Month: September 2016

Don Nadie

IMG_0200.jpg

Don Nadie
walks past the Jesuit Church
where the shoe-shine boys
store their stands at night.

He walks past
the tiny seat where
the gay guys sit
and caress each other
asking the unsuspecting
for unexpected dates.

Nobody asks him
for a match,
for a drink,
for money,
for charity,
for a walk down the alley
to the cheap hotels

The Yalalag witch
doctor sees things
other men don’t see.

He stretches out his hand
and brushes the mosquito
from Don Nadie‘s nose.

“Brother,” he smiles.
“I too have lost the way.”

Don Nadie is the one
who stops the hands
on all the clocks
at midnight.

He’s the one who leaves
this place and comes to this place,
all places being one

Don Nadie thinks
he knows who he is,
but he can no longer
sense his blood in the mirror
as the razor blade draws
its thin red scratch
across the dry husks of his soul.

Don Nadie,
my lookalike, my twin,
stares back at me
from the shop window
and I gaze into his eyes

In the back of the weavers’ shop,
three witches watch us.

One spins the yarn,
one measures the cloth,
one wields
the obsidian knife,

that will one day
sever the thread of our lives:

gimiendo gemelo,
hipócrito rector.

Small Corner

IMG_0160.jpg

Small corner

 And this is the good thing,
to find your one small corner
and to have your one small candle,
then to light it, and leave it burning
its sharp bright hole in the night.

 Around you, the walls you constructed;
inside, the reduced space, the secret garden,
the Holy of Holies where roses grow
and no cold wind disturbs you.

 “Is it over here?” you ask: “Or over here?”

If you do not know, I cannot tell you.

But I will say this: turning a corner one day
you will suddenly know
that you have found a perfection
that you will seek again, in vain,
for the rest of your life.

Gaia Sun & Moon

IMG0073_1.jpg

Gaia

Worshipping the Earth Goddess, Gaia,
before the great altar in Santo Domingo

If the goddess is not carried in your heart
like a warm loaf in a paper bag beneath your shirt
you will never discover her hiding place.

She does not sip ambrosia from these golden flowers,
nor does she climb this vine
to mount to her heavenly throne,
nor does she recline in majesty
a pantocrator in a mandala frowning down.

In spite of the sunshine trapped in all this gold
the church is cold and overwhelming.

Tourists come with cameras
not the people with their prayers.

My only warmth and comfort:
not in this god who bids the lily gilded
but in that quieter voice that speaks within me,

bringing me light amidst all this darkness,
bringing me poverty amidst all this gold.

 

Apologia FFF

IMG_0146.jpg

Apologia
Friday Fast Fiction

                   Late last night, I opened Alistair Macleod’s book The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and I re-read the first story. I was soon dabbing my eyes with a tissue and blowing my nose.
This morning, I want to destroy everything I have written. I know I don’t possess the verbal and emotional genius of the great writers and I sense that I will never be able to write like them. Graduate school taught me to be passive, not active, and to write impersonally, choking every emotion when I write. Academia also taught me how to kiss and how to run away with my thirty silver pence. “Never challenge the status quo,” my professors told me. “Learn the rules and disobey them at your peril.”
But here, in this private space where I create and re-create, there are no rules. The enemy is not clear any more and the fight is not one of black against white. It is rather a choice between diminishing shades of grey, and all cats are grey in the gathering dark that storms against my closing mind. Should I destroy all my writing? I won’t be the first to do so; nor would I be the last. And I won’t be the first or the last to destroy myself either. Intellectual, academic, and creative suicide: as total as the suicide of the flesh.
I carry on my back the names of those who have gone on before me as if they were a pile of heavy stones packed into a rucksack that I carry up a steep hill, day after day, only to find myself, next morning, starting at the bottom once again. But this is not the point: the point is that if I cannot write like the great writers, how can I write?
I think of Mikhail Bakhtin and his cronotopos, man’s dialog with his time and his place. I have no roots, no memories, and that is where my stories must start: in the loss of self, the loss of place, the loss of everything. I was uprooted at an early age, soon lost my foundations, was sent into exile, and only survival mattered.
I look at the first page of one of my manuscripts. My writing manifesto is clear before me: “And this is how I remember my childhood,” I read. “Flashes of fragmented memory frozen like those black and white publicity photos I saw as a child in the local cinema. If I hold the scene long enough in my mind, it flourishes and the figures speak and come back to life.”
I am aware of the words of T. S. Eliot that “every attempt / is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure / because one has only learned to get the better of words / for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / one is no longer disposed to say it” (East Coker).
Are my stories an exercise in creativity or are they a remembrance of things past? How accurate is memory? Do we recall things just as they happened? Or do we weave new fancies? In other words, are my inner photographs real photographs or have they already been tinted and tainted by the heavy hand of creativity and falseness?
The truth is that I can no longer tell fact from fiction. Perhaps it was all a dream, a nightmare, rather, something that I just imagined. And perhaps every word of it is true.
I no longer know.

