Fall

Hallowe’en

Hallowe’en

1

Today is All Hallows Eve.
Tomorrow is Oaxaca’s
Day of the Dead.
The clocks change
the day after tomorrow.

Today, it’s raining,
and rain is a trick when
it forces celebrants off the streets
and town councils vote to change
the traditional date and send
young children out trick and treating
on a dry, warmer night.

But this rain, after drought,
is a Hallowe’en treat.

It brings a promise
that the aquifers will refill
that wells will not run dry,
and above all,
it brings us hope.

2

Around us, fall thrives
and watches and clocks
will soon fall back.

Trees weep for lost leaves.
Flowers that flourished
now wither and perish.

Hollyhocks topple and fall.
Bees’ Balm is abandoned
by butterflies and bees.

3

I expect time
to change with the clocks
and my body clock
will soon be out of sync
with the tick-tock chime
that denounces each hour.

Hours that used to wound
now threaten to kill.
They used to limp along,
but now they just rush by
and I, who used to run
from point to point,
now shuffle a step at a time.

But still I live in hopes to see
the clocks spring forward
once more.


Commentary:

A great poem for Hallowe’en, even if I say so myself, and I haven’t even mentioned the Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Oh, woe is me. Shame and scandal in my poetry.

Game Six of the World Series on Hallowe’en – wow! – well, one team will get a treat and the other will receive a very disappointing trick. I know which team I support, but I don’t know who will win this time around.

Having said that – with substantial rain after drought, everybody in my province is a winner. And who could wish for more than that?

Clepsydra 34

34

… my heart so broken
     I can’t count the pieces
          nor solve the puzzle

scars are trenches
     deep defensive lines
          gouged into my face 

every night
     the black dog returns
          and I wake up from a dream
               to find myself pincered

attracted by the light
     squeezed tight
          between cave walls

my top half struggles to be free
     my bottom half
          hips down is held
               in a ferocious grip

I scream the way
     a stuck pig screams
          when the knife flashes
               and the hot blood spurts

all at sea
     I move up and down
          on dark restless waves

I reach for a life raft
     but find only an apple
          bobbing as it floats …

Commentary:

Moo thought I needed cheering up, so he did this painting for me. U R My Sunshine, he said to me, then gave me the painting for today’s post. I think he was rather taken with the phrase ‘attracted by the light’ … hence the nice, bright, sunny painting. Whenever I feel down, Moo reminds me that every cloud has a silver lining. Today’s clouds over Island View certainly do. They have actually brought rain and we need that rain so badly. We are in the middle of a drought, in places it is a severe drought. Wells are drying up, the river and the aquifers are low, we need rain – and now we have some. Too late for the apple orchards and the farmers who do not have enough winter feed for their cattle. Too late for the local deer who do not have their usual post-summer glossy looks. And too late for the trees that look drab, having lost their usual fall glow to appear very pale and peaky. Let us hope that a little more rain, on a regular basis, will change all that, and give us the sort of silver lining that, next year, will produce golden apples and brightly colored fall leaves

My First Thanksgiving

My First Thanksgiving

For the first twenty-two years of my life,
Thanksgiving had no meaning, no substance,
no shape, nor form, nothing to hold me.

When I emigrated to Canada,
my Canadian cousins changed all that.
when they invited me to come to
Kincardine for Thanksgiving.

They served a traditional Thanksgiving Dinner
with vegetables in colored jellies
and all sorts of things I had never seen.

We were all surprised
at how alike we looked.
Like Cousin George in Vancouver,
or Cousin Elsie in Revelstoke.

They told me how WWII
had brought the family back together
on these special holidays –
Christmas in Wales for the Canadian troops
or Thanksgiving in Winnipeg
for the Welsh boys learning to fly.

That thanksgiving, the old family names
turned into photographs before me.
Snaps of my mother’s wedding,
my grandmother holding me on her knee.

And finally, as a special Thanksgiving gift
a long-distance phone call to Britain
and Clare on the phone saying
yes she would come to Canada
and yes she would marry me.

