The Golden Thread

Amali Gunasekera

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781780375984
• eBook ISBN: 9781780375991
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Blending the sacred and the everyday, Amali Gunasekera's second collection The Golden Thread is a search for grace through the deep process of transmuting emotional trauma into peace. She takes up Muriel Rukeyser's famous line: 'What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.' Her book's central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman's equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture. Approaching the polemic or the existential with a gentle touch, this is poetry as lyric essay, mysterious and shapeshifting as sunlight on water. Formally, the poems explore the instability of the lyric 'I' and the addressed 'You'. Often there is no static vantage point; instead, the 'I' and 'You' are verbs in a state of becoming. Their very unfixity reflects dynamic systems in the natural world where elements are constantly interacting and altering their natures. These poems also respond to Wilfred Bion's notion of 'Thoughts Without a Thinker' and Carl Jung's 'Collective Unconscious': through a rich symbolic system they simultaneously hold two dimensions of time; the linear Chronos of our material world, and the vertical Kairos or spiritual time. Thus, the field of this collection is holographic, in search of new co-ordinates, always beholden to something just beyond sight.

III

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed

Into different bodies

ted hughes
Tales from Ovid (1997)

Spiegel im Spiegel

Something there, above the range of human hearing, yet, at the threshold of perception as if enclosed in glass, this great unceasing loom. How meticulous the weaving of wholeness, every note so loosely held, without fixity, without possession.

Two voices. If hearing is ungovernable, deep listening is the tuning fork conducting the pure tone of each of their nobody-but-yourself-ness. Two voices, like the suffering of being two natures, or two kindred souls past long wandering, finally come to face each other, one, bewildered; why have you arrived here stranger, what of yourself do you recognise in me? The other replying, will you speak to me, just speak in the many voices of the beloved?

Once again, a day of rain like the score to a waking dream. Two voices as the distance between the unspoken and the utterance, in slow awakening to something entwined and mutual. Transfiguration as perception looking for articulation. As aliveness searching for a body to inhabit. As joy, simple, frictionless, without the dissonance of a contradictory heart.

Not a singular I, that bewildered narrator divining with their half-heart’s rudimentary instrument, but a meticulous weaving, every note so loosely held, every question an answer, every ascent a descent, arrival a departure, always retuning to a mediant note and finding us asleep in our hiding places. Still, just as inverting the triad does not change the root note, a singular question each of us keep arriving at all our lives, the two voices too keep arriving at I like a simple plea.

A day of rain is the score to a waking dream that says knowing the way to yield is strength—at one point in your life something will happen to humble you. Glass coming down, bead by crystal bead, the fracture of a boundary finally revealing the element we lived in, its shattering, no savage offering as when every grieving is gone, the quiet expectancy for the world to re-shape itself again, and it does, all the fallen fragments rising through the rain, a deep commitment far down in the mind of two voices to become a single movement, then, though habituated thought expects a dénouement, the sense of an ending is misleading—they coil up again as one, like kundalini rising, the whole of existence in gentle vibration, the glass universe that melted and came down, rising up again its great invisible edifice—fracture is no calamity it is no loss, the re-shaping, not so different to love, as when each encounter prepares you for the next—the next enlargement of I, and unnoticed, each note a keystone that fell into its rightful place.

Once again joy, how meticulous the weaving, every note so loosely held, without fixity, without possession. Once I called love some human form and worshipped it until it became meaningless. Now I know love by feel, not countenance and as an endless rising towards articulation, as the mirror clarifies what’s before it—beyond form, in the barely traceable gap between two notes or the reflection before it reaches the world, love, you are there.

How meticulous the weaving, yet every note so loosely held as if the only way left to love is by opening the other to themselves, like kindred souls running into each other, or second chances to feel the future again almost here, the ripe span of its mirror upon mirror deepening the way a phrase changes when encountered repeatedly, a sense of anticipation, not expectation, and joy at the encounter, simple, frictionless, without dissonance of a contradictory heart, In this long passage, meet me where I am Dear X, as I have I, as I would you. Come sit beside me daily at the loom.

Bend in the River

That leafy place like some defunct book of wisdom fallen open at a random page. In it, here’s the legend that speaks in different voices. Martins loop overhead, their flight eternal, asking why am I, I, I? Whose story is it anyway? Soon soon sang the wood thrush, love, life begins and ends in the same substance. Must you always loop as if towards a different ending?

Water, what strange hours you keep, carrying the past lightly, moving towards your own annihilation, you stoppe...

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Kasturi Mrugam
• I
• II
• III
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright