Discourse Analysis

My favorite cat

My favorite cat

Pebbles have caught in my throat.
The word-river once flowing smooth
now backs up to spill leaf-freckled foam
over the tiniest barriers of branch and weed.

When I speak, some gypsy I find
has stolen my tongue, and my voice
is that of a changeling whisked away
from the cradle whilst her guardians slept.

Now leaves outside my window grow
rusty with autumn rain. A sharp-shinned hawk
no bigger than the blue jay he stalks
drives like a whirlwind at our feeder.

In dawn’s early light, a Great Barred owl
flaps enormous wings and drops like a stone
on my favorite cat, lifting her up and away.

Commentary:

Not a true story – sorry, my friends. However, I did see a Great Barred Owl swoop down on my neighbor’s cat. A canny old cat that one. He rolled over on his back, hissing and spitting, and showing all his unsheathed claws. Then he let out a most unnerving high-pitched whining sound and the owl backed off. Nature red in tooth and claw and our own backyard a battle ground where wild creatures roam and prey on each other.

Luckily, as a poet, I need neither seek nor deliver the truth, in any sense of the word. What I search for is emotional impact – words that ring true, even if they are not. Moments that reach out and grab us when and where we least expect it. As someone once said – never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Same with jokes.

And speaking of jokes, cross-cultural jokes are some of the most difficult things for a language learner to grasp. Humor exists in many forms. Silent comedy, like slapstick, does not need an interpreter. However, jokes based on cultural understanding are remarkably difficult to follow, unless one is totally immersed in the culture. As for linguistic jokes, even the sharpest individual can be defeated by word play and double meanings. I remember word plays from my beginner’s language classes that still leave me cold. Sorry, I just don’t find them funny even when explained. Clever, maybe, but funny? No way. Molière for example – Trissotin / trois fois fous. Really? ne dis pas que c’est amaranthe, dis plutôt que c’est de ma rente. Or, from the Spanish of Fuenteovejuna, Lope de Vega – Ciudad Real es del Rey. I hope you are splitting your sides over that one – I have never been able to laugh at it and still can’t understand what’s funny about it. C’est la vie, I guess.

Alone

Alone

the longing
to belong
appears from
nowhere

I want
to lose myself
in something bigger
than myself

religion
can bite like that
church and altar
feast days
incense and candles
confession
repentance
forgiveness
then sin again

I am not religious
not in that sense

nor am I militant
right arm raised
goose-stepping
in a parade
each step in time
with every one else

if that’s the meaning
of belonging
I guess I’ll continue
to dream alone

Commentary:

Moo thinks that Princess Squiffy, out at the front of the parade, a solitary cat, all alone and on her own, would be perfect for this poem. I am not so sure. Everybody is so happy, so engaged, except for Princess Squiffy aka Vomit, who is vanishing into the woodwork – about to plan and execute her next act of sabotage, I guess. Yes, Vomit! She’s the one who throws up in my chair.

The meaning of meaning – such a simple phrase, such a complicated philosophical history. How does one ‘belong’? In what ways can one ‘belong’? Does one yearn to belong or long to belong? And what does it mean – to belong? Does my cat belong to me? Does my dog belong to me? Cat and dog are long dead now – so how can they belong to me? And when I am gone, all my belongings will belong to someone else. A strange world, eh? And yet I long to belong in it for as long as possible.

The two most dangerous words in the world – thine and mine. Cervantes wrote that somewhere. For thine and mine are possessives. They teach us to possess things, to claim them as ours. My house, my garden, my trees, my flowers, my lawn. With the drought that has occurred this summer and into the fall, I can no longer say my lawn, my flowers, my garden, for they have all dried up and marched along, privatim et seriatim, – a touch of Kipling there, Storky and Co. if I remember correctly, and I don’t, because I just checked and it’s Stalky not Storky! – into whatever happy gardens dead flowers and gardens inhabit in their after life.

