Dreams

Anniversary Poem

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Anniversary Poem

“Hoy cumple amor en mis ardientes venas
veinte y dos años, Lisi, y no parece
que pasa día por el.”

Francisco de Quevedo

“For twenty-two years my captive heart has burned.”
Christ, what crap that is. The only heart burn
I have known came from your cooking: African
Nut Pie, as detailed in the cookbook I bought you
for Christmas on our first wedding anniversary,

remember? And do you remember the ride to Kincardine
on the train? A dozen coaches left Toronto and one
by one they were shunted away until only you and I and an
elderly man ploughed through the snowstorm in the one
remaining carriage. Deeper and deeper piled the snow.

You looked through the window and started to weep:
“What have I done?” you cried in shock and grief. Outside:
Ontario lake-effect snow. Headlights from two waiting
cars lit up the station. We drove to the homes of people
you didn’t know, third generation cousins of mine.

You’re the only bride I know who was carried to church
in the arms of the total stranger giving her away
in place of the father she never knew. The snow lay six
foot deep (eighteen inches fell on your wedding day
alone) and you, with a white wedding dress and black boots

up to your knees. Cousin Walter carried you to the altar:
how they laughed as they chanted that old song to us.
Later, when they tapped the glasses and fell silent
at the meal, I didn’t know what to do. And you, my love,
standing up, kissing me, married after six days in Canada.

S.W.A.L.K.

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S.W.A.L.K.

Where did all the sighs go?
The love that would last forever?
The tears that stained the letters?
The everlasting? The undying?

The eternally yours? The initials
we wrote on the back of envelopes?
SWALK, OXO, PHTR, RLN, ILYE,
ICWTKY, or was it ICWTMLTY?

I forget so much. But I do remember
how the windows steamed up
in your mother’s car when we sat
together for hours with nowhere to go

and nobody around to disturb us.
Combe Dingle, Wotton-Under-Edge,
Weston-Super-Mare: these were our
favorite places, do you remember them?

Just being together was more than enough
to keep us happy. We don’t hold hands
anymore. It’s not something grown-ups do,
especially in front of the children or the late

night news. Nor do football games inspire
passion and send us into ecstasies the way
the white spot did as it lit up your mother’s
TV, with us alone, and her asleep in bed.

Comment:
There are so many things packed into this poem, old things, perishable things, memories that will vanish, if they haven’t vanished already. Who now remembers writing regular letters, not e-mails or e-cards? Who remembers sealing them, perhaps with a loving kiss? Who remembers rushing to the front door as the postman pushes letters through the letter-box to see if the beloved has written back? If you didn’t go to a boarding school, you will know nothing about the 11:00 am break when we rushed back to our houses to go through the mail and see who had written. I’ll never forget those perfume-soaked envelopes I received from the local village girls. Nor will I forget a wrathful house-master, my scented letters stuffed up under his nose, sniffing at my letters like a bloodhound tracking me down.

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 3

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Predicting My Death before Yours

3

Know this: I have no regrets. Not in anything that touches you.
No regrets, that is, save for the thing I have done to hurt you.
Many things. Some underhand. Some unsuspecting. Some deliberate.
You know, after all these years, the way I am. Unthinking.

Selfish. Never unfeeling. Often unknowing. So many negatives.
Is it negative to embrace my death before it comes? I don’t
think so. Perhaps it’s the most positive thing I’ve ever done,
this coming to grips with the maggots that gnaw me away,

night and day, gnawing me away. They aren’t invisible. You see
them  sometimes yourself: in the bottle I drain to send me to sleep;
in my tone on the phone when I answer an unwelcome call; in kicks
delivered to sleeping dogs that I can never let lie. Why? I cannot

answer that question. It bounces like a pinball round my head:
why? why? why? But try as I may, there is never any answer.
Why am I made as I am? Why do things happen the way they do?
Why do you still love me, in spite of all my faults, my kinks?

There: I’m being negative again. Be positive: this is my last will
and testament. My love, I leave to you the pleasant memories.
Days in the sun in Spain; our daughter born healthy; grooming
the show dogs; digging the snow together. Our very presence here

in Canada is a sign of the highest bond that could ever unite
two people: leaving their homes, their families, their friends,
their birthplace, their nationality to set up a new home together,
crossing the sea to reach this new found land of ice and snow.

 

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.

Predicting My Death 1

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Three Poems Predicting My Death before Yours

1

I cannot always talk to you. There are so many barriers.
The hoovering, the cleaning, cooking the daily meals.
When we go to bed, you are tired, I’ve had too much to drink.
We know our routine answers off by heart. There’s never any time

for each other. House work, gymnastics, paying the bills,
even housekeeping on the computer: they all take time.
Time, time: so little of it left. I can feel death’s seeds
rooting in heart and chest. Premonitions: so little time.