Tomb 104, Monte Albán: Sun & Moon

IMG_0181.jpg

Tomb 104, Monte Albán

 Crocodile wraps bat in the carved
crocodile jaws that open the doors to hell.

Cocijo clutches Owl’s feathers.
He wears a feathered headdress
as he flies on Owl’s back.

 At the back of the tomb,

a darker world hides in the shadows
beyond the finger of our flashlight:
hidden galleries,
carved and painted bones.

 Our torch
plucks faces from the dark.

 Brought back to life by our unsteady light,
shadows walk grey bristles
across cheek and jaw.

We blink like owls as we ascend
from the underground darkness.

Up here, in the false world,
the one we know and love,
our hearts sing like wild birds,
caged between red ribs.

 Above us,
the pocked skull of the moon,
bares white rabbit’s teeth.

 Tochtli
knows that life’s only reality
lies in wait for us

underground.

Wednesday’s Workshop: News & Reviews

IMG_0154.jpg

Wednesday’s Workshop
News and Reviews

Tuesday evening began with John and Roger discussing the editing process. How easy it is to see the motes in another writer’s eye while failing to suspect the beams in our own.

Avoid the passive:
It is easier said than done. For those trained in academia and / or the scientific mode, the removal of the author and the insertion of the neutral and objective observer is de rigeur. John, a scientist, and Roger, an academic, share the same problems. We each use our editing tweezers to remove those motes from each others eyes, and wow, do we need help. We share our work by e-mail and the comments help us focus and revise. We are not Beta readers or editors in the full sense of the world, but we work well together and that is what matters.

Advice:

Find a good and trustworthy reader who will tell you the truth about your writing. The search for objectivity in a critical review is essential: if you find a good reader, treat them to all good things and don’t let them go.

TWUC:

Chuck is currently the Atlantic Provinces Representative for The Writers Union of Canada (TWUC). When he arrived (late, but just in time for his third of the ginger cookie) he told us of the meetings he was setting up for TWUC members across Atlantic Canada. Hopefully, there will be two in New Brunswick. More details will emerge later.

New Novel:

Chuck then continued talking about his new novel. We have discussed the plot of it before and were interested in how he had developed it. Changes are on the way, and as more problems are set, so more and different solutions emerge. The plot is intricate and convoluted and Donovan, Chuck’s main character, continues in his search to aid the underdogs in their fight to achieve justice.

New Beginnings:

Both Chuck and John bemoaned the fact that they need to write more introductory chapters to what were their previous introductory chapters. “I wrote this chapter to explain what was happening in the novel and now I need another chapter to explain what’s happening in this one.” JINX as my daughter used to say, crossing her fingers, and JINXED they are to write more and more introductions thus front-end-loading their plots. In Chuck’s case, he started at the front and worked forward; in John’s case he started at the back and wrote backwards … Chuck is now writing backwards too … ours not to reason why …

Computer Tracking:

The late, and unexpected, arrival of Kevin, our computer expert, (who did not get a portion of the weekly ginger cookie) led us straight into a discussion of the many programs available for tracking plot and character. Kevin believes strongly in this style of writing: think and plan it all out and log it all into a computer program. John and Chuck believe their characters need freedom to challenge the author, to develop, and to change their minds. Roger reminded them of Unamuno’s novel [novela / nívola] Niebla in which a character doesn’t like his fate in the story and travels to Salamanca to tell Don Miguel de Unamuno not to kill him off, as he plans. Some critics think Niebla is a very poor novel, as characters cross the space between fiction and the real world. Unamuno’s answer is legendary: “I am not writing a novel / novela,” he replied. “I’m writing a nivel / nívola. Niebla is a perfectly good nívola.”