I think one of the most dangerous games ever invented is Monopoly. Make no mistake, I love my Monopoly set – especially the top hat and the flat iron – but what do we learn from Monopoly and from all similar types of game playing and role modelling? Why, to gather everything into our hands hands and possess everything on the Monopoly Board. At least when we play chess, we defeat an opponent by check-mating his / her king. We don’t have to accrue all 31 pieces on our side of the board leaving the poor king alone on the other. Even Fox and Hounds – and that’s an impossible game to win when you’re the fox- doesn’t humiliate anyone in quite that fashion. Ah well, the meaning of the meaning of Monopoly – Happy Canadian Thanksgiving – we can all have a good rant about that one.

Inquisitor

Inquisitor
Sun and Moon

He told me to read,
and plucked my left eye from its orbit.
He slashed the glowing globe of the other.
Knowledge leaked out, loose threads dangled.
He told me to speak and I squeezed dry dust
to spout a diet of Catechism and Confession.

He emptied my mind of poetry and history.
He destroyed the myths of my people.
He filled me with fantasies from a far-off land.
I live in a desert where people die of thirst,
yet he talked to me of a man who walked on water.

On all sides, as stubborn as stucco,
the prison walls listened and learned.
I counted the years with feeble scratches:
one, five, two, three.

For an hour each day the sun shone on my face,
for an hour at night the moon kept me company.
Broken worlds lay shattered inside me.
Dust gathered in my people’s ancient dictionary.

My heart was like a spring sowing
withering in my chest
It longed for the witch doctor’s magic,
for the healing slash of wind and rain.

The Inquisitor told me to write down our history:
I wrote … how his church … had come … to save us.

Commentary:

No wonder the little girl in Moo’s painting looks so sad. She must have read this poem and understood how the exercise of power and authority, be it religious or secular, can effect those upon whom it is exercised. Times change, but so many things remain the same. The pendulum swings, and it moves from chaos to order and back again. The meaning of meaning – how we define chaos and how we define order define who we are.

Birds of a feather flock together. Manners maketh the man. Wonderful sayings. But fine words do not necessarily make for fine men or women at that. Serpents and senators, both can speak with forked tongues. It is up to us to apply discourse analysis and distinguish between what they say and what they actually mean. As my friend Jean-Paul Sartre once said – “L’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il fait.” A man is nothing more than what he does. His deeds reveal his true inner self – and remember – the plumage doesn’t necessarily make the bird.

Gaia

Santo Domingo
Worshipping Gaia before the great altar
in Santo Domingo

If the goddess is not carried in your heart
like a warm loaf in a paper bag beneath your shirt
you will never discover her hiding place

she does not sip ambrosia from these golden flowers
nor does she climb this vine to her heavenly throne
nor does she sit on this ceiling frowning down

in spite of the sunshine trapped in all this gold
the church is cold and overwhelming
tourists come with cameras not the people with their prayers

my only warmth and comfort
not in this god who bids the lily gilded
but in that quieter voice that speaks within me

and brings me light amidst all this darkness
and brings me poverty amidst all this wealth

Commentary:

A Golden Oldie from Sun and Moon – Poems from Oaxaca. The Church of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca, Mexico, contains approximately six tons of gold and gold leaf. Incredible. I visited it regularly, but rarely saw anyone else in there. The local people seemed to avoid it and tourists with cameras were the main visitors. I refuse to take pictures inside churches, for several reasons.

It has always amazed me that the Spaniards built their churches on the sites of previous places of religious worship. This is partly because the indigenous appreciated the sacredness of certain sites, and partly because it was to these sites that the indigenous had traveled prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. Interesting, too, that the Spaniards call their arrival the Discovery while the indigenous call it the Conquest. History – a coin with two different sides – and it is sometimes difficult to look at both sides at once. Malinche – heroine or traitress? Cortes – hero or murderer? And, as they used to say in Northern Ireland, during the troubles, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

Spin the coin of history, by all means. But beware of seeing only ‘heads’ and forgetting that there are ‘tails’. And never reduce those ‘tails’ to mere ‘tales’. Neither the written tradition nor the oral tradition is infallible. Many people, quiet and secretive as they may be, have long memories. And remember too that all that glitters is not necessarily gold.