Comment:

Rummaging in the dusty memories that line my bookshelves, I rediscovered a sequence of love poems I wrote for Clare, 25 years ago, in 1991. This is the second in the sequence. A Golden Oldie, it grips today even more than it did back then. I am growing old. The insurance company’s statistics tell me that soon, all too soon, I will join those statistics and become another black number on a white page. According to those statistics, Clare will survive me, but we don’t know by how much.

How do we prepare ourselves for such things? Our society, a society that sees violent death every day on the road, on the street, on television, backs away from death. We don’t face it, not in the same way they do in Oaxaca, for example, where it is celebrated once a year on the Day of the Dead. Homes are lit up. The dead ones favorite food is prepared. Little altars are illuminated by candles. Photos appear. Do the dead return to their homes to join in the celebrations? Sometimes, I guess they do. Certainly the would be made welcome if they did.

Perhaps Francisco de Quevedo, the seventeenth-century Spanish poet who was the subject of my doctoral thesis, was right. “The day I was born, I took my first step on the road to death.” He writes too of “this death that I carry within me, that has walked beside me all my life.” “If death is a law, and not just a punishment,” he writes, “then we must accept it and obey its call.” I guess it’s easier, if you are a Stoic or a Neo-Stoic, to face up to such things.

I once asked my grandfather, a man who survived the trenches of the First World War, if he was worried about dying. He looked at me in silence for a long time. I was very young and we were sitting in the sunshine on the bench by the old Swansea Hospital where he went daily to gossip with his friends. “Roger,” he said. “We are all going to die. We will die if we worry about it. We will die if we don’t. So why worry?”

I certainly don’t want to go. I didn’t want to go twenty-five years ago and I really don’t want to go right now. I have decided to take my grandfather’s advice. I’m not going to worry and I am going to continue to enjoy myself for as long as possible because: “For there are many fine things to be heard and good things to be seen / before we go to Paradise, by way of Kensal Green.”

 

 

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.

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

Structure in the Short Story

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Structure in the Short Story
Wednesday Workshop
30 November 2016
Posted: 4 December 2016.

I just attended, with one of my writers’ groups, a writing workshop offered by a guest speaker. Our speaker threw out some interesting ideas on structure in general and structure in the short story in particular. The first comment he made was “Are you sure that your novel is not a short story and vice versa?” He then suggested that often beginning writers run out of steam because their novels are not really novels but are short stories that need cutting, rather than expanding.

He followed this up by suggesting, and I made no notes so I write from a memory that fails me more often than it used to, that a short story should have a structure that runs something like this:

stasis > key occurrence > end of old world (stasis broken) > beginning of new reality (the world upside down) > quest (the search for  new balance) > climax (when all the events of the crisis come together) >  the moment of truth (when the central character is faced by a decision) > the choice (the protagonist chooses) > pay-off for protagonist (order is restored and the protagonist is changed or confirmed by his choice) > pay-off for readers (who see that change and are themselves changed by looking at the same old world through different sight and a new knowledge or insight gained).

 One of the group members circulated his notes from the workshop and summarized the idea rather more succinctly:

The first thing I remember … in any story, the main character has to be changed at the end from what s/he was in the beginning.

The other item was the list of elements in a story: Stasis, Trigger, Quest, Surprise, Critical Choice, Climax and Resolution.

            Clearly this is a theoretical structure, but many short stories follow it or versions of it. Through this structure, our speaker suggested, there often runs a leitmotiv and this can provide a thematic unity that also holds the story together. Returning to this thematic unity and writing selectively from within it, can often produce the desired change in reader and protagonist. Equally clearly, there is no length to this structure and the resulting story may be very brief or suitably enlarged.

According to our speaker, the character of the protagonist is very important and the key aspects of the protagonist’s character must be clearly drawn, right from the start. The protagonist must also go through some sort of change as the story and the protagonist’s character both develop. Place is also important and the protagonist should be linked into a place and preferably a time. The protagonist in the short story is, after all, in a dialogue with his time and his place (his chronotopos, as Bakhtin would phrase it).

This is certainly a prescription for short story writing, one of many prescriptions, I might add. A quick search turns up another definition, this time of a five-point narrative arc offered by Mark Flanagan:

“Sometime[s] simply called “arc” or “story arc,” narrative arc refers to the chronological construction of plot in a novel or story. Typically, a narrative arc looks something like a pyramid, made up of the following components: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.”

