confessions
written between Daniela Elza-and-Michelle Barker
there’s no pure fiction
we are all contaminated with
reality—
the flavour of my favourite tea forever trapped
in your words of leaving.
we unload pockets full of secrets & spare change
dust off the book of Truth:
(untouched for years)
A History and a Guide for the Perplexed
as if truth too has seasons and will
burst forth with bloom.
we put our faith in gnarled branches.
violent winds bend trees
whirl naked leaves and twigs.
—I write and rewrite until
peppermint becomes rose hip.
there’s no pure reality we are all tainted by
our stories.
water our days with them
until we see with a thousand eyes
in the mountains of many
with their dying.
we begin with confessions—
tannin in the aftertaste
under the apple tree weighed down with fruit
the one planted years ago.
fruit we’ve eaten for as long as we remember
like truth.
process notes with Michelle Barker
Daniela: Michelle and I went to the art gallery a number of times last year on creative dates. Michelle was launching her book The House of a Thousand Eyes, a title I find very inspiring and a book I cannot wait to read. A thousand eyes is perhaps what we need to see the truth. I even had the privilege to be present at the birth of a few of its paragraphs. For a couple of years I have had a book called Truth on my landing by my bedroom. All these convergences somehow lead me to invite her to write a poem together.
Michelle: Daniela and I have spent several lunch hours chatting about poetry and ideas and how the world works (or doesn’t), so I was honoured when she asked. We launched lines back and forth via email, every new line an unexpected flower in the garden. The prettiest flowers are hers.
Daniela: We composed most of it in a quick back and forth and then things slowed down a little, we got busy, but the poem kept patiently waiting for us to come back to it.
Michelle: Daniela is kind. Things didn’t slow down; I slowed down! The poem was patient, and so was she.
Daniela: All along I was asking myself what the poem wants to be. I guess I was not asking myself as much as I was asking the poem— we had confessions, we have references to two books. Truth— A History and a Guide for the Perplexed and Michelle’s title The House of a Thousand Eyes (I couldn’t help myself). And we have the disturbing post-truth times, which keeps nagging at the back of my mind: is this something we have to sit out? How do we manage these crises, this war on truth and facts? How volatile our memories are, how tied to reality, how difficult it is to fool someone when they know what is real. And then the question: How many eyes does it take to see? Where does the truth live?
Michelle: As primarily a fiction writer, I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between fiction and reality. My fictional worlds become so real to me I sometimes get confused by what actually has or hasn’t happened. And reality is so fluid: ask five people what happened at a certain event and you’ll get five versions of the truth. The idea that writing has the power to reshape the world is meaningful to me. We can change reality with our words, both spoken and written; and the words that we read can influence our personal reality.
Daniela: The last line seemed to give us the hardest time in the editing. Michelle was not sure she wanted like truth at the end, and I was a little too attached and kept tweaking it to work with those two words. So we went back and forth, back and forth on that, until she said she liked it. I hope she did, and she wasn’t just being polite.