The Screws

The Screws

There is no science to sciatica,
just a series of sensations
most of them involving pain.

I don’t know how or when it comes,
but one day, it knocks on your door
and makes you clutch back and buttock.

It’s like a hawk at the bird feeder,
flown in from nowhere to shriek
and shred, unawares, one small bird.

Was it the flannel I dropped yesterday
when showering?  I stooped to pick it up,
lunged forward and, was that it?

The pain came later. It kept me awake
all night, my worst nightmare.
No comfort anywhere. An endless

wriggling and every movement a knife
blade stabbing at my buttock and groping
its slow, painful way down my leg.

The screws, my grandfather called it,
a metal screw screwed into his leg,
leaving him limp and limping.

I googled it today, sciatica, and they
suggested an ice pad for twenty minutes,
repeated twenty minutes later.

“Yes,” I muttered, “yes” and found
in the fridge the ice pack we used
to use in our Coleman’s cooler.

My beloved helped me undo my pants.
“This,” she said, “will be icing on the cake.”
“No,” I said, “it will be icing on the ache.”

Tomorrow, I will call the pyro-quack-tor.
She will bend me to her will, straighten
my back, cure the pain, set me right again,
provided she doesn’t read this post
and will permit me to enter her domain.

Commentary:

Moo doesn’t paint pain, even though it occasionally emerges in his paintings. This painting of his is called Grey Day and I guess a Grey Day is rather like a Blue, Blue Day, something to be avoided, because you feel like running away. And that’s the problem with “The Screws” – it’s hard to face the pain when it’s behind you, unless you are a contortionist and can twist and twirl and see yourself in the mirror. I suppose another solution is to have eyes in the back of your head, but not everyone is that gifted.

As for the pyro-quack-tor, my apologies, Chiropractor, mine is excellent. I limp into her office, crawl onto the medical bed, and then, thirty minutes later, I hop off it like a man reborn, and skip down the corridor, waving my sticks and grinning as if I were a Gorilla in heat. Oh dear, not the sort of condition in which one should drive the zoo bus!

As for my joke – “This,” she said, “will be icing on the cake.” “No,” I said, “it will be icing on the ache!” This takes me back to my old school days – Aix-les-Bains / Aches and Pains. I remember one of my school friends going to Baden-Baden for his summer holiday. A double-barreled name, wow, very foreign. He asked me where I had been and I replied “Cardiff-Cardiff – this is Cardiff.” They used the English version back in those days, not the Welsh one – “Caer Dydd – Caer Dydd.” Doesn’t sound quite the same in Welsh. And how about Cas Newydd – Cas Newydd [Newport] or Pen y Bont – Pen y Bont [Bridgend]. And let’s not get into Llanfair.p.g – Lanfair.p.g – [Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch – Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch].

Try saying that one twice in quick succession. You’ll be sitting in the railway station a long time, just waiting to find out where you are. That, of course, is if trains still run to Llanfair p. g. “Gentlemen will please refrain from …. ” and if you can finish that little ditty off, in public, you have more courage than I do! Besides which, my voice broke long ago, and I haven’t mended it yet!

Drink up thy Tizer!

Drink up thy Tizer!

I wonder how many people actually remember Tizer, the Appetizer. It used to be sold in grocery stores and corner shops. Don’t forget the Tizer, shrieked the adverts. I hated the stuff – but others loved it. Sweet, sticky, a little bit like dynamic Lucozade – and who remembers that, I ask. The same people as had cod liver oil poured down their throats when they were little children in the United Kingdom. An old and almost forgotten generation with its own traditions. But this post is not about Tizer, it’s about cider. Good old Somerset / Zummer Zett scrumpy.

