that lone man’s hope
lingering turned, sweetly bound,
dignified in clinging drapes
and tight swaddling clouts
the immaculate desire to be
defined not by what we do but
like a mute maiden what she is
wound in her cocoon.

And so with unfurled wings
folding back like perfumed letters
in the dark, virgin lips signing
in the last low light and every
flute and hollow, genius spins
the miracle of thighs with down
so light it only lifts to knowledge
stroked the other way, leading
the man's hand of God
to know those things
it never sees or ever thinks
but only dies to dream.

And if we priests and doctors
cannot bow our heads to live
draped amongst the women thus
we cannot hold God’s absence
live nor like the genius maiden
be the empty vessel it desires—

and then we only die to dream
no more—  
and all our saints are peeping toms,
and all our gold, lead.

               "Les études de draperies,"
                                Musée du Louvre

 _____________________
“Les études de draperies” was an exhibition at the Louvre in 1990 of some of Leonardo da Vinci’s experimental sketches.
The artist wound damp muslin strips around a small, featureless lump of clay and then drew just the wraps.

      Published on-line: "For Franz Wright," Cowpattyhammer.com  (Jan 21st, 2010)
     [You can click on the citation for a discussion of this and the following poem.]

.

LIFE CLASS WITH KANT

The merest daub you say
will do it.

This undressed girl beside the vase
will satisfy my lust
for meaning even if
her unlaced body wilts
upon the stand.

Afterwards she draws her belt
tight about her waist and,
leaning slightly forward on the stool,
breasts hammocked in the folds
and gently dreaming,
gazes at my work.

I explain that relics
start like this—

the silver mantle is for later,
the sacred coddling
and the kissing
last of all.

The still god-wrapped girl meanwhile
like all the rest
bows down in yet
another’s arms.

            "Why I Wrote How Bad is the Devil," Cowpattyhammer.com  (March 26th, 2016)

He mistakes her kingdom for a horse

He heard horses
when she meant writing,

he heard sweat,
the creamy lather where

the taut skin
works against the leather.

He heard writing
when she meant

riding her journal,
the words a broad back

beneath her, pressed
up and caught between

her long phrases and the
need to be heard by him,

the naked verb,
the taut joy ridden

but prepositional,
the taut thorn,

a word, a horse 
working between them.

                        published in  The Beloit Poetry Journal  (Fall 2009)
                  Nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize: the Best of the Small Presses
 

CLICK HERE to see an example of Christopher Woodman's more ambitious work,
a long poem  from LA CROIX MA FILLE: Hexes, Ruins, Riddles & Relics.