Outside the church, a boy pierces his lips with a cactus thorn.
The witch doctor catches the warm blood in a shining bowl.
He blesses the girl who kneels before him.
On her head she carries a basket filled with flowers and heavy stones. He sprinkles it with her brother’s blood.
All day she will walk with this basket on her head until evening’s shadows finally weigh her down.
Cobbles clatter beneath her clogs.
When the stones grow tongues, will they speak the languages in which she dreams?
Comment: Revisiting and revising some earlier poems. The early version can be found here. The original poem comes from the collection Obsidian’s Edge, which can be found on Amazon.
Amnesia fades in these amniotic waters, moving in time to the water pump’s heart beat. I close my eyes. Nothing is the same.
Do I drift dreamily or dreamily drift? The tub’s rose-petals bring garden memories: primrose, bluebells, cowslips, daffodils dancing
sprightly in Blackweir Gardens or Roath Park, beside the lake or along the gravel paths where we used to bike, so many years ago.
Photos float before me, pictures of moments I alone recall. Spring in Paris, the trees breaking buds along the Champs-Élysées.
Santander in summer, walking the Piquío, Segunda Playa, beneath the jacarandas. Winter in Wales, up in Snowdonia where,
on a Relay Run to Tipperary, I ran down a valley between high hills, on a freezing night, with only the stars
to keep me company along a ribbon of road. Autumn in Mactaquac. An orgy of gaudily painted trees, leaves floating
on this first chill wind, to perch like sparrows, on my beloved’s hair. The look in her eyes as I catch a falling leaf and put it in her pocket to save it for another day.
So, the holly hocks are back and this year we have some red ones to go with the lovely yellow ones that reseeded, in a different place, from last year. The red ones are very shy and are hidden away by the back steps where they are very hard to see.
I spy, with my little eye …
The red and green go well together. More a deep, blushing pink, I guess, with very dark centre. You can see the wood of the steps just behind them. I posted this yesterday, incidentally, but the computer munched it and I had to rewrite it today. It has been a slow time for me. The Corona-19 finally got to me, not in the physical sense, but mentally. As a result I have been feeling isolated, trapped, and a little bit depressed. Alas, there are many more like me suffering in today’s world. Luckily, the flowers help. As does the sunshine.
We’re back
Here are the new seeds from last year’s hollyhocks. They are similar in color, but much smaller this first season. They have also shifted location and I have been surprised at how many seedlings have sprouted and started to grow. Next year we may have a bumper crop.
Night Garden
And here we have a painting of the garden at night, flourishing without us, but beneath the stars. “The garden going on without us.” Given the current situation, I prefer the garden going on with us still here to watch it.
These daffodils were not painted by an unknown painter, but by a painter whose paintings are unknown. There is a subtle difference. There is also something sweet abut covering a blank space with color and shape, even if the hand is unsteady and the eye unsure. This painting is also unframed and belongs in a photograph album or a long-forgotten painting book.
“Fair daffodils, we weep to see thee.” Indeed we do, for they are so transient lasting but a week, or less, cut and placed on the table in a vase of water. So sad to watch them as they stiffen, turn slowly brown, dry up, and then hang their heads in the shame of old age. We are not so dissimilar, those daffodils and me. This photo will capture me forever, or until it is erased, because a photo isn’t a photo anymore. That painting will capture those daffodils too, for little while, until my subscription to the blog runs out and I forget to renew it.
“Poor daffodils, we weep to see you.” But weep not for us, they tell me. Our day is done. Our life is fulfilled. We have brought beauty and scent, however brief, and we have given light to enlighten your daysand joy to light up your heart. And that, I guess, is the message. “Gather you daffodils while you may, for Father Time is flying. And those sweet blooms you pluck today, tomorrow will be dying.”
Thus it is during the Corona Virus 19 pandemic, and thus it was during the Spanish Flu, the Black Death, and all the other plagues that have come to bring understanding and make us see reason. Our lives are as short as the lives of flowers. Seize your life, hold it in both hands, admire it, enjoy it, make the most of the mall things, for they are often, like the smiles of small children and the daffodil’s golden glow, the most important things of all.
“The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, bring promise of merry sunshine …” Gilbert and Sullivan, from The Mikado, if I remember correctly, and not at all anonymous like the Anonymous Bosch artist who painted this painting. Still, I like it, and it certainly lends a little bit of color to the pale cheeks of these walls.
