Absence

A Bridge Too Far

A Bridge Too Far

I cry out for the love of art
that warms my heart and makes me
a part of the universe

how I yearn to earn the name
of poet or painter though my way
of approaching both is quainter
and therefore fainter than
any other poet or painter

some days I feel the world spirit
stepping its cautious way
through my fingers without
ever reaching heart or soul
without which no artist is whole

I long for some creative wind
to blow deep crevasses in my heart
to make it an open wound
with blood that flows like ink or paint
and stains page or painted panel
then lodges in other people’s
minds and hopefully their hearts

Comment

An old friend dropped in today, quite unexpectedly. Six years ago he left. So much has happened since then. I needn’t tell you about everything from Covid onwards. You will be well aware of the state that the world is in. He lives in Alberta now and assured me that Albertans had no desire to separate from Canada. That is good news. But we stayed away from politics.

We talked about the joys of ageing. Heart conditions – stents on the one side, A Fibs on the other, blood thinners for both. The gradual loss of mobility and flexibility. The gradual loss of strength. Our kitchen sounded like the consultation room of a third rate doctor who didn’t understand exactly what was the nature of the patients’ complaints.

We shared green Matcha tea, laced with honey, and he discovered the mystical magic of KTJ’s PNBs. We talked about setting up a supply line, from east to west, to bind Canada with PNB appreciation.

As old friends do, we changed the world, rebuilding it in much less time than the biblical seven days in which it was created. Not only that, we changed the laws of rugby – we are both former players – lamenting the size and weight of the current playing generation. Then we changed the rules of soccer, rued the latest version of the world cup, with its extent, fake gamesmanship, and some blatant corruption.

Then we went into sports injuries, especially the exploitation of the Head Injury Assessment laws in rugby. And then we were back to our own war wounds, like two old soldiers, returning from a campaign.

It was all such fun. Then, alas, it was “Time, gentlemen, please.” The bell rang, the kitchen emptied. I saw him to the garage door, which he kindly shut for me, and peace returned to the house. Now I rejoice in the joys of a friendship restored, and lament the loss of a former team member soon to be absent once more.

Anywhere

Anywhere


I knew you the first day
I saw you. I knew your heart
before you could open it up
and let me in. I knew your soul
before you allowed me
to touch its beauty’s depth.

Did I know you from another
life? I just don’t know. I only
know that I knew who you were
and what you meant to me.

Once I saw you, how could I let
you go? I reached across the bridge
that spans the ages and saw you
as you always were, clad in white,
shining like the Milky Way
across a universe of falling stars
and you the only one I wanted
to put in my pocket, hold,
 and keep safe in my heart.

Comment

I was talking to Moo this morning about how, once in a while, you meet someone, talk to them, and, within minutes, feel such a compatibility with them that it seems you have known them all your life. Or from another life, another planet, another star, another galaxy, perhaps.

Moo said that yes, he had himself undergone such experiences. He couldn’t explain them. But he knew how they felt, those special moments, when two minds click, and are suddenly at one. In fact, he told me, I have just painted my version of such a moment. I call it Blue Magic, as distinct from Black Magic.

What’s the difference,” I asked him

“Blue Magic is peaceful and positive,” he said, “Black Magic can be distorted and used to evil ends. And I want nothing to do with that.”

“Me, neither.”

“You know what amazes me. That you haven’t posted for 22 days, not since August 28. And yet, people are still visiting your page. You had 294 hits on the 16th, 217 on the 18th, and 263 hits yesterday. Yet you haven’t posted a thing. I have been worrying about you. You haven’t asked for any paintings from me. In fact, we’ve hardly talked for three weeks or more.”

“I know. It’s been a funny time. But I have written and published two books of poetry in that time. And I have started a couple of other projects. And I have borrowed some of your earlier paintings for the covers.”

“Without even asking me?”

“Well, you always said I could use your paintings any time. ‘Treat them as if they were your own,’ you told me.”

“Well, that’s true. So pax it is.”

“Pax amorque.”

“And remember, you will have to apologize to all those lonely visitors who kept logging on in hopes of seeing something new.”

“Sorry, guys and gals. Real sorry.”

Thumper

Thumper
A Jackpine Sonnet

How quietly she moves,
the old one, scarcely
disturbing the floorboards
way above my head.

Such a light touch
as she tip-toes from
room to room,
her floor my ceiling.

Not at all like the young one
with her two left feet,
both flat, and her elephantine
shaking the floor overhead.