I met Scrumpy when I went to Bristol University. It was an alternate drink to beer, and many pubs sold cider, in one form or another. A pint of cider – sufficient unto the evening was a pint thereof. After a couple of months, one could manage two pints of Scrumpy. Our drinking competitions including drinking a Yard of Ale. Someone always brought one when we went on a coach trip and we always ended up in a bar, in the middle of nowhere, trying to drain our yards of ale. I remember one lad bravely trying to quaff a yard of cider – scrumpy at that. Honk city – and it had nothing to do with the geese. But it was spectacular.

My own adventures with scrumpy really started in my second year at Bristol. The boarding house I lived in stood close to the Coronation Tap, one of the best cider house in England, if not in Bristol. First night I went in there and asked for a pint of scrumpy the barman suggested I have just a half. In my best Somerset accent, I said no, I’d appreciate a full pint. The barman duly placed it before me. As he did so, the man standing next to me at the bar suddenly woke up from his meditations, poked me in the ribs with a boney finger, and announced “Ah, lad. That’ll put lead in thy pencil.” I looked over at his pint of scrumpy and saw a slice of lemon floating in it. “What’s that lemon doing there,” I asked. “I’m waiting for the cider to eat it,” the man replied. “Better for the scrumpy to eat the lemon than to eat my insides.” Another night, at the Cori Tap, I met an old gaffer who wouldn’t touch scrumpy. I asked him why not and he replied that one night he’d managed to down seventeen pints of scrumpy. “That’s a lot,” I said. “What happened?” “Oi spend three weeks in ‘orspital, in bed, doan I?” He muttered.

In my third year, Hamburg University Athletics Cub arrived by coach to participate in an athletics competition with Bristol. The Cross-Country Club became the Athletics Club, in the summer, and we specialized in distances from 400 > 800 > 1500 > 3000 > 5000 > 10,000 metres. Thirsty work on a hot summer’s day. We took the Hamburg athletes back to our apartment building and spent the Saturday night slurping scrumpy down the Tap. They slept on the floor at our place, and next morning, a Sunday, they went shopping early. When they came back to their coach, they all grinned happily at us, and waved their bottles of Tizer in farewell. I looked around and saw that they had twenty cases of those bottles stored in the bus. “Ve vill have gut trip to Hamburg, no?” I started to laugh and they all joined in, waving their bottles at me. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Scrumpy came in barrels, not bottles, and that they had not purchased cider at the local stores. Alas, they had bought 20 cases of Tizer the Appetizer. Somehow, in translation, cider had become Tizer – oh the glories of discourse analysis and the meaning of meaning.

Clepsydra 22

22

… winds kiss words from lips
      sand creaks
           squeaks underfoot
                    creeps between dry toes

the sand cleanses
     purges
          brings closure
               each magnificent moment
                    lighting a candle

is this beach an altar
     under the rocks’
         shadow church
              it doesn’t matter

mindfulness
     holding each memory
          each piece of colored glass

wave after wave
     climbing ashore
          washing footprints
               memories away
                    closing
                         door after door …

Commentary:

“Wave after wave climbing ashore, washing footprints, memories away, closing door after door.” Everything turns out in black-and-white – here a crow, there a seagull. What does each say to each, when they meet upon the beach? Silence and stillness. No sound of wind or wave, no sign of the tide rising or falling, and what do the birds say to each other, when they meet like this? Two solitudes, mine and thine, and somehow the silence must be broken, or in our separate solitudes we will remain. What if I open my solitude and show it to you? Will you then open yours and spread it willingly before me? Or will you turn away, crow spurning seagull and there’s no going back.

And did my feet, in ancient time, walk upon the beach in Santander? Did they wander over the cliffs at Cabo Mayor? What did I say to the sands in Swansea Bay when, sitting on the steps by the railway station, I dusted the sand from between my toes, placed socks upon my feet, and did up my sandals? Private places, private memories, private conversations live on in the privacy of my head.

A dozen heads, all crowded onto the computer screen, zoomed in so they can be together for an hour or two, repeating their memories to each other – how much did they really share? How much can we know, your life of mine, my life of yours? At what point do those twin railway lines meet at the edge of time? Or are they doomed to a parallel universe where mind and mind, rail and rail, neither meet nor understand? Tell me, if you can, what the crow thought of the gull when they met, that morning on the sand.

