Animals

Rage, Rage 57

Rage, Rage
57

Time’s oxen
have plowed their furrows
in my face.

A silvery thatch
bears witness
to the winter
of my withering.

My broken body
hangs from the coat hanger
of my shoulders,
its worn-out sack
knitted from skin,
bonded with blood.

I walk with two canes,
not just a sick man,
but a stick man.

When I fall asleep,
my enigmatic body
haunts me with
its death-rattle
of drying bones.

Comment

Sometimes no comments are needed. However, when it comes down to it, I guess it’s worth saying that I am raging, raging against the dying of the light.

The dying of the light – in the evening, when the sun goes down, the house grows silent and cools around me. Some nights, when the news is bad or depressing, I feel we are entering another dark age. Luckily, spring is on its way, with summer not far behind. But what will spring and summer bring?

I fear the heat, the gathering of muttering trees, the ambush nature is setting up for humanity. We live among trees. Trees, all around the house. Trees, climbing the hills into the distance. I loved them when I came here first. The maples, the paper birches, the mountain ashes with their spring finery and the light green fuzz of forming leaves. Winter – the firs and pines dressed in their winter coats.

Last summer, fires broke out all over the province. The closest was a mere 30 kms down the road from us. We could smell the fire, see the smoke, and sense the discomfort of the proximity of possible outbreaks closer to home.

As I grow older, I become more fearful. Walking downstairs in the morning – cada pie mal puesto es una caída, cada caída es un precipico / each badly placed foot is a fall, each fall is down a precipice. Luis de Gongora. ( d. 1627). Alas, it’s that time of life, and it comes to anybody who, like me, has walked this far.

It’s the animals that I pity. The birds who move on and away and no longer stay with us. The deer who also have nowhere to go when their habitat is destroyed. The moose, the bears, the coyotes, the foxes, the jack rabbits and yes, they have all been visitors to our backyard.

Last summer, the local council circulated some ideas on how to prepare for immediate evacuation of our property- what to pack with a day’s notice, three hours’ warning, two hours’ warning, one hour’s warning. I hope it never comes to that. But now, I no longer know, and so I rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Rage, Rage 39 & 40

Rage, Rage
39

Was I day-dreaming
when knife slipped
and ended up slicing
through my finger?

Blood everywhere
and a deep ugly, red wound
wedged between torn,
fleshy cliffs.

Short, sharp
shocks of shrill pain.

Little finger, left hand.
A glimpse of white bone.
Nobody here to help.
Don’t panic. Think.

40

Sheet from paper towel,
staunch, press down,
more pressure, find gauze,
a bandage, quick.

Take kitchen towel
from rail. Run
down hall, leaving
fresh blood spoor,
the cat following,
sniffing, licking
my blood
from the floor.

Open garage door,
get into car,
use one hand, clumsy,
on steering wheel,
hold other high,
blood seeping
down wrist
to soak sleeve.

Drive to emergency.
Fast.

Comment:

So fast, so quick, so clean. Look away, lose your attention for just a fraction of a moment and … as we grow older, so we must grow more aware of the pitfalls that surround us, especially if we live alone. I don’t live alone, but my beloved was away in Ottawa visiting our daughter and grandchild when that happened. I remember it so well.

Luckily, I had taken the St. John Ambulance First Aid course. The instructor told us – if anything happens you will go into overdrive and know exactly what to do. And I did. Cold running water, ice cube, paper towels, then real ones. Stop the blood flowing from the wound or else staunch it, slow it down.

But the hero of the day was that cat. She followed me down the corridor and my last mage of her, as I closed the door to the garage, was that of her licking the blood, my blood, from the floor. I remember too that one handed drive to the Emergency. Good job we had an automatic, not a gear shift. Don’t know what I sliced to cause so much blood – but it didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, refused to stop.

And more about that next time I write.

If I don’t go AWOL, as well I might!!!

Rage, Rage 34

Rage, Rage
34

A squiggle of spaghetti
or twisted noodles,
that’s what my brain
has become.

My second-hand mind
is a hand-me-down,
an antipersonnel bomb
from another place
and a distant time.

Blind, in so many ways,
with nowhere I want to go,
my soon-to-end days
lie humped on my shoulders,
weighing me down
as I limp along.

Comment:

You can blame my friend Moo for the painting. “That’s my view of your brain,” he told me. “A squiggle of spaghetti or twisted noodles.” I think his painting looks like what my Beloved, courtesy of Corrie Street (as was), calls a Spag Bowl. Funny how easy it is to become muddled and confused as we age. Did I shut the back door? Double-check. Yes, I did. And you can multiply that to the power of N (or DR – for don’t remember!). And what about those windmills that wave their arms in my mind? Will that be cash or “Charge!”