And I remember crying
all the way back from Kincardine
to Toronto and that was my first
Thanksgiving in Canada.

Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves

I used to run,
jump, and catch them
in mid-air,
one, two, three
in each hand.

Now
I stand and wait
for them to fall
and land, perhaps,
on my clothes
or catch in my hair

…

the Leprechaun luck
of my Irish heritage,
so long-denied,
with its pot of golden leaves
waiting for me
at summer’s cast-off
rainbow’s end.

Commentary:

Autumn Leaves, but where does it go to. Good question. Moo asked me that the other day. I just had to tell him that I didn’t know. However, he did offer me the perfect painting for the fall and the changing leaves. Fall Folly Age. I never realized that he could play with words like he plays with paint. Anyway, I know that last winter he painted a picture of little white dots with wings. “What are they?” I asked him. “Snow flies,” he replied. “You know, when the snow flies …” “When the snow flies do what?” “I don’t know.” Moo and I live in a mysterious world, as you have probably come to realize.

Any way, the combination of fall foliage and fall folly age is quite a good one and it shows the folly of ageing and trying to chase down falling leaves when gadding about in the garden with two sticks, one in each hand. Of course, in case you don’t like that painting, and I hope you do like it, because I do, then here’s another one for you.

The text reads – “Autumn leaves – catch them if you can – while you can -and close the door behind her – when she leaves.” Oh witty Moo. Painting and occasional poetry too.

Fear

Fear

Now is the time of fear:
ice on the morning step,
a child’s slide on the sidewalk,
a parking space too narrow
for me to get out of the car.

Sometimes the shopping cart
lurches beneath my weight
and I clutch at thin air:
each fall a precipice.

An emptiness in the gut,
a tightening of the elastic band
clamped around chest and heart,
a chill through the bowels
in the washroom’s dark:

 a long night that threatens.

Commentary:

Things happen, from time to time, and seem inevitable. With the coming of fall and the threat of frost comes the fear of ice. All year round, the fear of wet and slippery floors walks beside me. I am very careful about how and where I place my canes.

Shopping brings the fear that someone will park so close to me that I cannot get back into the car. Shopping carts can be treacherous. In one shop, their light-weight carts always seem ready to tip up or lurch over. The tell-tale leap in my chest reminds me that yes, this can and does happen. I am ultra careful in that particular shop.

Oh yes, and don’t forget the diuretics that upset the tummy and leave one struggling for time, and space, and the right place. Such things arrive so suddenly. They make the night seem dark and long.

Funny how the same thoughts change shape when published in prose, rather than poetry. The narrative is the same, but the emotional impact can be so different. Góngora wrote about such moments, a long time ago, in the early seventeenth century. “Cada pie mal puesto es una caída, cada caída es un precipicio. / Each false step means a fall, every fall is down a precipice.” The fear of falling is inherent to those of us who age. It is interesting that precipicio (Spanish) ends in -ice, precip-ice (English). How many readers note such seemingly minor coincidences?

Accident or deliberate? Who knows when the shopping cart or the cane slips out beneath us and we stumble as the ground comes suddenly rushing up, with us on the way down.

October

October

… and the wind a presence, sudden,
rustling dusty reeds and leaves,
the pond no longer a mirror,
its troubled surface twinkling,
sparking fall sunshine,
fragmenting it into shiny patches.

It’s warm in the car, windows raised
and the fall heat trapped in glass.
Outside, walkers walk hooded now,
gloved, heads battened down
beneath woollen thatches.

A wet dog emerges from the pond,
shakes its rainbow spray
soon to be a tinkle of trembling sparks
when the mercury sinks
and cold weather closes the pond
to all but skaters. Then fall frost will turn
noses blue and winter will start to bite.

Comment:

I was the first to like Moo’s painting, and indeed I do.
I hope someone likes my poem, too.

Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams

Amnesia survives in these amniotic waters,
moving in time to the water pump’s heart beat.
I close my eyes and dream. Nothing is the same.

