Clarity is essential now: the cycle of seasons, the will and willingness to change. Nothing can alter this flow: rain and river, pond and sea, the moon pull of the tide. Each half-truth glimpsed through the helmet’s slotted visor as we charge in the lists, knee against knee, spear against spear, knight against knight. On the shore at the earth’s edge, a new planet mapped in miniature: each grain of sand, a speck of dust, light upon the palm, yet the whole beach, in unison, weighing us up, weighting us down. This world, immanent, renascent, growing more solid through its thinning veil of mist. Freckled the water, as the wild man sculls towards us, over the waves, over the sand, a fisher of what kind of men? Was he without guilt, he who cast that first stone? The pond’s water-mask, reconfigures in ever-widening circles traveling who knows where to lap at an unseen shore. Light bends like a reed; liquid are the letters dancing, distorted, on speckled waters and the white sand undulating under the rising waves.
Comment: So this is the messenger, and what now is the message? And who or what do we believe? And why should we believe it? Better by far, say some, to bury our heads in the sand and to pretend to be unaware, uncaring about all that is going on around us. Why worry about what we cannot change? Just let it be. But not all people think that way. And, unfortunately, not all people think. I do. But I am beginning to think that I am one of the few who does think. And not only that, I think I am getting out of step with the world around me. Yes, I know the Spanish saying: “in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king”. I am neither blind, nor one-eyed, nor am I a king, nor a king-maker. More than anything, I think I am an anarchist ant!
Monkey Meets an Anarchist Ant Memories of El Camino de Santiago
The anarchist ant is dressed in black. He has a little red base-ball cap worn backwards on his head.
His eyes are fiery coals. “Phooey!” He says. “It’s folly to go with the flow.” so he turns his back on his companions and marches in the other direction.
Some ants call him a fool. The Ant Police try to turn him.
The Ant Police try to turn him. The Thought Police try to make him change his mind.
Others, in blind obedience to a thwarted, intolerant authority, first bully him, then beat him, then bite him till he’s dead.
It’s late in my life, with the big hand stuck on the nine, at a quarter to some thing, and the small hand twitching its red-tipped needle of blood. Yesterday, the breakdown van called for my body and towed me to the doctor’s. “Cough!” she said. “Say ninety-nine! Now cough again!” All the while, cold hands probed my unprotected body. Bottoms up? Thumbs down? It’s hard to see that the wine glass stands a quarter full when seventy five per cent of the wine has gone and the empty bottle lies drained on the operating table. I sit in front of the mirror and examine the palpitating heart they have torn from my chest. Flesh of my flesh, it beats in my hand like an executioner’s drum. I hear the tumbril drawing near. My colleagues sharpen their knitting needles. My lungs are twin balls of wool knotted tight in my chest.
Variants
Not one of us knows when the skeleton in the limelight will peel off her gloves, doff her hat, lay down her white cane and use us as fuels for a different kind of fire. Grief lurks in the bracelet’s silver snare of aging hair. We kick for a while and struggle at dawn’s bright edge, we creatures conditioned by time and its impossibilities. What possible redemptions unfurl their shadowy shapes at the water’s edge? A dream angel, this owl singing wide-eyed like a moribund swan bordering on that one great leap upwards, preparing to vanish into thin air. Some say a table awaits on an unseen shore; others that a rowing boat is tied to the river bank, ready for us to row ourselves across. Who knows? Yesterday’s horoscopes sprinkle butterflies of news as the snow wraps us all in the arcane blanket of each new beginning.
Comment: It’s been a strange week. In spite of all my resolutions, I missed my Wednesday Workshop and my Thursday Thoughts. Never mind: the latter weren’t very pleasant anyway. It has been pouring with rain again, and, as the WWI song says “Back to bread and water, as I have done before,” except in this case, it’s pills and needles, and I get the first shot on Tuesday. Nothing to worry about. I’ve been there before. It’s all preventative. But the body-clock is ticking away and I am getting no older and people around me are drifting slowly away. One of the players I used to coach at rugby, an excellent prop forward, went AWOL on Wednesday, MIA, and I read about his passing yesterday in the obituary column of the local newspaper. 18 years younger than me. He might be gone, but his memory lingers on, strongly for me. I have been thinking about him and his family and their tragic loss. My heart goes out to them and I offer my condolences, but what can one do, other than sympathize, celebrate a life well-led, and accept that all of us, poor creatures, are born to die. And if not now, when?