We often wondered if
the earth was quaking,
the house shaking,
with the ceiling about
to come tumbling down
upon our waiting heads.

Comment:

How silent, the house, with the visitors gone and me and my beloved back together, alone, as we have been for so many years. The silence is broken only by the tick-tock of the grandfather clock, an occasional creak from a floorboard expanding in the sun, or creaking in the shade, the hiss of the kettle … a silence so deep that sometimes we gesture to each other or whisper low.

Don Ryan came over to visit and joy and noise returned. I made him coffee and he brought us a fudge delight. My beloved took refuge in the silence of the front porch and Don Ryan and Don Roger planned their future adventures. We will be working again together soon. Our first task – to finish reading Don Quixote and to complete our notes on our readings, suspended, alas, during the summer work season, but soon to return when university goes through its September Rebirth.

After Don Quixote, we will probably explore two picaresque novels, Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler. That will be great fun for both of us, and I look forward to preparing the readings and their annotations.

When Don Ryan left, our table top noise melted away, silence returned, and Clare with it. Other friends will be visiting soon. They will break the silence with a soft tap on the door and a gentle voice calling “Hello!” We look forward to that. Meanwhile all is quiet and silence is golden.

Until the arrival of Moo. “Hello,” he bellows. “Writing again? Have I got a painting for you. You thought the little ones were noisy… well, speak for your self. Here’s your painting, Et Tu, Mu. It comes from Julius Caesar, the play. And remember, when you and Don Ryan get together you’re just as noisy as the little ones. And I am too, when I’m with you. That’s why the painting’s called Et tu, Mu. Time to go.”

Out he went, thumping and clumping, and left me to the tap of the computer keys and the ticking of the grandfather clock.

Departures

Departures
A Jackpine Sonnet

For Yolande
whose children left
the same day as mine

the house’s silence speaks
a dream language
full of touch and tone
and shared emotions
that still reach out

floorboards creaking
mimic the tip-toe dance
of visitors now departed

the chair beside me
at the breakfast table
stands empty this morning

the armchair cushions
in the tv room where they sat
now sink beneath the weight
of my hollow heart

Comment:

When Moo read this poem, he thought very carefully and, brow puckered, said “It’s not all bad. It’s not the dark night of the soul and I see Glimpses of blue sky. Here – this is the painting for that poem.” He gave me the one you see above, unsigned and unnamed. “I call it Glimpses of Blue Sky,” he told me.

Sometimes Moo can be very nice and sometimes he can be a pain in the you-know-what. I guess you’ve got one or two of those in your family too. Moody Blues, they are, who turn into Moody Moos, and act like sea-cows up at Skinner’s Pond, or else where on the Island. And no, that’s not the Island in Island View, not my Island View anyway, because here there are no Islands to be seen. We live on the far side from the river. The river – if this drought continues much longer, we end up with no river at all.

We used to get nine feet (three meters) of snow every winter. Two winters ago, I used my magic snow blower on three occasions. Last winter, I didn’t use it once. Jackie, my jovial black lab loved water. In the spring she could dive in the ditch and swim all the way around the block. Now the ditches run dry, the grass is gray rather than green, and the crab apples are about the size of raisins.

Global warming > climate change > climate crisis > climate disaster ….. you choose your own terminology, I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but don’t tell me that everything is business as usual and that there’s nothing to worry about.

A couple of our neighbors are worried about the aquifer we all share. They get dirty tap water. Wells are of varying depths. Several of the less deep drillings are showing sign of strain. And yes, the St. John River, the river that the local indigenous call the River of Plenty, is plenty empty right now and flowing very slow. The salmon disappeared a long time ago and now the waters are following them into oblivion.

Well, I suppose that is also a departure of sorts, a very worrying one for some of us. Moo can paint Glimpses of Blue Sky, but hard as I try, when I look at storm clouds building and the rain never falling, I find it difficult to see them.

Limp-Along-Cassidy

Limp Along Cassidy
A Jackpine Sonnet

My creativity lay crippled.
I picked up two fountain pens,
held one in each hand, a pair
of walking sticks or crutches,
but nothing happened.

My mind did not pick up its bed
and walk. My tongue tripped
between my teeth and refused
to move, let alone to talk the talk.

Reason and rhyme fled
from my head, and walked
a cross between a plank and
a frost crossed midnight road
of petty, lisping syllables that
struggled and limped and lost
themselves as they wandered
the labyrinth that wrapped
and mapped my empty head.

