Blessings

Overnight Rain

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Overnight Rain

Do you remember sharing the single
bed in my room in Bristol? It was
not so much the sound of raindrops
falling, but rather that of water gurgling
through gutter and pipe that kept
us awake, turning to each other, rest-
lessly for comfort and dreams.

Downstairs, in our little yellow
house, the dogs are quiet. Upstairs,
rain drums its rhythms on our thin
tin roof and I cannot go to sleep.
The grass will be much too wet
to tackle and scrum: tomorrow I’ll
call around and cancel practice.

Funny how this season winds down
to its end. Tomorrow, no practice.
Then two more games, three maybe,
and a portion of my life will fade
into history. How many forty minute
periods can the human mind retain,
with wins and losses all crammed in?

A strange thing, memory. Even now
I can sing the tunes from the kiddy
shows I watched so many years ago:
Bill and Ben, The Woodentops, Andy
Pandy, Muffin, The Magic Roundabout.
Some nights, in my wildest dreams,
Mr. Plod, the Policeman, still comes

into the tv room with shiny handcuffs.
He leads me to my childhood cell,
high beneath the eaves, and I am
condemned to bed with nesting birds
rustling beneath the roof, rats and mice
scratching, half-heard waters whispering
off-beat lullabies: all oddly disturbing.

Comment:

This is one of my favorite poems from the sequence of love poems I wrote for Clare back in the nineties. It recalls the persistence of memory: how all things are linked throughout our lives and how one thought triggers another. The phenomenon of rain is the starting point for a journey back to a time or times that still remain firmly embedded in the writer’s mind. Memory is indeed a strange thing. I am certain that no two people recall the same incident in exactly the same way. How could they when viewpoint and memory create such wonderful and different links?

One thing I will never forget: the rats and mice in the rafters of our bungalow in Gower. My father and grand-father built it in 1928 and my uncle was the caretaker who took loving care of it throughout his life. They did their best to keep the bungalow vermin free. But we closed it down in September and over the winter all manner of things found their way in. Those first spring nights, until the rafters were cleared again, were full of the sounds of nature’s revolution against humankind.

The other thing I remember very vividly was the lack of running water and electricity. Wood stoves, a fireplace in the dining room, an enormous cast-iron kitchen range, wood and coal burning, on which my grandmother cooked and did the baking. Then there were the cows that wandered through the bungalow field. They would be there, all night, nurtured by the bungalow’s warmth. Many’s the night I wandered out to the outdoors bathroom, the out-house, in fear of a meeting a nocturnal cow. One of my worst memories: walking barefoot through a cow-pat, warm and wet, and the moisture rising up soft and squishy between my toes. Those were the days … the stuff of which memories are made …

 

Secret Garden 3

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Secret Garden 3

Good times, bad times, sun and rain:
only the robin knows what passes
through my mind at times like these.
Head on one side, looking at fresh-
turned earth for wriggling worms to take
to his new nest under the leaves, he’s not
telling anyone anything. So why should I?

“Once I had a secret love,”  but secrets
aren’t secrets when the heart is worn
on the sleeve or a shining ring adorns
the loved one’s finger. I remember
the warmth flooding through heart
and mind as I prepared for our secret
meetings. The Silver Gift Shop in Bath:
many’s the afternoon I waited there
while you finished your shift in Boot’s.

Then off to the Monk’s Retreat for sausage,
egg, and chips served in the frying pan
at the table: “Careful, my dears, it’s very hot.”
The Robin nods his head and winks a knowing eye.

There are voices in the garden. We lie
close to the ground hoping we won’t be seen.
Your state of undress is something
you’d want to hide from your mother,
even now, after a quarter of a century.
Would you encourage your daughter to make love
out of wedlock? We did. There: the secret’s out.

At least, I thought it was a secret,
but now, as I sit in the classroom
watching pair lovers, side by side,
I read so many signs I once thought
unreadable: sudden warmth in a smile,
a blush, eyes locking then looking
quickly away, a change in a person’s
breathing, hands touching lightly,
loves messages flashed swiftly
from eye to eye, along the secret pathway
that unites and ignites two souls.

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Swans Swimming

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Swans Swimming

You swim so much better than I:
one length of the pool, then two
and your grace in the water is fluid,
like a swan’s. I think of white feathers,
dark feet paddling under water.

Swans follow the ferry as it crosses
the River Stour. Yellow bills, sharp
over the side of the boat, stretch
for the dry crusts the ferryman
keeps in a plastic bag by the engine.

When he smiles at you, my stomach
tightens. When he nods, you break
bread, pinch it tight in rigid fingers,
and offer it to the swans. Round, black
buttons of eyes judge the exact distance.
Can these sleek, folded wings really
break an arm or a leg? Serrated edges
on wicked bills make short work
of stale bread even if it is iron hard.

After a little while, the pool’s chlorine
stings our eyes. Swimming side by side,
our eye-lids tightly closed, we dream
our way across the pool. Ten lengths,
twenty: our world is a watery vision
of a weekend package deal: paradise
for two. Your body above me now,
locked together in an ancient dance,
Leda and the Swan performed to perfection.