Do I drift dreamily or dreamily drift?
The bath-tub’s rose-petals bring memories –
primroses, bluebells, cowslips, daffodils dancing

beneath the trees in Blackweir Gardens,
or beside Roath Lake, where I biked
on gravel paths so many years ago.

Photos float before me, pictures of moments
I alone recall. Spring in Paris, the trees
breaking into bud along the Champs-Élysées.

Santander in summer, walking the Piquío
as it slumbers beneath the jacarandas.
One winter in Wales, up in Snowdonia,

I ran down a valley between high hills,
on a freezing night, with only the stars
to keep me company, so cold, I nearly froze.

Autumn at the Peace Park in Mactaquac,
with leaves reflected in the head pond.
Or the Beaver Pond with its fall orgy

of gaudily painted trees, leaves drifting down
on this first chill wind, to settle like tiny,
colorful birds in my beloved’s hair.

I remember the look in her eyes when
I caught a falling leaf and put it in
her pocket, telling her to save it,
like a falling star, for a rainy day.

Autumn

Autumn
and all that jazz

1

Slow last drag of summer’s sad trombone
sliding its airs between stark, naked trees.

Golden memories float face down in tranquil
waters, life and the summer drained away.

A voice, her voice, ripples across the pond,
echoes over drowned and mirrored leaves.

2

Grey the sky, white the birch trees:
Narcissus kneeling, dark waters flooding

Tumble-dried by this autumn sky,
leaf words falling, still her voice echoes.

3

Tintinnabulation: a tin-pan alley of leaves
blown against windscreen and car windows.

I, who a grief ago sat here watching her walk,
now sit here alone, waiting for her return.

4

Here beginneth the gospel of the fall,
the fall of all things finally into deep water.

Fall, fall asleep to the rhythmic leaf beat
that summons us all to our appointed end.

5

I who am nothing know nothing, save that I
am a burnt-out ember, cold, in a grey-ash grate.

Grating of old bones, these hips and knees,
and if I fall, sweet heart, please love me more.

Commentary:

The trees and the grass are all stressed out and we are looking at an early fall this year. So many bright berries on our Mountain Ash and Crab Apple trees. Yet the grass all dry, the hollyhocks brittle, and so many flowers dried up and gone.

Fall Foliage

Fall Folly Age

Fall Folly Age aka Fall Foliage is a play on words.
Thank you, Moo, my painter friend, for putting this title
on your painting and allowing me to use it for one of my book covers.

After intense heat
the garden is dusty dry.
The hollyhocks,
stressed out,
bow their heads
and tumble down.

Before the heat,
heavy rain drenched
the flowerbeds.
The yucca subsided
beneath waves of water.

One hollyhock,
regally proud,
stored so much liquid
in its flowery crown
that it bent and broke.

The mountain ash
bears a host of berries.
Bright orange,
they are already turning
to their winter shades.

I see so much stress
in the little world
I inhabit.
I no longer listen
to the news
or watch TV.

So much is beyond
my control.
Yet I can control
the radio and the TV
by turning them off.

The friends I meet
now have white hair.
Like me and my flowers,
they are dried up
and bent, held up
by sticks and canes.

My beloved and I
are growing old together.
We watch each other
with great care
wondering who
will be the first
to topple and fall.

Comment:

It has been a long, long time since I last wrote on my blog. Many things have distracted me, including editing books for friends, working on my own books, journaling, painting, and surfing the web in search of something positive to read. As for my own books, I published four this summer. Clepsydra – Chronotopos I, Carved in Stone – Chronotopos II, Rage Rage – Chronotopos III, and No Dominion – Chronotopos IV. Maybe I will try to post on a regular basis and copy some of those poems here, in my blog.

Exploring the Divine in Nature

Divinity

outside us or in us
the divine is always with us

green god
of the mountain ash
garlanded now
with autumn berries

lady hollyhock
and her flock
of butterflies and bees

colibri
martyred soul
reborn
as a hummingbird

our garden
a paradise
where the creator
still strolls

some of her
many faces
glimpsed
among the leaves

in this half-light
as the sun
goes down