Tell us about a time when you felt out of place!

Tell us about a time when you felt out of place!

I think it would be much easier to tell you about a time when I felt as if I was in my proper place. There were so few of them. As for the original question – Tell us about a time when you felt out of place – I think that a time should be replaced by the many times. Learning languages has always been more of a pain than a pleasure, for me, anyway. In the Basque Country, Northern Spain, at first with my parents, and then on my own. Sitting at the table or standing in the kitchen, listening to people chattering away in Spanish some days, in Basque, on other occasions. I was reduced to interpreting looks, smiles, scowls, meaningless sounds … how could I have felt that I was in my proper place? Etiquette – I knew nothing about their etiquette. Culture – I knew nothing about their culture and they knew even less about mine. I lived in a world where waves of sound battered at my body and I stood there, a rock on a seemingly deserted linguistic beach, being gradually worn down by the endless waves and the eroding tides. How could I have felt anything but ‘out of place’?

The same thing happened when I became immersed in French culture. I spent some time in the South of France, in an area where Provencal was still spoken. Between the two languages and the differing accents, I was lost, lost, lost.

Something similar happened when I came to Canada. Here, it wasn’t the language that baffled me, but the culture. I remember trying to learn to skate. My cousin played Junior “B” hockey and volunteered to teach me. Well, I learned very slowly (a) to keep my balance and (b) to move forwards very slowly. However, I couldn’t skate back wards and I couldn’t stop. In spite of that, I decided to try and play hockey. The park close to where I lived in Toronto had a frozen area where the little kids played shinny. I asked if I could join in. After three falls and a total inability to stick handle in any known fashion, they stuck me in goal. I used the goalie’s stick to try and stand up. After the third or fourth goal, one five or six year old whisked up to me, stopped in a sideways shower of ice, and said “Sir, please sir, you’re allowed to use the stick to stop the puck, you know.” I retired from ice hockey soon after that, and from skating. I did learn to cross-country ski, though. I also earned the name Wapiti (white-tailed deer) long before I saw one or knew what it meant.

And that is all just scratching the surface. I could say more, so much more. But I’ll control myself.

Clepsydra 21

Clepsydra 21

… she left me
          at the lighthouse
               rising tide
                    beach diminishing

and grew smaller
     as she walked away

I search the sand for sea-gems
     sand-dollars
          cerulean sea-glass
               rarest of all the reds

ground down
     polished
          sanded to perfection

so many worlds
     in a grain of sand
          their words going unspoken
               carried away by the sea-wind

the wind that haunts
     caves and cliffs
          hooting like a ghost train
               in a forlorn
                    tunnel of love

love lost
     love found
          an old love
               rediscovered
                    only to be lost anew

what is this thing
     called love …

Commentary:

Listen! “Can you hear the music?” “No, but I hear singing even though there’s no one there.” I know, I know, we have had this conversation before. Moo didn’t have a painting along the lines of ‘what is this thing called love’, so he dug out this one – Walking on Air – the painting, not Moo. But then, Moo’s a silly old romantic and verses and songs settle in his mind. All too often, when he walks he finds he’s ‘walking on air’! The two of us, Moo and me, have always loved that song. Great to work it into a commentary on a poem (again).

Love – what is this thing called love? And how many types of love are there? We use the word so frequently, or infrequently, if we are Mr. Grinch. But what does it mean? Love of self, love of other? And how many others can we love – I know that Minnie had a heart as big as a whale, but how many loves can fit into it? Love of father, mother, daughters , sons, brothers, sisters, cousins – how far do we go? Winning sports teams – everybody loves everyone on the team when they win they cup. That love is so much harder if they lose it – especially if there is a goat on the team, and I don’t mean greatest of all time! I mean sacrificial.

