Cartoons

In Vino Veritas

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In Vino Veritas

Last year, on the road to Pwll Ddu,
I turned the steering wheel too fast
and almost rolled the car I rented.
My mother’s ashes were in the back.

I was driving my father to the Gower
so he could scatter them on the sea,
as she had requested. “Watch what
you’re doing,” my father cried.
“You’ve knocked your mother down.”

Now, as I drink to forget her ashes
tumbling around in their plastic urn,
I call you names. Crude graffiti clings
to the wall I have built between us.

Can you forgive me? In vino veritas,
said the ancient Romans, but truth from
a bottle is a double-edged sword cutting
both striker and person struck. My love,
I sense stark darkness within you. I see
black stars exploding to flood blue skies
with their inevitable ink. Can you feel
the instant hurt behind my eyes, like I
sense yours? Here, in one of our secret
gardens, give me the pardon I never gave
my parents. Heal the harm I’ve done.
Forgive me. Break the cycle. Set us all free.

Wheelbarrows

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Wheelbarrows
Secret Garden #6

Once upon a time,
an inmate at Cefn Coed,
the Swansea lunatic asylum,
walked around the garden
with his wheelbarrow
upside down so nobody
could put anything in it.
Not so crazy, eh?

That’s what you and I are
without each other:
upside down wheelbarrows,
or wheelbarrows
with the one wheel missing,
or wheelbarrows
with the bottom boards gone
and everything falling out.

So here’s my card for you
on Valentine’s Day:
I’ve painted an upside-down
wheelbarrow missing a wheel.

There’s not a flower
or a heart in sight.
Anyone can give hearts
and flowers.
Only someone really special
merits a wheelbarrow,
upside down,
with the missing wheel
long gone.

Secret Garden 4

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Secret Garden 4
Pause for Thought

My love, are you my muse?
Or do I write to amuse myself?
I don’t know any more.

I only know for sure
that every second is precious
here in our secret garden
where we cultivate these creative
moments when the world stands
still and our breathing makes
light of the void within us.

Right side, left side: who cares
what’s dominant when our bodies
are tuned like strings on a lute
and you blend with that blood-
red body space beneath my ribs
until my heart beats to your rhythms,
Princess of Paradise, fair of face.

We must never permit these memories
to fade. All too soon chaos will serve us
its tainted apple, tunneled by surging
worms, dark-serpent heralds fore-
telling death’s angel, the night to come,
and the cold of our ultimate separation.

 

 

Ice Pack

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Ice Pack

Downstairs at 3 AM with frozen French Fries
stuffed down the back of my jammies and
tightly pressed between chair back and spine.

Yesterday, when the pains in my lower back
ran rampant and I was too stiff to bend,
I lay on my back in bed, begging you for help.

Seventy-two hours flat on my back with my feet
on a chair did nothing to improve my temper.
I thought of my mother lying hopeless,

of my father being dressed, washed, shaved,
cared for as if his return to a second child-
hood was accompanied by a necessary

humiliation, a lowering of every inhibition
that gives a man his manhood and allows him
a minimum of dignity. Lying there, helpless,

my feet stretched out before me, I saw my
future as if it were an endless pack of ice
barring the horizon, groaning when I moved.

I must learn to lean on the closest shoulder.
This is really love, my love, your gentle hands
pulling sock over foot and ankle, lacing my shoes,
standing by my side, letting me lean on your arm,
refusing to discard me in my time of trouble.

Your Voice

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Your Voice
Love poem

Still in the still of the rain
I sense you near.

The room is full
of the scent of emptiness
yet even the silence
turns my head.

The walls expand
to enclose the world.

With gaudy flags
on a colored map
I mark your progress
through my memory,
upwards and inwards
your progress to my heart.

A moth glistens in the circle
cast by my reading light.

Your stealthy footsteps
sound in the corridor.

A voice, your voice,
drifts through the night

Thought Police

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Thought Police

Why are they always men,
these blue-clad figures
who wear our dreams like badges
and stare into our eyes,
bright lights behind them,
as they check our numbers
and make us count from one to ten
and up and down again.

Be warned:
you can’t walk in the street
without seeing a curtain
flicker at a window;
unseen lips repeat your words
as they wander,
stray cats and dogs,
from house to house.

Walls have watchful eyes
and lusting ears
that clutch each wayward thought
reporting it to people
who have our best interests at heart,
or so they say.

Don’t look up
but there’s someone
leaning over you,
reading these words right now.

Desaparecidos

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Desaparecidos

Last year, in Fredericton Mall,
a mother lost her little girl.
They found her in the women’s washroom
where two old ladies were cutting off her hair
and dressing her in a young boy’s clothes.

Wanted in Winnipeg.
Vanished in Vancouver.
Cheap alliterations in tabloid headlines
disfigure each tragedy.

Sometimes we think we recognize their faces.
This young girl with an old woman’s body
standing at a Yorkville window.
That other girl on Yonge Street
selling her body for drugs.
That flash of underage flesh
mounted by strangers
and glimpsed in a pirate video.

Do you call for call girls when you travel?
That midnight knock on your hotel door
is someone’s missing daughter.
You saw her once before on an airport advert
or on the carton of milk you opened
for your family’s breakfast.

What traveling salesman would you trust
to take your only daughter’s body and treat it well
while she promised him the sexiest time
he would ever have?

But in Goya’s Spain
it’s the males who disappear
usually during the night.

Most times, their families never see them again.
Sometimes, as in this etching,
their bodies are found, nailed to a tree
or dumped in a side street with the garbage.

Bacchants

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Bacchants
after
Velásquez

Go down to Queen Street
on a summer evening,
or walk to Odell Park
and look in the dark
beneath the trees:

you’ll find them
gathered round a fire,
drinking meths or after-shave.

Fly Karsh from Ottawa.
Lodge him in the Beaverbrook
then bribe these Bacchants with free
booze and bring them to him.

One day their photos will hang
with those of Hatfield or Robichaud
in the New Brunswick Hall of Fame.

That’s what Velásquez did
when he painted his dwarfs
and topers, and you can see them
in the Prado today,
as famous as
Spain’s King and Queen.

Mad Dog Wind

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Mad Dog Wind
Barcelona

from
Last Year in Paradise
(1979)

It rushes through the city,
loses itself in hotel lobbies,
comes out to snatch and snuffle
at the empty hands of children.

It hustles leaves,
leaves paper-trails
of flighty pigeons
flapping, indignant,
across the square.

Delayed by doors,
it snorts at windows,
shudders
tight-closed shutters,
rages at rooftops,

chases
a ragged herd of clouds
around the sky
high above the Ramblas.