Comment:

Moo and I have both been on walkabout, absent without leave, wandering a deserted desert road filled with rocks and sand and not a glimpse of grass or a flower. Hour after hour, day after day, not a singe inspiring thought or brush stroke coming our way. We sat at the table, looking at an empty page of snow, with not a footprint upon it.

Why do these things happen? I don’t know. I have never worried about writer’s block, and Moo has never worried, to my knowledge, about painter’s block. The shock of the shadow of nothingness lay upon us both and even the coffee tasted differently.

Then, suddenly the dam broke. Moo painted five paintings in two days. I wrote four poems in that same time period. Suddenly, the silence lay broken, the plank had been walked, and we found ourselves safe on the other side of whatever it was that had come between us and our respective joys.

A dark night of the creative soul, perhaps. Luckily it was followed by a creative dawn. Light broke where no sun shone and suddenly those minds of our sparkled with creative gems once again. I reached out to Moo and we hugged each other. “It’s over,” we said. Then we changed ends and life and the grass was so much greener on the other side.

May it never happen again, we sighed. But I am sure it will. And I hope it never happens to one of you. If it does, just breathe deep, believe, examine the joys of that silent midnight, and wait for the dawn.

Inquisitor

Cracked heart-shaped rock with ancient carvings in a sandy desert
A cracked heart-shaped stone with carvings lies cracked in a desert landscape.

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 walking on water.

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

I counted the years with feeble scratches:
one, four, two, three;
for an hour, each day, the sun shone on my face;
for an hour, at night, the moon kept me company.
Broken worlds lay shattered inside me.
Dust gathered in my people’s ancient dictionary.

My heart was a weathered stone
withering within my chest.
It longed for the witch doctor’s magic,
for the healing slash of wind and rain.

The Inquisitor told me to write down our history:
I wrote how his church had come to save us.

Bees

Bees

This year, we mark them by their absence.

There is a stillness in the bee’s balm,
a withering of early blossoms and still no bees:
will they ever come back? The bee-keepers
don’t seem to know as they scratch their heads
and search dry colonies only to find
dead and dusty hives, with cells devoid
of the lust and life of their former inmates.

Each day we watch over the flowers,
and hum as we wait for the bees to buzz:
“will ye no come back again …”

Rage, Rage 25

Rage, Rage, 25

A carton of eggs,
milk left behind,
a walking stick
abandoned on a cart,
discovered
in the lost and found
in the supermarket.

My cousin’s face,
her daughter’s name,
the parking spot
where I left my car.

Time and place
wave goodbye
and are quickly gone.
So much has become
ephemeral.

“What day is it today?”
I check my watch
for the third or fourth time.
I forget phone numbers.

I look at photos
but they are blank spaces,
gaps in the photo album.

Scenes on the tv screen –
“I recognize those faces,” I mutter,
“who are they?
Where did I see them before.”

Comment:

Ephemeral – “Something that is fleeting or short-lived is ephemeral, like a fly that lives for one day or text messages flitting from cellphone to cellphone.” Heraclitus says we can never step in the same stream twice – because the waters are not the same and neither are we. We change, things change. They do not stay the same. Here today and gone tomorrow. Like the flowers our kind neighbor brought us when our kitty cat passed away last week. She, too, was ephemeral. Just like the flowers. Just like us.

Some things leave us with sorrow – our pussy cat was 18 years old, and her passing took away her pain. Yet she still left us sad and grieving. And those 18 years seemed to pass in a dream. Where did they, where did she go? There is sorrow too in memory loss. The days of our lives, once fresh their memories, now filling with a sadness as we try to recall them. Memory loss – one of the great sorrows of aging.

So many things slipping away. Seasons passing. Daylight hours waning then waxing again, just like the moon. Water between fingers. Grains of sand through the hour glass. So many blank faces in the photo album. “Who is that?” “I can’t remember.” More and more of the family names fading away, slipping into the distance. And all too soon, we shall join them, leaving an empty nest, for, as Cervantes once wrote – “No hay pájaros en los nidos de antaño” – there are no birds in last year’s nests.

Rage, Rage 10

Rage, Rage
10

My body’s house
has many rooms
and you, my love,
are present in them all.

I glimpse your shadow
in the mirror, and your breath
brushes my cheek
when I open the door.
Where have you gone?