News:

Two new books were presented to the group, Monkey Temple (Roger Moore) and The Caroline (John K. Sutherland). These circulated and one anonymous member of the group received autographed copies.

Reviews:

Both books are available via Amazon and Kindle. They need both reviewers and purchasers. But this is the old egg and chicken: do you purchase the book and then review it or do you review it (based on the Beta reading you have done) and then purchase it? This is a thorny question and one we left for another discussion, along with the major question — how do we get genuine and honest reviewers for our books?

In conclusion:

We concluded with the reminder that the Fall meeting of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick (WFNB — we are all members) is already scheduled. If we are planning to go, we must hurry to sign up … so this is a reminder to do so. Before we concluded we agreed that a table in the Christmas Craft Fair or at the Local Farmer’s market, at which we offer our books for sale, might be a very good idea. We can certainly do this at the WFNB. But with four of us now starting to publish, a concerted effort at marketing, reviewing, and selling is most certainly needed.

Valid and reasonable suggestions on how to do this would be welcome.

Sun & Moon

IMG_0231 (2).jpg

Sun and Moon was published on Amazon and Kindle today. This is the second (revised) edition of Sun and Moon, the first edition having been published in 2000. Although this is the second edition, I have returned to and revised the original manuscript. It is clearer, stronger, and better than the first edition. Here is the description of the book as it appears on Amazon and Kindle.

“They tore down our walls,” Mono whispered, “stone by stone. A new church they built on the land they stole from us.” These opening lines begin the verbal adventure of Sun and Moon. Written in Oaxaca, Mexico, between 1995 and 1999, the poems tell some of the tales  of the voiceless, of the conquered, of the displaced, of the survivors, of the people who eat and sleep in the streets of Oaxaca, spinning their myths and legends and recalling their oral histories and memories. Sun and Moon traces the relationships between two civilizations, the indigenous and the conquerors, from the first contacts between Europeans and the people of the Oaxaca Valley up to the modern day interactions between locals and tourists. In these pages, some of the ancient ceremonies and beliefs, as described by indigenous people, are brought back to life in vivid images and colorful metaphors, so sharp, they can be grasped between the fingers and examined by the light of the sun by day and the moon by night. The multiple voices in the poems are those of human beings who, like the author, himself an émigré, find themselves in exile, lost, abandoned, and displaced. As the final character cries out in the final poem: “You do not worship at our sacred places … you don’t know even know the meaning of my name.”

Inquisitor: Sun & Moon

IMG_0184.jpg

Inquisitor

He told me to read,
and plucked my left eye from its orbit.
He slashed the glowing globe of the other.

 Knowledge leaked out:
loose threads dangling,
the reverse side of a tapestry.

 He told me to speak and squeezed
dry dust between my teeth.
I spouted a diet of Catechism and Confession.

He emptied my mind of poetry and history.
He destroyed the myths of my people.
He filled me with fantasies from a far off land.

I live in a desert where people die of thirst,
yet he talked to me of a man who walked on water.

 On all sides, as stubborn as stucco,
the prison walls listened, and learned.

 I counted the years with feeble scratches.

For an hour, each day, the sun shone on my face;
for an hour, each night, the moon kept me company.

Broken worlds lay shattered inside me.
Dust gathered in my people’s dictionary.
My heart was a weathered stone
withering within my chest.

 I longed for the witch doctor’s magic,
for the healing slash of wind and rain.

 The Inquisitor told me to write out our history:

I wrote
how his church
had come
to save us.

Note: I am still working on Sun and Moon. It will be ready for publication on Amazon and Kindle some time this week. Monkey Temple, Though Lovers Be Lost, Bistro, and Empress of Ireland are now available for review or purchase on Amazon and Kindle.

Monologue: Sun & Moon

IMG_0211.jpg

Monologue

 Mono means Monkey in Spanish. Monkey is one of the day names in the Mixtec calendar. 
Monologue, then, is Monkey, talking, perhaps to himself.

“They broke our walls,” Mono whispered, “stone by stone.
A new church they built, on the land they stole from us.
Red was its roof from a thunderstorm of blood.
The white bones of their lightning scattered us like hail.

They ripped out our tongues and commanded us to sing.
Carved mouths were ours, stuffed with grass.
Stone music forced its way through our broken teeth.