            Flanagan continues with a definition of each moment in the story. Exposition reveals the characters and the setting. Rising action is a complication that hinders the protagonist. Climax is the point of highest stress or tension. Falling action is a releasing of the pressure and the resolution ties up all the loose ends. (Taken from this site)

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/literaryterms/g/Narrative-Arc-What-Is-Narrative-Arc-In-Literature.htm

Lope de Vega, the Seventeenth-century Spanish playwright, suggested a simplified three-part structure: situation > complication > unfolding / dénouement. Of course, the complications may be multiple, resulting in an action that runs situation > complication > further complications > complicating the complications > even more complications > even more complicated complications > and then the final unraveling of the ‘by now very twisted’ plot. An even simpler two-part definition, also from Spain’s Seventeenth-century, offers us the dual structure of a ‘world in disorder’ > ‘a world in order’ — how the characters progress from disorder to order is up to you as a writer.

Of course, the author may decide NOT to tie up all the loose ends and re-order the world to perfection. When this happens, we may have a dystopia: the disaster continues; or we may have an open ending that prompts the reader to wonder what might happen or what might have happened. As for ‘beginning at the beginning,’ there are also stories that begin in the middle (in media res) and then go backwards in time before going forwards again. This raises the awkward question: how short is a short story? I won’t attempt to answer that one here.

Whether you describe or prescribe, there are many possibilities in the world of short story telling and it is always the story that counts. If it is good, then perceived structural flaws that go against these prescriptive methods may well become a prescriptive structure for another future writer. Interior monologue and dream, for example, linked thematically but not necessarily linked in time and space, may well distort or destroy yet another structural format, that of the three classic unities of time, place, and action. these, incidentally, are expanded into four by the great Spanish playwrights (among others, I am sure) who add unity of theme to the other three.

Robin Grindstaff, in an online article entitled “Narrative Arc: what the heck is it?”, available at

http://robbgrindstaff.com/2012/03/narrative-arc-what-the-heck-is-it/

suggests yet another simplification and reshaping, of the narrative arc idea.

“Think of narrative arc as a bell curve. It starts at a point on the lower left hand side of a graph, rises in a curve to a peak, and then drops back down again. The standard narrative arc is often referred to in terms of the three-act play: a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

            This is not unlike the structure outlined by Lope de Vega, except for the fact that ‘middle’ is a rather inadequate term for the multiple complications outlined in the Lope de Vega model. This statement may be a little unfair as Robin Grindstaff goes on to outline the complications that may occur in the second act in the following fashion:

“In act two, the main character must try to overcome the conflict presented by the inciting event. The character wants something, has a goal in mind. The conflict and tension of the story rise, and obstacles are thrown in the path of the character to prevent her from achieving her goal. The character faces these obstacles on her way to overcoming the conflict. The obstacles get bigger, more difficult, and the character may be on the verge of defeat or surrender. At this point, the character must make a critical decision or a moral choice that changes the direction of the story.”

            Clearly the ‘obstacles that are thrown’ compare favorably with Lope’s consistent throwing of obstacles and ‘middle’ therefore becomes a euphemism for ‘complications.’ Act three allows for the climax and resolution of the story and this includes character change or ‘death in defeat’ and tragedy. I recommend this article very strongly, as it goes way beyond the outline I have offered thus far and clarifies many features of the narrative arc.

In fact, Grindstaff then references Nigel Watts, Write a Novel and Get It Published, and outlines an eight-point narrative arc that runs

stasis > trigger > quest > surprise > critical choice > climax > reversal > resolution.

 This runs a close parallel to the circulated list (quoted earlier) of seven elements:

 Stasis > Trigger > Quest > Surprise > Critical Choice > Climax > Resolution.

 The main difference being the insertion of a reversal between the climax and the resolution.

So, we have now established an narrative arc, or a pyramid, with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 steps included within it. This is all very prescriptive: do it and you will succeed. My greatest fear then becomes the gate-keepers, those anonymous figures who sit on shadowy selection committees, place ticks in appropriate boxes, and judge the quality of writing by consensus in committee. I can hear them now: “#7 is missing. There’s no reversal. Reject!” “I don’t like #5. The choice isn’t critical enough. Reject!”

As writers, we must remember that all these arcs and numbers are just theories. The most important thing is the command ‘Take up thy pen and write’! All the theory in the world does not produce a good short story or a good novel. In fact, the opposite may be true: too many rules may stifle our narratives at birth or choke them to death My advice: know your theories, then smash them into little pieces and create the new structures, the new formats, the next new great piece of writing that will lead you, as a writer, to boldly go where no writer has gone before.

 Blessings, happy writing, and follow your creative instincts.