I’m obsessed with odes. Odes celebrate, elevate, magnify. They treat their subjects as though they are the only things that exist. They insist on focused attention. I like them so much I use odes to introduce poetry to young poets. Why?
It’s quite simple, really. Odes open up fresh fields of looking: Neruda wrote odes to tomatoes, onions, socks. He took the most ordinary daily items and shone vivid lights on them, turning them around with such intensity that the onion becomes a saviour on the table of the poor, the tuna fish a simultaneous king of the ocean and solitary man of war. I love the metaphorical turns an ode can take: a coffee flask, for example, reveals the beauty and function of the object as well as the desire for security (from an actual ode I wrote to my green coffee flask). And this ode to earrings I’m sharing comes out of the journey my interest in earrings takes: it goes, inevitably, to regions of impermanence and love.
Do you have a favourite ode or a subject for an ode you’d think would be illuminating?
I began to hang you
on days delicate
with spiderwebs,
loose threads,
things on their way
out.
For hope,
I took rosebud hoops,
unicorn studs,
pink ladybugs as big
as earplugs,
long sprays of stars
and made something
of my ears,
of the woman
inside the mirror.
We could be happy
like this.
With awe,
almost a seafloor
dangling off
an ear-cliff.
You and I,
self and self,
returning
to the good things in life
like having beauty
crystalised
a star land on your body
and find comfort there.
One earring at a time
to remember
destinies lie in
what we hear
and maybe
earrings we shelter
are reminders
of the light we bear,
even if it is
the size of an ear drum.
Sometimes
the littlest objects
like atoms,
like minerals
are what repeat for us
the wisdom of this world:
the delicate heartbreak
of things on their way out
like the whisper
of your mother’s voice
in the middle of the night
when nothing makes sense.