Re-reading the Quixote, side by side with a very good friend, I forget some of the ideas that I once had. I try to read my penciled marginal notes. What fun! First, I can hardly read them. Second, I can hardly understand them. And third, I have to reinvent what they might possibly have told me. All good fun. But sometimes, at the end of a session, my mind feels like the bodies of Don Quixote, Sancho, and Rocinante, after their meeting with the Yanguesans – battered, bruised, and beaten! Why, can someone kindly tell me, did Cervantes treat his two main characters to such frequent and brutal assaults?

Ah well, Friday today, and Friday is fish – not Spag Bowl. Are scallops fish? Not when they are sliced off your body with a razor-sharp sword. But then, I doubt if Quixote’s sword was razor sharp. It was probably vencida de la edad – conquered by age – just like he was. Conquered? No, not yet. Happily, I just limp along, however slowly. Ah yes, I forgot. I need a name for my Nexus. Maybe I’ll call it Rocinante, like DQ’s horse.

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 18

Rage, Rage
18


I nod off again and dream
of a summer beach,
burning sand, tide way out,
sparkling waves, clouds moving,
inaudible, as they drift by.

I dream of my beginning
and find a forlorn formlessness
that sought the solace of sound
only to discover waves and wind
as I drifted on an amniotic sea.

The wind of change has blown.
I awake and pick up my book.

Voltaire –
“Si jeunesse savait,
si vieillesse pouvait.”

“If youth knew,
if age were able to.”

Comment:

The wind of change has blown and, by all accounts, it is still blowing. A Nor’ Easter here, swinging down from the Arctic and bringing us cold weather, ice, and more snow. Driving isn’t too bad, for the roads are cleared regularly, especially when schools are in. Most enterprises have cleaned, salted, and sanded their premises. Some haven’t. Yesterday, it took two people to move my shopping cart from the shop to the car, a matter of about thirty yards. The wind was so strong. It tussled and tugged, drove me where I didn’t want to go, and two people stepped in to help me. Then I discovered an undug doorway. I parked my car at a sharp upward angle, on the snow. A man offered me his arm. I said no, but he stood beside me, hands held out to help, just in case. Leaving that same shop, I was accompanied by a young lady who insisted on carrying my bags, taking my arm, and leading me to my car. The dangers of falling on down hill ice were even greater than going uphill.

I dream of my beginning, more and more often nowadays and now-a-nights. I know, spell check underlined that word. A neologism, not a proper word. But I like it, for though I dream by day, nodding suddenly into a shallow sleep, it is by night that I really do my dreaming.

At night, I find I can roam a world that has become hostile in the light of day. I can, and do, dream of my childhood on the Gower Peninsula. The fields are still there. My grandmother walks among the bluebells, and together we tell the time by the old dandelion clock. The larks still rise on Bishopston Common and Bluebells, Cowslips, and Primroses still hide beneath the trees. The sands at Brandy Cove are still clean. There is no pollution in my dreams and no oilers clear their tanks in the pristine waters of the Severn Estuary. There is no industrial haze and, on a clear day, I can still see, from the steps of the bungalow, Ilfracombe, across the bay.

And the people – my family and friends are still there. My uncles and aunts, my cousins, all young still, my parents and my grandparents … and all my dogs return, one by one, from their canine adventures. At night the cows can be heard crunching grass, and wheezing in my dreams. I met one, once, on a night trip to the outhouse – we had no indoor plumbing. And, on one memorable night, I stepped into a wet, warm cow patty, left like an anti-personal landmine, just outside the back door. I still shiver as I think of that warmth creeping up between my toes. No amount of wiping has ever really removed it. It haunts like the ghosts of summers past that drift at midnight round my room. waiting to be plucked from the air.

Sheep

Sheep

Wales is whales (with an aitch) to my daughter who has only been there once on holiday, very young, to see her grandparents, a grim old man and a wrinkled woman. They wrapped her in a shawl and hugged her till she cried herself to sleep suffocating in a straitjacket of warm Welsh wool. So how do I explain the sheep? They are everywhere, I say, on lawns and in gardens. I once knew a man whose every prize tulip was devoured by a sheep, a single sheep who sneaked into the garden the day he left the gate ajar. They get everywhere, I say, everywhere. Why, I remember five sheep riding in a truck on the coal train leering like tourists travelling God knows where bleating fiercely as they went by. In Wales, I say, sheep are magic. When you travel to London on the train, just before you leave Wales at Severn Tunnel Junction, you must lean out of the carriage window and say “Good morning, Mister Sheep!” And if that sheep looks up, your every wish will be granted. And look at that poster on the wall: a hillside of white on green, and every sheep as still as a stone, and each white stone a roche moutonnée.