I love you with all my heart! Does that include the pacemaker and the stent? What does atrial fibrillation mean in that situation? Good questions. Neither me nor Moo have the answers. Write your answers on a postcard and send it to – where? With Canada Post on strike, you will need a team of real snails. Hitch your postcards to them. Threaten them with the salt shaker. And off they go. Snail mail is back. Or you could place them on a dog sled, hitch up the huskies and Mush, Moo, mush! Away they all go hauling the mail. Why does it always be the mail? Why can’t it be the Femail? Mail – Femail. Oh, but I love that. There, you see. We’ve just added another meaning to love. Let’s hope none of the huskies lies down to rest. That’s called a Canadian flat tire. Oh, I love that one too.

I am running out of time, space, and ideas. And that’s only one word from the poem that we’ve looked at. Oh, shame and scandal in the letter-box.

Hair Cut

Hair Cut 

Curly locks, wisps of grey and silver,
curve around my ears, cuddle my collar.
I stand in the bathroom, look at my scissors,
glance in the mirror, and start to hack.

I turn my head swiftly from side to side,
watching white hair falling, like snow.

“All done!” I look at myself in the mirror:
hair shorter, still sticking out in clumps,
but some curls still tickle and cling.

Not bad for front and sides. I still
can’t see the back, but if feels fine.
“Right” I say. “I’m ready for the show.”

What show? The one where I sit before
the computer screen and admire myself
before I click in the code, type the password,
and join the virtual meeting that today,
in the pandemic, passes for face to face.

Commentary:

Face to Face – Moo helped me with this one by allowing me to have one of his ‘face to face’ paintings. Thank you, Moo. Sorry I said you weren’t too bright yesterday. And we both got the singer of All Shook Up wrong – it was Tommy Steele of course. Also, as you explained to me, you may not be great at adding two and two and making four, and you may be unenlightened with words, but wow, when you add a colour or two to the palette you are enlightened and enlightening and dazzle people with the lightness of your enlightenment. There – hope we can be friends again now. I would miss your paintings if you withdrew your services.

And this is a Golden Oldie. In 2020, when Covid walked with us, I started cutting my own hair – hacking might be a better word – and I have continued to do so ever since. In fact, I have only been to the barber’s three times since 2020. Each time, the hair lay so thickly upon the floor behind the barber’s chair that we walked knee deep in the white stuff. Great fun. How the young lady made fun of me. Right down the middle of the back of my head she found a large mullet that I couldn’t reach with either hand. She found that so funny. Asked me if I wanted to keep it. Of course, I said no!

I remember those face to face on the computer days. At least we couldn’t catch Covid from an image talking back to us on a screen. I always find those online meetings so difficult and awkward. I love the awkwardness of that word – awkward. The facilitator always began with – ‘Now, let’s all introduce ourselves.’ What on earth do you say on such occasions. ‘Easy,’ Moo told me. ‘I always say “Hi. I’m Moo. I’m a painter.” Nobody bothers me after that. Once somebody asked me what I painted and when I replied ‘houses’, everyone lost interest and the facilitator moved on.’

I always get tongue-tied and can never manage to be coherent. In fact, I am neither coherent nor cohesive and I often fall apart. “Hi! I’m Roger. I’m a writer.” This always opens the doors and the windows to all sorts of questions. ‘What do you write?’ ‘Have you published anything?’ ‘What’s your latest work?’ Of course, if I had any sense – and often I have less sense than Moo – when someone asks me ‘What do you write?’ I should reply. ‘English.’ Or ‘Italics.’ Or ‘Greeting cards.’ That last would be as much of a show stopper as Moo’s response – ‘houses’! Of course, I could get really inventive and say ‘Bilingual jokes for Christmas Crackers.’ Another pet peeve – have you noticed how the French and the English don’t match up? I could have a great old rant about that one. But don’t let’s talk about Fortune Cookies!

And suddenly, we have strayed a log way from the act of getting our hair cut during Covid. But, like many diversions, the journey is often more important than the destination, especially if we are amusing ourselves! And I hope you had some fun and took some joy from my words.