This is the front cover. The first copy of the book arrived this morning. It is now ready for you if you want to see it!
Here’s the back cover – a slightly different concept – back to front, so to speak.
Carpe Diem
Poems for the End of Time
Poems for the End of Time
Here it is, and it is up and waiting for you! I already have my first copy. More on the way. The same artist who did the cover for People of the Mist did this one as well. He’s such a nice person – doesn’t charge me a penny.
Introduction
Poems for the End of Time is composed of two linked collections, Meditations on Messiaen and Lamentations for Holy Week. They both have separate introductions in the body of the text.
My graduate work at the University of Toronto (MA, 1967, and PhD, 1975) included studies on Golden Age / Early Modern Spanish Poetry (16th -17th Centuries). It enabled me to read and enjoy both the Renaissance and the Baroque poetry of Spain. My own interests lay within nature poetry, as expressed by the Spanish Mystics (St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila), the Neo-Platonic Poets (in particular, Fray Luis de León), and the Metaphysical poets (Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo). Echoes of their writings and thoughts are frequent within these two poetic sequences.
I will write further on both sequences later in the book. Briefly, both sets of poems were written while listening to the music of Olivier Messiaen. Three of his compositions, Quatuor pour la fin du temps / Quartet for the End of Time, Éclairs sur l’au-delà / Lightning over the Beyond, and Petites esquisses d’oiseaux / Little Sketches of Birds, influenced me enormously. I listened to them every day while I was writing and revising these poems.
These poems are not for the simple-minded. They form a contrasting tapestry of point and counter-point, filled with allusions, word-plays, internal rhymes, repetitions, and alliterations. They have a music all of their own.
Do not expect simplistic escapism. If you are serious in your efforts to read, listen to the magic of Messiaen as you turn the pages, much as I did while I was writing.
Redemption
I had no paper with me in the car
so I wrote this poem on a bottle redemption slip.
Redemption
Redemption:
that’s what I seek
and some days it seeks me.
A double need this need to redeem
and be redeemed. A double need too
this god I need, the god who needs me.
Lonely he will be without me,
and I without him.
Knock and the door will open.
Seek and ye shall find.
I look and, yes, he’s there,
him within me and me within him.
This redemption slip is all I need:
empty bottles on the one hand,
my empty heart on the other,
both now redeemed.
All of this while I sit in the car
outside a fast-food chain
wondering if a bullet will come,
to break the car’s window pane,
or someone brutal who will rejoice
in his heaven-sent task of delivering
my personal order of take-out pain.
Black Paintings
Black Paintings
pinturas negras
Goya
Wrapped in his blanket of silence, the painter paints.
He pays no attention to the shrieks, screams, prayers,
curses, doesn’t even hear them. He sees their staring eyes
as the bull’s eyes at which anonymous soldiers, heads down,
backs to his easel, fire. He sees their mouths as black holes,
slashed across their faces. He sees the priest with his rosary,
but never hears the rattle of the beads or the firing squad’s guns
going off, filling the canvas with smoke, the square with blood.
Back home, in the Quinta del Sordo, his deaf man’s house,
he sits at the supper table, dwarfed by his painting of Saturn,
devouring one of his children. Beside him, old women,
hags themselves, suck soup silently from wooden spoons,
or fly soundless, black bats in the starless sky,
on the back of goats or on their witches’ brooms.
The great, open wounds of his paintings speak to us
of his hushed suffering, of the calamitous world that spawned
such violence, plague, famine, and fear. Plundering armies,
guerrilla warfare in back street and alley, torture, pillage,
rape, and suffering, pits filled with the dead and dying,
famine walking the streets, and all of it inaudible,
the nightmares of a little child, seen, but never heard.
His paintings speak to us, and they allow us to reconstruct
in our imagination, the many things that the painter, deaf,
but never dumb, could never hear, yet reproduced
using his paintbrush and his taciturn palette as a tongue.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
“It is said that deafness is worse than blindness because you are isolated in an inner world of terrible silence.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 71.
Swings
Swings
They told me that one day
my feet would be up in the air,
and the next they would be stuck
on the ground.
A roundabout, they said,
a merry-go-round,
with all the fun of whatever fair
happens to be around that day.
Someone, not me, flicks a switch,
music plays, the carousel horses
move up and down, slowly at first,
then faster and faster as day, music,
and horses all gather pace.
There are no reins. If there were,
I would heave those horses
back to whatever reality I left.
But what is reality now?
These hot flashes that warm my flesh?
Those cold flushes that make me shiver,
then turn up the heat
until I am sweating again?
Shadows grow. I pull less strongly
on the swing boat’s ropes.
My journey slows. The showman
raises the bar beneath the wooden hull.
Wish it or not, my journey grinds
to its inevitable end.
