Angels

Full House

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Full House

Full house: echoing footsteps, shadows,
everywhere, a litter of toys, crayons,
colored pages, jigsaw puzzles, Barbie
and Ken found at the back of a shelf.

Memories: pinned to the fridge, found
in strange places, an almond on my chair,
a drawing in my notebook, a message,
unintelligible, scrawled on shopping lists.

That peremptory voice calls my name
and I drag myself from sleep, only to know
it was a dream, netted up from slumber’s
dark midnight sea. I drift off again and

see her again, opening the bedroom door,
calling, calling, ever present in voice,
song, and dervish dance, such energy,
round and round, bouncing on my bed,

rolling the exercise ball across the floor,
oblivious to danger, harm, the perils of
unbalancing, stumbling, slipping, falling,
aware of the need for sticking plaster

comforts littering thighs, knees, calves,
feet arms, elbows, where ever instant
attention calls for instant, urgent treatment.
I will always remember the ambushes

that rolled off the tongue, phrases way
beyond the skills of a four-year old. What
if her mother is a lawyer, the youngster
shouldn’t control that sort of language.

She remembered so much from her last
visit. We thought she would have forgotten
us, but no, she remembered where almost
everything was hidden, out of sight but

no longer out of reach. Just a little bit taller,
stronger, more determined, faster, so fast
and loud we could not keep up. This morning
I awoke to the silence of an empty house.

Alphabet

Chaos

Alphabet

So everything is now as yellow as the yellow alphabet.
Bellow below cello, above fellow, saying “Hello,” jello,
always yellow, nobody eats orange jello, mellow, sello
or sellotape, tellow, as in “Tell old salt …” pronounced
“tellow salt” … so many verbal adventures, scales falling
from young eyes, and old ones as wello,
and the melody of music in tone,
on tongue, wonder in the eyes of everyone,
golden yellow, hair high-lighted in the early morning sun.

Commentary:

An endless jumble of words, all joined together rhythmically and linking one thought to another in a succession of jumps that wander from here to there and back again. Team tag: each one of us chosen for a moment, teased, played with, abandoned, picked up again, delight in each adventure.
My party tricks are e-cards, typing on the computer, her name, my name, the alphabet, her mother’ name, another name, and then another. Coloring is my trick too, and finding empty pages that can be followed with color and scrawl and everything that turns the blank page from a wilderness to a new world covered in endless manufactures of meaningful, meaningless scratches.
Joy in small things.  Albert Camus’s theory of the absurd present in almost every moment of the day. Moments that stretch into eternities, eternities seen in a grain of sand. Dw i mwynhau … what do I enjoy? These timeless moments, these glimpses back into my family’s past, Dych chi mind am dro? … these walks into my DNA’s future. Nach ydw: no, I will not be here. But tiny segments of my existence, words and phrases of my Welsh grandfather’s DNA and language, they will be here. Recycled. Again and again. Somehow. Somewhere. Forever. What more could I ask?

Yellow

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Yellow

Sunshine and daffodils: my grand-daughter
paddles in the kitchen sink. Her mother
washes feet and dishes. “Sit,” Finley says,
and “stand,” following the words with actions.

“Yellow,” she says, “yellow,” as daffodils
fill the computer screen to shine in that
far-off kitchen five hundred miles away
by road, but immediate by I-Pad.

“Yellow,” Finley repeats, “yellow.” Soon
in that distant province where spring arrives
so much earlier than here, she will see
daffodils dancing their warm weather dance,

tossing their heads to gold and yellow trumpets,
fresh, alive, and young in the soft spring breeze.

Commentary: Not a large vocabulary, back then … yellow … yellow hair, yellow jello, yellow dog, yellow cat, yellow daffodils, well, we got that one right anyway. So, she is here now, yet again, with an enlarged vocabulary and two feet taller. She comes shopping with me, swings on the shopping cart, runs everywhere, will not sit still, slips and slides like stones in a slate quarry. She takes my cane, I call it a walking stick, and thwacks it in the air, a danger to sundry and all. Knows what she wants: not this, not that, no, yes, THIS … and points with a sticky finger at whatever it is that has caught her fancy.

She runs away from me, and I cannot catch her. I stand there quietly, waiting for her to return. And she does, with a squeal and a shriek and cries of joy after even a brief absence. We talk magic. I say I am invisible, and she cannot see me. She says she is invisible, but I poke her in the ribs with my index finger and she squeals again. Magic, she says, you can do real magic. I nod. Me too, she says. And she is the real magician for she is four years old and has me bewitched.

Finley at Two

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Finley at Two

Blood of my blood, my daughter’s daughter,
I live too far away to watch each day the laughter
on your lips, the sparkle of your eyes.

I see them when we Skype. Such a miracle
this magic machine that reduces distance
and time and brings you here to me.

I see you trying to stand, to understand,
to hold my image in your mind, to figure
out these moving shadows on the screen.

Words, born from poetry in my heart
and music on my lips, sometimes fall short,
and fail. Perhaps I should carve you a Welsh

love spoon. But time is not on my side. So brief,
this life: I wonder if we will ever meet again.