 

Secret Garden 2

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Secret Garden 2

Five a.m.: The moon on the back porch
shines with  light as bright as day. It’s cold,
much too cold for August. Orion is back. To the left,
in the East, he has hoisted himself over the horizon.
Winter can’t be far behind.  Upstairs, in bed, I can
hear you twisting and turning, looking for me in your
sleep. I am not there. The garden is magic beneath
the moon-shadow playing on flower and plant. Withered,
it is all dried up from summer’s heat. A false light
casts moving shadows as whispers of clouds murmur
close to the moon’s ear. Orion heralds the bitterness
to come. The long bright winter nights, aurora borealis,
more than a dream, a vision dancing in brittle
air that crackles and snaps in changing sheets of color.
I know you are there, upstairs, waiting for me,
hoping I will sneak quietly back to bed,
waiting for my footstep on the stair.
What will you do when I am no longer there?

Predicting My Death 2

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Three Poems Predicting My Death before Yours

2

There never was anybody else but you. Too late now when
you’ve discovered this to tell you that there probably
never will be anyone else. Middle age: I look back on all
the things we’ve done together. Shall I count the ways?

No: I’ll make a list. So often we’ve sat together at the table
planning the next set of duties that will keep us occupied
by driving us apart. But of all the people in the world
you’re the only one who doesn’t need a list of what we’ve done

or haven’t done. Goodrich Castle, last year in England,
was your discovery. We went there together at your instigation.
A part of you that will always be me, that first discovery
of ruins, new to us, growing from red bed-rock. I thought I had

seen everything worth seeing till I looked on Goodrich,
explored its towers, its labyrinth of connecting rooms.
Civil War tore down the curtain walls, fired the stables,
driving the horses wild with fear. Sometimes, at night,

I can feel that fear pumping through my veins. Knowing
I will die before you, knowing I will leave you alone
to defend yourself between curtained walls, isolated,
besieged by the same memories that mill in my mind.

Secret Garden

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Secret Garden 1

Being the secret love poems
I write to Clare at midnight
while she is upstairs, asleep.
They make up for the things
I can no longer say because
I am uptight, or under pressure,
or working too hard. Or maybe
because we are quarreling over
something stupid. So these are
some of the seeds I wanted to plant
but never did because I was busy.
They are also the things
that I would like Clare and Becky
to remember me by if I should
suddenly pass away without being
able to say good-bye. My parents
left me nothing but bitterness.
I want my wife and child to have
a garden they can wander through
without my being there, knowing
I have cultivated these thoughts,
at night, sleepless, without them.

Catching Crickets

 

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Catching crickets, caging them, and making them sing

We track them through their courting ceremonies
hunt them down by the noise they make
clutch them tight between anxious fingers

We weave glass jails
sentence them one by one to green imprisonment

At day’s end we ferry them to city apartments
incarcerate them like canaries in their cages
and wait for them to sing

At first they are silent in this strange environment
we feed them with bread dipped in brandy and wine
and sooner or later they sing in their captivity

Now they will not eat
they await the liquor that burns them
into fiery tongues of song

 Our midnights are haunted by their spirituals

Commentary: This is a “Golden Oldie”going back to when we were living in Santander, Spain. When we visited the beach at Noja, we would lunch with our Spanish family and all their children on the grassy headland overlooking the sea. After lunch, the children would hunt for crickets. When they caught one, they would weave a grass jail from blades of grass and place the crickets in there, one by one. Then, when they went home, they would bring the crickets with them and cage them. The crickets usually ‘sang’, but if they didn’t then alcohol was used as a bribe and a persuasion. I told this story in class one day and one of my students, Sheree Fitch, herself an excellent poet and story teller said: “It’s a poem: quick, write it down.” And I did. And here it is. With many thanks to Sheree Fitch.

NB Our cricket, the one they caught for us, wouldn’t sing. Clare and I took it down to the local gardens and released it when nobody was looking.

Power Out-[R]-age

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Power Out-[R]-age

A tree fell across the wires.
Our power went ‘poof’!
No lights. No water. No heat.
We lit a log fire and strove to keep
sub-zero temperatures at bay.

It was as if God had stepped
away from the high altar
and gone out for a coffee
at the local Tim Horton’s
leaving a deserted church
to the mercy of the elements.

Guttering candles surrender
their skimpy lives but scarcely
warm us as more snow falls.

Shadow demons creep in
with the gathering night.
Shivering beneath piled blankets,
we cling together and hope
to keep out the growing cold.

 Warning: Raw Poem

Another raw poem. We lost power at 8:30 am on Wednesday, 30 November and it returned on Friday, 2 December at 2:00 am. 42 hours without power and the temperatures not rising above +2C and dropping to -3 / -5C. No light. No heat. No water. No phone. No internet. I thought of the victorious general who announced to the tune of the bombs bursting behind him on our tv screen that “We bombed them back to the Stone Age.”