B & W
B & W
black words white page
thoughts
floating in space
airs and graces
the world’s wind
blowing through
freshening cleansing
cotton clouds silky sky
that one word
waiting
to be spoken
that one thought
soon to be borne
out from the dark
a new existence
brightens
blinds with its light
Click here for Roger’s reading.
“If you look at a page of poetry, the slim words are couched in the empty whiteness of the page.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 69.
Dissolution
Dissolution
When I am no more myself,
will I know what I have become?
What last breath in the mirror
will reflect my passing from this self
to the next, if there be another one?
Does it matter? No, to most of us,
yes, to the lusting soul that seeks,
but what does it seek, I ask myself?
I watch the deer crossing the yard.
Muted, dark against winter trees,
I can scarcely make them out,
let alone understand their wanderings.
If they scare, they raise white flags of tails,
then run, dancing down their tracks,
as light as thistle-down, though the snow
be deep beyond their walk-ways.
I want to see them as they really are,
the original inhabitants of this land that
a scrap of paper, drawn up by a lawyer,
says I own. Nobody owns this land.
It was here before me and will be here
long after me and mine are gone.
Only the deer truly belong, passing
through, each generation similar
to the one before, knowing no lawyers,
holding no legal papers, but aware
instinctively that we are the intruders,
that the forest is their heart and home,
and that they are sole owners of this land.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
Comment: from a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire: “I am no more myself. I have become the fifth of the twelfth.” I bought a book of his poetry (Livre de Poche) from les bouquinistes in September, 1962, when I started the school year in Paris. I picked it up last night, and started reading it again. The result – this little poem and a host of memories that came flooding back as the deer walked through the garden and all was right with the world.
Spider Web
Spider Web
for
Ginger and Michael Marcinkowski
I do love long and complicated sentences,
stuffed with clauses and dependent clauses,
and all strung together like a spider’s web,
an enormous web with silvery threads that glisten
with dew drops in the early morning sun that
blanches them, turning them white, and look,
there’s a little fly caught in this one, trapped
by his own struggles, and struggling even more
as the spider emerges, advances towards his prey,
soon to be his breakfast, or lunch, if he lets his victim
stew in the poisons soon to be injected, and look,
dew drops are falling as web shakes, and threads
tremble, and the dark and seamier side of life
emerges with its stark, black lines, from beneath
the advertising mask of glorious beauty that distorts
reality, as the spider turns into an assassin and the fly
into his victim, and yes, each of us must choose whether
to be an assassin or a victim, meurtrier ou victime,
as Camus phrases it in one of his books, L’Étranger,
though I read it so long ago, when I was a teenager,
studying French in school, and that was one of the books
I chose to read, but I was never labelled, meurtrier or
victime, just trouble-maker, first class, because I didn’t,
wouldn’t, couldn’t tow the official line and kow-tow
to a rigid authority, that walked set lines, like this spider,
the meurtrier, who turned that fly into his victime, and I,
I who could so easily become either, became neither,
but merely the observer, who stands on the outside,
looking in, and watching as the show goes on and on,
year after year, seculae seculorum, world without end,
and yes, the English Master told me never to mix
metaphors, nor to add foreign languages to my poems,
but what if they are not foreign to me, but a part of my being,
as part of the spider’s being is to be a meurtrier, and as for
that fly, well, he is the victime, in whichever language you use,
and yes, this poem is only one sentence, and I love it, amen.
Blessings
Blessings
I wish I could bless you
as you have blessed me,
with gifts of love and life.
Together, we have walked
this world, wandered its shores,
scaled rocks, seen rich tapestries
of land painted beneath us.
Only you know me as I am,
know what I want to say,
the difficulty I have in saying it.
You know why words trip
on my teeth and lip, and exit
with those little slips
that make me hesitate to speak.
Do tree roots speak? Does
the yucca, blossoming each
spring, share words with
the hollyhock growing beside it?
Do the birds and the bees
silently commune, as we
so often do, sitting together,
peaceful in our silence,
and doubly blessed?
I wish such blessings to fall
on all who need this verse.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
“When you feel love for your beloved and the beloved’s love for you, now and again you should offer the warmth of your love as a blessing for those who are damaged and unloved.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 35.
Comment: I changed read [sound reading] to need in the last line, because most people who need such blessings will probably be unable to access this blog. My apologies for my initial short-sightedness. My thanks for being allowed to make the correction.
Sound of Silence
Sound of Silence
Cara Anam, p. xv
Where do the deer go
when they leave their tracks
behind them and pass out of our sight?
We lose them when, like school children,
they scale the snow bank,
stop at the roadside, and look left,
right, and left again, then walk sedately,
one by one, across the road, and blend
into the dark woods opposite our house.
Too many friends have walked a similar way,
crossed the great divide, and lost themselves
in the unknown that lies there, out of sight.
All too soon, we will be faced by that same
decision, whether or not to cross.
Our paths already tell us where we’ll go,
but the hands of our body clocks don’t yet
point to how, or when.
rogermoorepoet 