Commentary:

Sheep in Wales and deer in Canada. And here is a little group wandering around in our garden. So how do I explain the deer? They are everywhere, I say, on lawns and in gardens. I once knew a man whose every green leafed plant was devoured by a herd of deer, who sneaked into the garden the day he left the gate ajar. They get everywhere, I say, everywhere. And everybody loves them, because the heart beats a little faster when you see them walk by.

Dog Daze

Dog Daze

Memories deceive me with their half-remembered shows, shadow shapes shifting over the walls with a flick of the magician’s fingers. What magic lantern now slips its subtle slides across night’s screen? Desperate I lap at salt-licks of false hope that increase my thirst and drive me deeper into thick, black, tumultuous clouds. A pandemic storm lays waste to the days that dog my mind. Carnivorous canicular, hydropic, it drinks me dry, desiccates my dreams, gnaws me into nothingness. At night a black dog hounds me, sends my head spinning, makes me chase my own tail, round and round. It snaps at dreams, shadows, memories, anything that ghosts through my mind. Hunter home from the hill, I return to find my house empty, my body devastated, my future a foretold mess. Tarot Cards and Tea Leaves are lost in a Mad Hatter’s illusion of a dormouse in a teapot raking runes from an unkempt lawn.

Commentary:

Well, what a muddle. Images flying everywhere, in and out, like Von Richthofen’s flying circus of WWI fame. And look at that last line! Tarot Cards and Tea Leaves are lost in a Mad Hatter’s illusion of a dormouse in a teapot raking runes from an unkempt lawn. No wonder Moo said “Nein!” when I asked him if he had a painting to illustrate this one. In fact, he quoted Salvador Dalí at me: “There’s no difference between you and a madman, except that some days, you aren’t mad.” I guess this implies that some days I am.

“Ah well,” said Mrs. Thomas calling her son Arwel in for tea. Welsh joke. Many won’t get it. Arwel didn’t and he didn’t get his tea either. Never mind. Those things happened a long time ago when the world was so much younger, and, dare I say it, wiser! Actually, there’s nothing wrong with the world itself. The problem, as always, just like the old woman who lived in a shoe, it’s the madmen who inhabit the shoe that are the problem. And when the shoe’s sole needs a nail, who is going to come and glue it back together. Not me, said the red squirrel, laughing. And he always laughs. As soon as it gets cold he tucks into my garage and it’s a devil of a job to get him out again.

What’s worse, he insists on building nests in my car engine. That’s three times now. And it costs money to dig those nests out. Not to mention the mess. First time, I didn’t even know he was in there until the windscreen wiper on the driver’s side started to fail. Then the whole watering system broke down. I took it to the garage, and the garagemen said “I hope you’re getting rent money, you’ve got a tenant.” Anyway, he got rid of the squirrel and the nest. But the little blighter must have followed me home, because a few days later he was back in there again. He’s in there now. I can hear him chuckling as I type this.

Dog Daze, indeed. I wish I had my doggy back. Alas, as you can see from the photo, he crossed the rainbow bridge to his doggy paradise, leaving me to contend with a garage full of ham-fisted red squirrels. No wonder my head is spinning around and I am chasing my own tail, round and round. At least he’s single, that squirrel. I don’t know what I’d do if he got married. I know my maths ain’t no good (nor is my English), but where squirrels are concerned, I am pretty sure that 1 + 1 = 6 or more and a foretold mess.

Carved in Stone 50

Carved in Stone
50

Here, in the castle of my own home,
I sit and write and patiently wait
for the enemy’s superior forces
to arrive and overwhelm me.

But death is not the enemy.
He is the friend
who has walked beside me
every day, since the day
that I was born.

I know him and I trust him,
though I am unaware
of when he will come to call
and I am ignorant of the shape
he will finally take.

Commentary:

Francisco de Quevedo, the 17th Century Spanish Neo-stoic and Metaphysical poet, wrote “the day I was born I took my first step on the path to death.” And so it is, with all of us. Sometimes we are able to choose our paths, sometimes they are forced upon us, sometimes they appear – with choices – and we make our selection and move on.

There are so many roads to travel. For Antonio Machado (Spain, Generation of 1898) there is no road. There is only a wake upon the sea – “Caminante, no hay camino, solo hay estela sobre el mar.” We must look back, to see where we have come from and where we have been. But there are many other possible paths, beside that of the sea – gravel paths, cobbled ways, log trucking roads in the Canadian Forest, cattle roads, transhumance roads, winding roads, straight Roman roads, roads that run up hill, down hill, or twist and bend following the paths of rivers.