Well, here we were sitting in our own miniature stone age and mentally unprepared for the shock of what it all means. What a struggle: to light the fire, to keep it alight (day and night), to keep warm, to prepare hot food over a log fire in an insert fireplace (and us so lucky to have one; some of our neighbors didn’t), and we won’t talk about going to the bathroom! At least, I now what it means to lose power at the start of winter. However, I really don’t understand what it means not only to lose power, but to know that an enemy deliberately and callously stripped that power away.

I tried to put those thoughts into the first version of the poem, but then I took them out as I didn’t want to politicize what is right now a nature poem, pure and simple. The out-[R]-age is there, with or without those other memories and that out-[R]-age comes partly from the knowledge that our civilization, if indeed we can truly claim to be civilized, is indeed skating on very thin ice.

First Snow

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First Snow

Lying in bed
on a snowy morning
with the first flakes
fast falling,
can you follow
the rag-tag-and-bobtail
drift of snow thoughts?

Filled with sparrow, siskin,
chickadee and finch,
the now leafless tree
stands outlined in the yard:
black skeleton,
white wind-drift.

A scarecrow
with many arms,
it braces against
these feathered weights
that settle
like colored snow.

Warning: raw poem.

I rarely let any of my writing out while it is still raw. These words will undoubtedly change, the snow will settle, the birds will fly away, a crow and a blue jay will startle the smaller species, the sun may come out, the wind may get up, and so may I. In addition, the poem, like the birds in the tree may or may not survive. The tree itself chose to surrender to a family of yellow-bellied sap-suckers and they changed into a chess board of small square holes that leaked the tree’s life blood throughout the summer. Perhaps the tree won’t survive. Well, I know it won’t survive for ever, but perhaps its life will be even shorter, curtailed by those ravenous little beaks.

Whatever: I have taken a risk by sharing early, and we will see how you, my readers and fellow bloggers, rise to the bait. Perhaps you will encourage me to place more early verse online. Perhaps not. Hopefully, you’ll click and make some comments: we’ll soon see.

Absence Makes the Heart: Flash Fiction

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Absence makes the heart …
Flash Fiction

 Time on my hands: so precious these moments alone, with my wife gone away to visit our daughter and our grand-daughter. I didn’t want her to leave me here alone. But I thought she needed the break, the space, and I also thought the women needed time together without the troublesome presence of a man. So many ideas flow back and forth when the man isn’t present, ideas that women share and debate, female anxieties that they will not discuss in front of the male, questions of children and development, teething and first words, actions and reactions, left-handedness and right-handedness, backwards and forwards skills that they will not discuss with the same comfort if the man is there.

I miss her. The sun filters through the kitchen and the autumn leaves store up sunlight like an old precious wine before they fall. Wine: I sip slowly at this bottle filled with life and sunshine, bottled sunshine they call it in Spain, sol embotellado, and I know that although I am alone, my friends are there, at the end of the telephone line. I can call them if I need them and anyway, they call me often or drop in once or twice a day to make sure I am okay. If I walk around the block or knock on their doors I know I will be greeted with warmth, an arm around the shoulder, the offer of a meal.

Thanksgiving is near. I already have two invitations for dinner and another lady, much lonelier than I am, has offered to buy the Thanksgiving food, bring it round, and cook it for me. She will also clean up after wards and leave the house cleaner than when she arrived. Can you believe it? I get company, companionship, and no, they are not the same thing, a cooked meal, and a house clean all together. It’s like winning the lottery.

But really, I prefer this solitude, my adventures with the cat, my slow stroll, not through the autumn woods, but through the leaves of this book. I like exploring my own mind, linking myself now to the self I was when I first read these pages and yes, there have been crises, and there will always be crises, and this is not a crisis, not yet anyway.

I remember when I was in boarding school. First day back from the holidays, I would draw a railway engine, and a train track, and I would number the days until the holidays came around again. For the first few days, I would cross off each day. Then, one day, as the new routine took control of my mind, I would forget to do so and the days would all blend into each other.

The new routine: get up earlier than usual. Go down and feed the cat. Make sure the cat had water. Change the kitty litter and make sure that her litter box is clean. Hoover around the litter box and pick up all the spilled litter. Place used litter in the garbage. Put the cat garbage on one side ready for Monday morning when the garbage men come around. Finish with the cat. Wash hands carefully. Then wash them again.

Downstairs I go. I put the kettle on and debate what I shall have for breakfast. Tea or coffee? Cereal or eggs? Muffins or toast? Breakfast for one is so simple. I take the easy route. Green tea with honey, no milk, no sugar. Some yogurt. Some grapes.

I sip my tea and thumb the pages of Carl Jung’s book, The Undiscovered Self.  I love her and miss her so much, but I am glad she has gone. Her absence allows me to re-discover my own presence. I learn about myself once more. I remember who I am and what I am and how I survive when I am on my own, abandoned, set adrift to fend for myself.

I get up from the breakfast table, look around the house, and find my Teddy Bear. The cat will not come near me, so Teddy it is. I set him on the table next to me and tell him all my news. Then I tell him what is happening on the news. Together, we sit and wait for the phone to ring. If she doesn’t call soon, I’ll call her myself. But not yet, not just yet: I’m still discovering my undiscovered self.