I walk from room to room,
but when I seek,
I no longer find
and nothing opens
when I knock.

Afraid, sometimes,
to enter a room,
I am sure
you are in there.

I hear your footsteps.
Sometimes your voice
breaks the silence
when you whisper my name
in the same old way.

Comment:

Rage, Rage – and still I rage against the dying of the light and, like Dylan Thomas, ask the ageing of this world not to go gentle into that dark night. Yet, as my beloved and I age, we watch day’s shadows growing longer, and night stealing steadily along. What can we do?

Well, since the winter solstice, we can start counting the minutes as each day adds a minute or two and gifts some more light and strength to the sun. Sunrise today – 8:03 AM. Sunset today – 5:09 PM. That means 9 hours and 6 minutes of sunlight. Well, it would, if it weren’t cloudy, with a cold wind, and a dropping temperature. My guess is that it will get dark much before it ought to. And that’s not nice – no respect!

Of course, my beloved is a sun bunny and a Leo, and she perishes in these shortened days. I was born in them and they don’t affect me as badly as they do her. But I can still Rage, Rage, because there is so much to rage about – icy streets, the usual potholes, roads that hide ice beneath a thin covering of snow, some strange drivers who don’t seem to have bought winter tires. Oh yes, I love them. One came twisting and turning down the same side of the road as me only this morning. Luckily he hit the snow bank before he hit me. But, I ask you, what was he thinking?

So there’s Rage, and Rage Rage, and also Road Rage. Way to go! I think we should call a national rage day and all stay home for 24 hours, just to cool us all down for a bit. Oh dear, that might lead to cabin fever – and that would be an out–Rage.

Carved in Stone 59 & 60

Carved in Stone
59

St. David of Wales once said,
“Do ye the little things in life.” 

I do, and I wander
along the banks of the River Taff,
admiring how wild daffodils
flourish each spring, in Wales.

Young, I run on the beaches,
Brandy Cove, Pwll Ddu, Langland,
Caswell, Swansea Bay,
and, as I write these words,
I hear my footsteps
echoing back through time.

Baudelaire’s words ring in my mind,
“Creativity is nothing more nor less
than childhood recovered at will.”

Or, as Pablo Picasso said,
“I have spent my life
learning to see, paint,
and write again, like a child.”

And on and on I go –
child-hood, youth, maturity, age,
then back to my second childhood,
when I can recreate
that youthful world
in all its joyous beauty.

60

Does life flows through me,
like water in a clepsydra?

Does it flicker like a candle
guttering on a church altar?

Is it circular, like a sundial,
or the Roman numerals
on the face of the clock?

Am I just flesh and blood,
doomed to blossom and flourish,
then wither and perish?

Or will some small part of me
linger on, an unchained melody,
with all my memories slowly erased.

Commentary:

Moo’s daffodils are painted and potted, not growing wild at all. They are still the national flower of Wales and they still grow wild, in the spring, in Blackweir Gardens and beside Roath Park Lake. At least, I hope they do. I haven’t been back to check for 37 years now. Maybe things have changed, and the daffodils have gone the way of the sky lark, the cuckoo, the cowslips, and the bluebells. I wonder if the foxes still wear gloves? Let me know if you know the answer to that one. Just write “I do” on the back of the usual postcard. And you know what to do with it.

As for me, I am moving into my second childhood and, in may ways it is so much better than my first one. Here, I am free to look back on my life, to harvest my memories, to paint what I want – well, what Moo wants, anyway – and to think my own thoughts. Thank heavens Moo doesn’t think for me, though he does get his fingers covered in paint when he reads my mind and puts paintbrush to postcard, and designs his designs.

I feel very sorry for Moo. I guess he never had a childhood, so therefore, ipso facto, he can never have a second one. How much he is missing even he doesn’t know. How could he? Mysterious Moo – I like that idea. Sólo el misterio nos hace vivir, sólo el misterio. Only the mystery keeps us alive, only the mystery. And if you guessed that the author was Federico García Lorca, then you can award yourself a glow of satisfaction, for I have no prizes to hand around.

But hold on a moment, that was the title of one of Lorca’s drawings, so he was the artist, yes, but maybe not the author. Picky, picky nit-picky! Another of the joys of second childhood – annoyingly spotting the minor slips of other second-childhood thinkers – and never, never ever admit the mistakes you might, or might not make, are your own. Blame someone else. There’s always somebody out there whether to own up to your errors, especially if the price is right.