The picture above shows the old Roman Road that leads to the Puerto del Pico, in the province of Avila. It followed the contours of the hill and formed part of the Ruta de la Plata, the road that took Latin American silver from Seville to the Spanish capital in Madrid. Look carefully and you can see the modern highway that runs parallel to the old Roman road. Nowadays, that older road is used for transhumance, the movement of cattle from the valleys in the winter to the hills in the summer. The same road, the same pass, so many different uses, and the road a wake upon the path of so many lives.

Carved in Stone 45

Carved in Stone

45

No candles burned at that altar.
A single match, let alone
a candle flame,
would spell the end,
if gas leaked from the seam.

Only the canaries,
confined in their cages,
sang songs.

Doomed,
like the blind pit ponies,
never to see the light of day,
they lived out their lives
down there.

So many died underground,
unable to get out,
buried alive,
before they were even dead.

Commentary:

“Only the canaries, confined in their cages, sang songs.” Yet the miners often sang, in their own cages, as they were lowered down from pit-head to seam. It wasn’t the songs that worried them, it was the silence. The men could rarely smell the gas, but when the canary stopped singing and toppled from its perch, then the men knew that bad news hounded their heels. As for the pit ponies, how did one get them out? Some of those mines, had been dug 5,000 feet deep and two or three miles out to sea. A pit pony should never be confused with a sea horse, and as for the white horses that surge in the waves in so many paintings, well, pit ponies need to be laundered before they can compete.

“Good-bye old friend.” I remember the photo from WWI of the dying horse, surrounded by crying men. The suffering of the animals is what men feared and pitied most. The animals are innocent. They do not ask to be sent underground, nor to be sent to war. They have no choice, poor things. So sad, when a dear, four-footed friend dies, so far away from the light of the sun. As for the men, there were no “safe rooms”, those reinforced rooms filled with food and water, not in the early days, anyway. A camaraderie, yes, but not many people went down to the mines willingly. Rita MacNeil summed it all up in her wonderful song that begins ‘It’s a working man I am.” – How many people, if they ever saw the sun, would ever go back underground again.”

Clepsydra 41 & 42

41

… fire flares on the water
     rivers and lakes blaze
          that sound is a monster
               a dragon descending
                    breathing fire

so swift so powerful
     come sudden
          from nowhere
              yet another disaster
                   with its ravenous roar         

the dragon refuses to move on
     until sated
          but who could satisfy
               that monster
                    destroy its will
                         defeat its power

will Lac Megantic
     ever be the same
          after all these years
               of grief and tears

will fading memories
     be all that remain …


42

… a stillness between words
    tranquil movements
         the world suspended in space
               soundless the night
                    drenched in silent light

 Aurora Borealis
     draws gaudy curtains
          across the night sky

I can hear my heart beat
    as time softly sifts

a celestial hour glass
     this sky filled
          with unimaginable light
               breaking coloured waves

lit up
     with mysterious flowers
          so graceful
               when decked out
                    in light

 the moon returns
     turns into a mirror

          its silver boat
               suspended in space

silent its light
     enlightening
          the heart’s dusky craters

dawn’s silent glory
     will be here soon
          pointing the silent path
               to even more light …

Commentary:

Ten years or so since the disaster at Lake Megantic. I am sure it affected everyone who followed the news, saw the pictures, and bore witness to the power of conflagration. Moo offered me his painting called Burning Birbi. A Birbi is a Koala Bear in one of the Aboriginal Languages. When the fires hit New South Wales, the Eucalyptus Trees started to fire. When in danger, the Birbi climbs the eucalyptus trees, higher and higher, followed, of course, by the fire. A fate inescapable. Just like the Megantic Disaster. Word has it that it could, and should, have been prevented. I cannot (will not) comment on that here. I will just stress the fear that we all have, those of us who live in a drought stricken province (New Brunswick) surrounded by trees.

The closest wildfire to us, in Island View, was about 31 kilometres away. The closest trees are about 30 feet away from the house. Much too close for comfort. Curtains of flame and smoke, rising up to stain the skies. And the smell of burning also inescapable. Stay indoors, I say. Shut the windows. And hope that nothing comes your way!

Fire, controlled, brings heat, warmth, light. The Northern Lights bring spectacular light flooding down from the skies, not rising up. You can almost hear the sky crackling as the light curtains shift and shimmer and dance their way across the horizon. Fire and Fire Light – beautiful when we can control them, but oh-so-destructive when they flame and flare, out of control.

Do not despair. Just remember we need each other, all of us, each one of us. Together we can overcome most things. Isolated and alone, like the lone koala at the top of his tree, it is much, much more difficult to survive. Select your friends carefully. Maintain contact with them. And be there for each other in times of need, for, as we say in Wales – “a friend in need, is a friend in deed.”