Death

Lost

img_0363

Lost

My body’s house has many rooms and
you, my love, are present in them all.
I see you here and there, glimpse your
shadow in a mirror, and feel your breath
brush on my cheek when I open a door.

Where have you gone? I walk from room
to room, but when I seek, I no longer find,
and when I knock, nothing opens. Afraid,
sometimes, to enter a room, I know you are
in there. I hear your footsteps on the stair.
Sometimes your voice breaks the silence.

It whispers my name in the same old way
I remember … how can it be true, my love,
that you have gone, that you have left me
here alone? I count the hours, the days,
and snatch at sudden straws of hope,
embracing dust motes to find no solace
in the sunbeams, salacious as they are,
that drag me from my occasional dreams.

Moonshine: FFF

 

fundy-05-mistwolfepipers-081

Moonshine
Flash Fiction Friday
Friday, 5 May 2017

Here, on the wharf, in Santander, I stand in the shadow cast by the Customs House and gaze at the moon path sketched out over the water. “Over the mountain, over the sea, that’s where my heart is longing to be.” I taste the bitter salt of homelessness and know that I will never belong in this world and that I will never find a place to call my own. Back home, I have a black and white television and a black and white dog. Here I have nothing. Back home, when I am home, I am a latch key kid. My parents leave for work at seven in the morning and my mother gets home about five every night. Those ten hours on my own are mine to do what I like with: but I must account for them. “What did you do today, dear?” And everything I say I do is checked. Did I make the beds? Did I do the laundry? Did I finish the ironing? Did I wash and dry the breakfast dishes? Did I clean the house from top to bottom?

Sometimes I strip and stand in front of the mirror in their bedroom and look at my naked body. It’s not much to look at. Once I stood there with the carving knife in my hand and deliberately cut myself across the ribs, just to feel the pain and watch the blood flow down. Other days I play cards against myself. That way one part of me always wins, but then the self I play against is always doomed to lose. Sometimes I wage battles with toy soldiers, moving them up and down across the carpet in front of the fire. Occasionally, I throw a soldier in the fire, just to watch him perish.

Sometimes I just sit on the back of the settee and press my forehead against the cool window. The rain is cold and cools the window pane. I know the sky is crying and sometimes I think I know why. I’ll go back to my boarding school soon. There, we are taught to be isolated and to live in isolation. The bullies will come and they will bully me. I have not grown much over the holidays and I know they will be even bigger, and even stronger, and even faster. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go back to that school. I don’t want to be bullied and abused. The masters cane me and the older boys beat me and the bullies force me to do things, unspeakable things, things that I don’t want to do. I have tried to run away but someone always brings me back and then they beat me for running away. “Don’t be a coward,” they say, “take it like a man.” And I do.

I look across the water. How beautiful is the Bay of Santander beneath the moon. I look up at the hills, at Peña Cabarga, at the hills from whence cometh my salvation. My grandfather walks towards me over the waves. He helps me choose stones and pebbles, helps me to fill my pockets with them. He takes me by the hand and gives me courage. He and I walk down the slip way, hand in hand, and then we walk out across the moon path and into the sea.

May Day

IMG_0464.jpg

May Day

March 1, St. David’s Day:
the daffodils grow free
around Cardiff Castle keep;
they cluster in Roath Park,
while Blackweir Gardens
flourish with their flowering.

March 17, St. Patrick’s Day:
it’s the traditional first practice,
out of doors, for the Toronto Irish
Rugby Club and the players stand
round and shiver in weak sunlight
as shadows lengthen over the grass.

April 23, St. George’s Day:
International Book Day
and we celebrate the lives
of earlier writers … Shakespeare,
Miguel de Cervantes, El Inca
Garcilaso de la Vega, great,
but so little known outside Peru.

May 1, May Day, May Day:
the Morse Code call goes out,
Save our Souls, for we have sinned.
We have left so many days and lives
behind us now, as we move into spring.

I recall so many familiar faces,
now gone for ever. Today, I’ll gift them
virtual flowers, a bouquet of May bought
from the wise old women who know its secret
hiding places in the wet spring woods
and bring its early sunny scents,
wrapped in foil, to my breakfast table.

Comment: Raw poem. I wrote it this morning with our winter geraniums sitting on the back porch, in the rain, glistening and damp. Every fall, we bring the best plants into the house and they survive the winter warmed by the fire. Then in the spring, we release them to the outdoors once again. So many things released this spring, friends departed over the winter, their exit so sudden. Wrapped in the scents of early May, I dream of salvation for them and for me and for all who survive.

MiA

IMG_0447.jpg

MiA

The things you didn’t see:
the cat, this morning, ginger,
coiled like a spring and ready
to pounce on an unsuspecting junco;
five crows perched on the same
side of the tree, and the tree leaning
over on account of their weight;
the smile on my granddaughter
when we Skyped.

The things you didn’t hear:
the squawk of the bird
as the cat misjudged her jump;
those same five crows cawing,
cracking the day open like
an egg boiled for breakfast;
the joy in my granddaughter’s voice
when she spoke to me: “Hi Moo.”

And you didn’t hear the robin’s shriek
as the hawk’s claws pierced,
nor the tears in my voice
as I called out your name.

Hollow

IMG_0457.jpg

Hollow

I am a hollow man,
my heart and soul scooped out
by worry, wear, and care.
Water fills my bones.
My muscles shake like jelly.

Hope?
I abandoned it long ago.

Faith?
In these changing times
it’s a series of corks
bobbing their apples
in a party barrel.

Charity?
Love grows old and cold
and loses its charms
as we shiver in each other’s arms.