Few live now who can read the melodies of our silence.
We wait for some sage to measure our dance steps:
treading carefully, we walk on tiptoe.

A + cross  these stepping stones of time.”

 

Note: I am working on Sun and Moon. It will be ready for publication on Amazon and Kindle some time this week. Monkey Temple, Though Lovers Be Lost, Bistro, and Empress of Ireland are now available for review or purchase on Amazon and Kindle.

St. Christopher: Flash Fiction

 

F1040003.jpg

St. Christopher

“Well,” I said to Luis, “if you wade through that river and get yourself soaking wet when there’s a perfectly good bridge to walk on, you’re stupid. That’s all I can say.”
He didn’t reply and we both stood there, glaring at each other. Then I looked down at the cobbled road that led to the bridge. The stones, turned on their edges and woven into herring bone patterns, looked as though they had been there since the beginning of time. The bridge was clearly the work of the Romans rather than the Devil, the Devil’s Bridge, as the locals called it, built by the Devil himself and joining the two banks of a river that God had placed there to separate one side from the other.
“I’m going over the bridge,” I said.
“And I’m wading through the river, however deep it is.”
“It’s not that deep,” I replied. “It’s only up to the waists of the fishermen in their waders. You’re not taking that much of a risk.”
“It’s not a question of risk. It’s a question of honor and loss of honor.”
“What do you mean, loss of honor?”
“You know what I mean. I have lost my honor and somehow I must win it back.”
“By wading across a river, barefoot, with your clothes on, when there’s a perfectly acceptable bridge set here especially for pilgrims?”
“If necessary, yes; that’s what I must do.”
“Necessary?” I exclaimed. “There’s nothing necessary about it. You’re just being stubborn; and stupid.”
“I don’t think I’m being stupid.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if you are even thinking.”
Luis looked at me, hard, then started down the little path that led to the river.
“I give up,” I said. Then I turned away and walked to the bridge. I stopped when I was half way across and looked back. Luis had descended to the riverbank. He was talking with a young child who stood there, gazing at the moving water. Then I watched him as he picked up the child, placed him on his shoulders, and waded slowly into the river.
There was a sudden shout from one of the fishermen, and a washerwoman, washing her linen on the far side, to which Luis was headed, ran to where Luis was forcing his way slowly through the waters with the child on his shoulders.
“My son,” she cried out. “¡Hijo mío! Where is he taking you?”
“Everything’s fine,” Luis shouted back. “He just wants to visit his mother and I’m bringing him across.”
Just then, Luis stepped into a pothole in the river. He stumbled and the child almost fell from his shoulders. Luis staggered for a pace or two, then straightened up and continued across the river.
“A saint,” the child’s mother called out. “You stumbled yet did not fall: you must be a saint.”
“St. Christopher has come back to us,” another washerwomen crossed herself and the two of them knelt. I looked at Luis, wading through the river, and I knew for certain that if he wasn’t mad now, he soon would be. I watched as he reached the shore and handed the child over to its mother. She asked for his blessing, but he shook his head and refused to bless her saying that he was neither a priest nor a saint but just a poor sinner who could give a blessing to no one.
I walked down to the end of the bridge and waited for Luis to catch me up. Ahead of us, the cobbled road led to the church and to another cruz de harapos. We walked forward together, him with his wet clothes and his watery footprints, and me with my clothes all dry. When we got to the stone cross in front of the church, Luis stopped and gazed at it, raising his eyes up from the base and looking up towards the heavens. Then he moved forward, climbed onto the cross’s plinth, and stood there, just below the level of the stone arms. Three of the washerwomen had followed him. One was the mother of the child that Luis had carried across the river and her child was beside her.
Luis turned to face the cross. Then he raised his arms above his head, jumped upwards into the air, and clung on to the cross with both hands, his feet suspended about six inches above the ground.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.
“I’m hanging myself out to dry.”
“You can’t just hang there.”
“Why not? Jesus did.”
“You’re not Jesus.
“And the cross isn’t wooden and nobody has nailed me.”
“You’re going mad,” I told him.
He raised his eyes skywards muttering a prayer and refused to look down at me.
“Father,” he said. “Father: why hast Thou forsaken me?”
The three women stood at the foot of the cross, gazing at Luis who was hanging there, dripping his drops of water onto the stone.
“Send someone to fetch the local priest or the doctor,” I said to one of them. “This man’s gone mad.”