Christopher Woodman
Three poems from FIG LEAF SUTRAS, a book still in manuscript by Baan Hom Samunphrai’s resident poet , repairman, secretary, gardener, reluctant guide and awkward husband.
Christopher & Homprang inside the Botataung Pagoda, Yangon, Burma.
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.
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 large proportion of Thai religious beliefs and practices are Hindu rather than Buddhist in origin. This is nowhere clearer than in the Spirit Houses that are so important to every Thai family and business, including our own. Small but elaborate, these miniature palaces often contain a Shiva figure in the innermost courtyard — if you look carefully you can see him in there just behind the beautiful shy girl looking back at you in the shadows. In many spirit houses Shiva is attended by Ganesha, the much-loved elephant-headed god who makes things happen.
Here he is at one of our houses waiting by the door.
LIKE A LOVER, LIKE A MOTHER, LIKE A MOUSE
In my father’s house
there are many mansions
just as in my village
there are many poor houses
with mansions between them—
mansions with gables and finials
and small shiny servants
kneeling by elephants,
horses, buffalo-carts and palanquins,
peacocks unfolding their fans as the girls
with big breasts fall silent, and smiling
bow brightly uncovered like bells
as they bear at the banquet
on small silver trays
tiny thimbles of whisky and water—
water-born courtyards of perfume
and smoky inhalations,
sacred waxed alcoves curtained off
with tall scented cushions
in damask and rice-green velvet,
melon-shaped with vast muslin oceans
filled out on the spirit-born breeze
like a lover, like a mother,
like a mouse—
and all of them quiet and assembled
for the rare private blink
of the god in the house,
huge, whale-still, like Herod but holy
with those wide-awake eyes and garish
like a mountain in a peep-show—
the gargantuan trunk right there,
gob-smacked, stuck right in your face—
yikes, the size of him!
So swing low, O God of Bright Presence,
Sri Power, swing O Prince of Pubescence,
O Bounteous, O Fat One—
sweet the spectacular pink Substance,
the perfect round belly, wide hips,
the radiant pure mind and broad sceptre—
oh the long, spangled prepuce,
the swooning, the monolith pout
with the make-up, the swaying unseemly
back and forth on one massive leg—
oh the bells on the ankle, the tinkling,
the trampling in time with the snout.
O Ganesha, to garnish life’s platter
with the wink of good fortune—
O Shiva, to shiver & lather us more—
O Brahma, to make it all happen,
what we want
more than anything
that happens to the gods
everyday in these mansions
up there on the humungous dwarf leg,
garlanded, stage-struck & beribboned
with incense and candles—
any morning at 8
with a glass of cool water,
and an orange on a blue plastic plate,
swaying in the mansion, up on one leg—
any morning in my father’s house,
oh heavenly mansion for the passionate,
ponderoso and intelligent,
girly-sweet god of Siam.
Chiang Mai (2019)
Despite his huge bulk, Lord Ganesha’s “vehicle,” his spiritual companion or familiar, is a tiny mouse — he’s as quick, unobtrusive, omnipresent and skillful as that (the ambiguous antecedent is deliberate, which is how both poetry and magic work).
Here he is at one of our houses waiting by the door.
Ritual gifts of food, water, flowers and incense are offered up at shrines and spirit houses everyday all over the country, and if a prayer is answered, the supplicant leaves in return a tiny ceramic elephant, horse, dancing girl, or some other useful object as a gift for the spirit who has obliged. In the shrine above you can see a large hand-rolled cigarette, a small bowl with a pellet of fragrant incense, a betel leaf, and a seven tiered umbrella which is not only a sign of great respect but very useful in such a hot climate. The forehead, trunk, belly and hands of the god have also been rubbed with bits of gold leaf by grateful devotees.
Homprang spends the first hour of each day preparing food and ritual offerings for our altars and spirit houses, and at the end of each day what’s left is carefully gathered together to make a feast for our chickens and dogs — or even for the children if there’s something left over really soft and sweet.
Christopher has written more about Spirit Houses here and here.
The ceramic water pot at our gate is porous, so it’s green with moss and always damp and cool. It is also in the shadow of a large Bo Tree which is covered with ferns and wild orchids A beautiful nang faa carved in teak leans against one of the posts while Lord Ganesha kneels beside her on very sturdy, very human legs. He holds a mortar in his left hand and a pestle in his right in order to prepare herbal medicines for sufferers. The pestle is, in fact, Ganesha’s broken right tusk which he willingly sacrifices for our well-being. And of course he writes with it too, helpful words, needless to say — for openness, generosity and encouragement are his gifts.
MONSOON WATER
The gracious draught in the cleft shell, the cool reprieve, support, belief dipped from an old clay pot held out at noon with torn hands under the corrugate, that's pure celestial water— though every western winner knows the village well is far more controversial, the undressed orchid's purple parts and linen more dramatically confessed and soapy moss around the edges positively pubic. I wai. I drink the lot. Even the sweaty jewels of last night's frog-storm chorus cling to the moist hope that living may be worth the heart-breaking thirst that's sure enough to follow.
The ceramic water pot at our gate is porous, so it’s green with moss and always damp and cool. It is also in the shadow of a large Bo Tree which is covered with ferns and wild orchids A beautiful nang faa carved in teak leans against one of the posts while Lord Ganesha kneels beside her on very sturdy, very human legs. He holds a mortar in his left hand and a pestle in his right in order to prepare herbal medicines for sufferers. The pestle is, in fact, Ganesha’s broken right tusk which he willingly sacrifices for our well-being. And of course he writes with it too, helpful words, needless to say — for openness, generosity and encouragement are his gifts.
A NEW BIO
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.
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 85 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.
“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 above and below. And the books have been recognized as well 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.
* It was just announced that Fig Leaf Sutras was a Semi-Finalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes (Feb 15th, 2025).
'GRAVITY AND GRACE'
published in Phase and Cycle (1990)
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.
PASS WORD
published in Fire Readings, A Collection of Contemporary Writing from the Shakespeare & Co. Fire Benefit. (Paris, 1991)
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.
Like Every Angel Born
published in The Chariton Review (1994)
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.
Leadline
published in The Cumberland Poetry Review (1997)
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.
Interment
published in RUNES: A Review of Poetry (2002)
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.
LEONARDO AMONGST WOMEN
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.]
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.
LIFE CLASS WITH KANT
“Why I Wrote How Bad is the Devil,” Cowpattyhammer.com (March 26th, 2016)
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. 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.
He mistakes her kingdom for a horse
published in The Beloit Poetry Journal (Fall 2009)
Nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize: the Best of the Small Presses
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.
Christopher Woodman at home in Chiang Mai. February 20th, 2025
A Selection of his Published Poems in 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.”