Commentary: Seeing Finley again, now aged four, has made me question all my earlier poems about her. I am overwhelmed by her energy, her interests, her concentration. I am bowled over by her flexibility, her strength, her joy in simple things. The above is not a new poem: it is a rewrite of an older poem, one that no longer served its purpose. I reshaped it as a sonnet, not traditional, but a sonnet none the less. I doubt that I will have much time on my own over the next two weeks in which to write. I guess I will pick away at this blog, adding a little something every so often, when the energy runs down and tranquility descends. Bear with me: I’ll be back.

 

 

 

Butterflies

 

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Butterflies

“Why did the butterfly flutter by?”
“Because she saw the dragonfly drink the flagon dry.”
That’s all you need to know about our raison d’être, our reason for being here, the meaning of life. Unless, like Bertrand Russell, The Meaning of Meaning, you think a cat is a dog or you know why “the beach wet” or how many turtles there are, on the way down.

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So many butterflies have visited us recently. We think the hollyhocks may have attracted them. But they seem to prefer the cone flowers.  And the bees’ balm remains virtually without visitors.

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What exactly are these blessings that descend upon us? I don’t know. I have never seen this one before. A black swallowtail, according to my searches. But this is the first time we have seen one, let alone catch one on camera.

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According to my research, shallow at best, these Admirals mimic the Monarch Butterflies which taste so bitter that predators will not touch them. True or False (T / F): a multiple choice question that I cannot answer, for I have no personal or scientific knowledge, just opinions found on the web.

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What I do know, from personal experience, is that our little patch of garden is blessed by the presence of butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds. We live in a treasure-house, pleasure-house of Nature. Long may it continue.

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Bottle House 2

 

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The Bottle House 2

Here, as promised, is the bottle house 2. This time we visit the chapel, and what a lovely spot it is, as you will see, if you are brave, play the game, and click on the next link to the bottle house 2 The last time I visited, rain was falling, not heavy rain, but a light sprinkle that set the skies free and watered gardens and flowers. I should have some photos of the gardens too. If I have, I will post them. I promise!

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Bottle House, PEI

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Bottle House, PEI

A house made entirely of bottles? Well, not quite: the bottles are set in concrete, but the light … the light is unbelievable. Fragmented, many-colored, a tribute to he man who thought of the idea and then turned it into reality. House and gardens are both well worth visiting and I will do two posts on the bottle houses. Houses, for in fact there is more than one house. There is also a tiny chapel and I visit it every time I go to Prince Edward Island.

Be brave. Play the game. Take a look for yourself by clicking on one of the links to the bottle house.

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Balloon Lady

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Commentary:

Nine o’clock in Oaxaca is the ‘witching hour’. That’s when the young children go home and the balloon lady packs her bags and walks with her balloons out of the square. She really does build a castle. She stacks her balloons around her and lives within its walls selling balloons to children. Each Oaxacan child receives a balloon on his or her birthday and name day. These balloons are cherished, held carefully by their strings, walked like aerial dogs through the square.

The State band practices most nights int he central square and the balloons are moved by the music, especially that of the wind instruments, and then they wander to and fro. Sometimes they take on a life of their own and escape, skip away, go absent with out leave, and seek the freedom of the open skies. Sometimes they get caught in the trees. Then the strings are jigged and older children, experts in the art, place sticky tape on their own balloons and send them upwards in rescue missions which can be surprisingly successful. Oh what joy when the errant balloon returns to earth, stuck to its new mate. Oh what wailing when a birthday balloon bursts and the deprived child must persuade its parents to purchase another!

I can see them now, those colored balloons, floating skywards, sailing freely into the freedom of those blue Oaxacan skies. Up and up, level with the cathedral roof, ascending the cathedral tower, up, up, and away  … soaring like souls into the innocence of a sky blue heaven.

Mannequins

 

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Mannequins
McAdam Railway Station #12

“He startles the unaware, that man by
the door, in uniform, with his youthful
looks and old-fashioned peaked cap,

fingers poised by his silver watch chain
ready to pull out his Waltham pocket watch
and check the time against the master-clock.

Two ladies wait in the waiting room.
One wears winter robes of red and black
while the other wears velvety green. Both

are motionless, one seated, one standing. Yet
if you watch them from a corner of one eye,
you will see shadowy gestures as their lips move.

Overnight they have changed into summer
clothes, gauzy, almost see-through, flowery
patterns, light-weight wedding boots, laced,

restful, cool, thin-soled. ‘Are you for real?’
I ask the standing one, for a joke. When she
nods and winks, a chill settles over the room.”

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Faces

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Faces
McAdam Railway Station #10

“White at windows
when trains pass through
in June on their way
to summer and sand.

Wind-tousled, tanned
at summer’s end
returning home to
Boston and Montreal.

I remember them
waving their hands,
flickering white hankies
as they went by.

This station is a ghost train
that travels through time
instead of space. Stand
still as silent stone. Wait.

Look: there’s someone,
waving at us now
from that window
on the second floor.”

 

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