“And we merrily dance and we sing, tr-la, as we welcome the promise they bring, tra-la, of a summer with roses and wine …” I can remember my grandfather singing that in the kitchen in Swansea. He would conduct with one hand, and encourage me to join in with the other. And I did. Merry days, they were, before the fire in winter and out in the greenhouse in early spring.
So, where have all the flowers gone? Gone with the grosbeaks, everyone. Which reminds me, I saw an Evening Grosbeak at the feeder this morning. The first one in years. There used to be several nesting nearby and they were regular visitors, as were the Gray Jays, aka Whisky Jacks, aka Gorbies, aka Ghosts of the Woods and all of them long, long gone.
Will they naw come back again? Who knows? The world is changing even as I sit at my window and watch it go by. February, March, April, May, June, and now July. The lock down has been lifted, but the fear of going unmasked in the great outdoors is still with us, as are the anonymous givers of the virus, a donation I do not want, and nor does anyone else, in their right minds, compus mentis, and not yet willing to on the anonymous ranks of the Gorbies, the Grosbeaks, the Swallows, and the other birds that have fled elsewhere, leaving our yard to the crows, the blue jays, the squirrels, the chipmunks, and the occasional more colorful visitors.
“Ah, would some power thegiftie ge us / to see ourselves as others see us.” Robbie Burns, a Scottish Poet.
And sometimes I think the flowers would like to be seen as they see themselves, not as we see them with our imperfect eyes, not with the cataracts of the Elderly Monet, not with the blunted vision of many artists who have stopped, and sniffed, and bent their heads, and wondered at the colors that entered their paint brushes through the nostrils. Vision and reality: the photo versus the objects as we see and sense them. The reality versus our own version of it.
So who is this anonymous artist who delivers these visions to my blog and allows me to glimpse alternate realities that are so different to my realities. I think of Lorna Crozier, The Garden Going on Without Us. I think of Kingsbrae Gardens, at night, when the flowers are alone and talk only to themselves. I think of Monet at Giverny as his vision lessened and his instincts grew. Who are we? What are we? Do we see ourselves as others see us? Do others see what we see? Color, shade, light, hue … El ojo que ves no es ojo porque lo ves, es ojo porque te ve / the eye you see is not an eye because you see it, it is an eye because it sees you (Antonio Machado). Does the man or woman looking out at us from the television set see him or herself as we see them?
The night before last I sat alone in a hotel room. The television screen was much, much wider than it was high. All the facial images were greatly distorted. I didn’t recognize the people I saw, except by their voices. Who will distinguish the reality of the flowers, each by each and one by one, privatim et seriatim? Who will listen to their floral voices and call them by the names they have given themselves, rather than by their horticultural names?
Tell me, what reality do we see when we see the flowers? What reality do the flowers see when they see us? The anonymous painter who painted this picture that Geoff Slater, my anonymous friend, framed so nicely did not see those flowers the way that I saw those flowers. Why not? Why can’t I see like him (or her)? and why can’t she (or he) see like me?
Every trip to Kingsbrae Garden in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, opens my eyes to more beauty. Yesterday, I brought back this painting, Night Garden, and placed it on the wall by the garage door so I would see it regularly when entering and leaving the house. Alas, I caught the reflection from the window in the photo, but the night flowers and their colouring make up for any lapses in my amateur photography.
The painting is neither signed nor dated, so this night artist will have to remain anonymous for now. My friend Geoff Slater framed the painting but my photo does not do justice to the beauty and skill of the frame. My apologies. Alas, I must live with my inadequacies, but at least I am aware of them!
I spent a wonderful day in Kingbrae / KIRA, incidentally, chatting over a glass of wine with some exceptional local visual artists who are spending four weeks (June and July) in day residencies and working out of the artists’ studios at KIRA. Geoff Slater, the Director of Art at KIRA, led the conversations and I joined in, as did Alana, Ann, Simone, Stephanie, and Simone’s visiting friend, Renate. When artists gather at KIRA to discuss their art, the conversation is wide ranging and varies from the intensely personal to universal theories of creativity. Visiting KIRA is an experience like no other and one that I delight in every time I visit.