For now, I’ll dodder
my dodo way
towards extinction.

As I shuffle
from room to room
I’ll rest for a while
upon this chair.

My mother went this way.
My brothers and my father too;
I soon will follow,
just like you.

Glass Man

img_0359

Glass Man

“I am made of glass,” I said.
“You can see right through me.”

But the harder you looked,
the less you saw.
You claimed
there was nothing there,
just empty air.

“Your glass is an illusion,” you said.
“It’s not half full
and it’s not half empty.”

“Glass is fragile,
I break easily.
Drop me, I shatter;
hot and cold will
make me crack.”

“Your fragility is in your mind,
not in the fact of your existence.”

“When light passes through me
I break into a million colors,”
I said.

“You are a prism,
the colors that you cast
change you and rain
rainbow  lights
that change others
too.”

 

Sinister

IMG_0186

Sinister

What the left hand does
when the right hand doesn’t
know what it’s doing
is an attempt to re-pattern
the brain, to slow it down,
as the pencil spider-walks
its wandering way over the page
like my father’s did when,
stroke-stricken in the right hand,
he transferred his pencil to the left
and sought to-re-establish control
over tiny, manageable things,
and yes, he often cut himself
shaving, but he didn’t like beards
so he never gave in and shaved
every day, died fighting,
and did not go gentle,
and neither will I.

Comment: This is a very raw poem, in more senses than one. I fell over on Tuesday, on the back porch. One of the porch nails, forced up by the winter ice, caught in my open-toed sandal and over I went. My head had hit the deck before I even knew I was falling. It wasn’t as bad as the tumble I had when chasing the black bear and trying to photograph it, but this fall left me quite stunned. You can read about the fall HERE. The actual bruising, not the fictional ones, can be found in #3 of that sequence. I wrote the above poem, on Thursday evening, with my left hand, while my right hand was being iced. Funny how we think of one thing while doing another: I had visions of my father, stroke-stricken as I say, trying to write with his left hand. He fought so hard to do just the smallest things. Oh yes, I have a nice bump on my head, too, and as I told the chiropractor when I visited her later that Tuesday afternoon: “I think I have already had my back adjusted once today.” The other thought that comes to me: how slow we are to heal, once we pass a certain age, or, as my good friend Jan the Stoneist says, “an uncertain age.” With that latest fall, I have indeed entered into The Age of Uncertainty.

Why?

IMG_0154

Why?

Curiouser and curiouser
the vanishing smile
on the ginger cat
and wild dog dingo
grinning like a coal-scuttle,
why, oh why?

Who put the cur in curious?
Why was the dog-watch curtailed?
Cynicism, some say, and why
do we kneel before him,
heads bowed, waiting
the thumbs up, thumbs down,
of placet, placetne,
why, oh why?

Comment: Raw poem. I dreamed it up last night, but it wasn’t like this when it started. Cur: means why or what for in Latin and curs were large, mongrel dogs, bred for herding cattle in the Middle Ages. Cynicsm: because the cynics were also called ‘dogs’ partly for their shamelessness and partly for the faithful way they guarded their philosophical tenets. In Mexico, the Dominicans were often portrayed with dogs at their sides. The explanation: domini / of the Lord, -can / dog; hence they were the faithful guard dogs of the Lord. Placet: it pleases in Latin; the thumbs up sign that allowed the defeated gladiator to live, not die. “In any event, the final decision of death or life belonged to the editor, who signalled his choice with a gesture described by Roman sources as pollice verso meaning ‘with a turned thumb’ a description too imprecise for reconstruction of the gesture or its symbolism” (Gladiator: Wikipedia).

Geese

cropped-15-may-2002-pre-rimouski-020.jpg

Geese

The arrowhead precedes its shaft and leads its feathers into night’s perfection. Summer catches flight and waves good-bye to Arcturus as an obsidian knife flashes black lightning across the icy threshold of a morbid sky. Darkness, swift and sudden, blots out each scattered scat of golden grain and swallows an iris of stars. Inverted, the Big Dipper hangs its question mark from the sky’s dark eyelid.

When daylight breaks cold sunshine over broken ground, the great white geese lay their burdens down by the riverside. Pristine as they drift to the land, flake by fluttering flake, they accumulate the colors of mud daub and anonymity as they grub food from the neat ploughed fields that march their earthen armies across the land. Fallen angels, they sprawl down from heaven and abandon eternity to adopt their waddling time-and-earthbound shapes.

Now, the afternoon gropes steadily to night. Some people have built fires; others read by candlelight. Geese litter the riverbanks with their mud-stained snowdrifts. Freshet mud besmirches them — or is it the black of midnight’s swift advance? The geese step on thin ice at civilization’s edge. Around them, the universe’s clock ticks slowly down. Who forced that scream through the needle’s eye? Night gathers its darkening robes and the seabed reaches its watery arms out towards a magnified moon.

Ghosts of departed constellations drown in the river. Pale planets scythed by moonlight bob phosphorescent on the flood. I walk on the beach sensing the flesh that bonds, the bones that scarcely bind, the shoulders and waist on which I hang my clothes. Now I stand nameless in a shimmer of moonlight and listen at the water’s edge to the whispering night. I catch the mutterings of snowflakes strung between the stars.

My dream stretches out a long, thin hand and clasps bright treasures in its tight-clenched fist. The moon hones its cutting edge into an ice-thin blade and the lone dove of my heart flaps in its trap of barren bone. Moonlight and starlight run their twin liquors, raw, within me. What will I bury beneath this year’s fallen leaves?