Timothy heard his older brothers moving from room to room, searching for him. He knew they would find him but for now he had found refuge beneath his grandfather’s double bed. It was dark under there in that sepulchral space. He had placed his grandfather’s enormous Royal Doulton chamber pot between himself and the door so that the dog would not pick up his scent, run to his hiding place, and lay the Judas lick upon his cheek.
His grandfather had forgotten to empty the chamber pot. Dark urine splashed on Timothy’s hands and sleeves as he squeezed behind the giant china pot that overwhelmed his nose fills with his grandfather’s nocturnal vapors.
The voices got louder as his brothers climbed the stairs and approached the bedrooms on the upper floor.
“Where is he now, drat him?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”
“And then he’ll be for it.”
“I’ll beat him with the little red brush they use for cleaning the fireplace.”
“That will teach him.”
Timothy was familiar with those threats, especially the little red brush.
He remembered the fox the hounds killed at his feet, one sunny morning a year before. He cycled down the lane outside his family’s summer cottage. The fox limped along the side of the lane, saw the boy on his bike, but too tired to run from him, continued limping in the roadway. Timothy got off his bike, leaned it against the rough stone country wall, and watched the fox. Its tail, speckled with mud, dragged behind its low-slung body, sweeping the ground. Timothy observed the twigs and thorns protruding from its black-tipped orange redness.
Timothy walked towards the fox. It tried to move away from the boy but collapsed and lay at the edge of the lane, flanks heaving, tongue lolling out through the white strings of thick foam that choked the muzzle and streaked saliva on the forequarters.
The hounds came from nowhere, an incoming, barking tide that rounded the corner and rushed towards Timothy who froze with a fright that pressed him against the wall. Sun-warmed stone jutted sharp edges into his back. As he stood there, unable to move, a rough hand came over the wall and grabbed him by the shoulder. He felt himself hauled upwards. The flint points dug into his back and he yelped as the firm hand drew him over the top of the wall to safety.
“Get out of there, you stupid boy, or the hounds will have you.”
Timothy hid his face in the farmer’s rough homespun shirt. He shuddered as the dogs bayed and growled and scrapped and scratched. Then the fox, it must have been the fox, let out a high-pitched yap and whine and the pack gargled itself into a drooling, slobbering sort of silence. The farmer pushed Timothy’s face away from his shoulder and forced his head towards the spot where the hounds, on the other side of the protective barrier, rubbed their ears into the dead fox’s torn and bloodied body.
“That’s what they’d have done to you, my boy. Never come between a pack and its kill.”
Timothy watched a member of the hunt staff pull a knife from his jacket. The foxhunters broke into cheers and howls of pleasure when the man severed the fox’s brush and held it on high. The farmer thrust Timothy towards the Master of Hounds.
“Here, blood him, Master, he was in at the kill.”
The Master of Hounds opened his mouth to flash a smile filled with pointed, foxhound teeth. He stooped, dipped his fingers in the still warm fox blood, and streaked a smear across the boy’s face.
“There,” he said,” you’re blooded now. One of us, eh what?”
The mingled scents of fox and hound and blood and death and urine and feces made a heady mixture and Timothy started to hyperventilate. His breath came hard in his throat and, as he struggled to breathe, tears rolled down his cheeks.
Timothy feels safe in his secret hiding place beneath his grandfather’s bed. He can hear his brothers’ taunts and calls as they search for him, but they haven’t found him yet. Sticks and stones may break my bones, he whispers, but names will never hurt me. But names do hurt. Tiny Tim they call him and ask him where he hides his crutch. I don’t limp, Timothy once replied. When he said that, one of his brothers, Big Billy, kicked Timothy as hard as he could with the toe of his boot, just above the ankle. Timothy screamed with pain. You’ll limp now, said Big Billy, and his other brothers found the joke so funny that they all called kicked Tiny Tim at every opportunity. Limp, Timmy, limp, they chanted as they chased him round, limpTiny Tim, Tiny Timmy.
“He’s not up here,” one of his brothers called out.
“Must be out in the garden, the coward, we’ll have to hunt out there for him,” another replied.
“Can’t run, can’t hide,” said Big Billy. “Get the dog, we’ll track him down.”
The voices finally faded. Protected by the barrier of his grandfather’s cold but intimate body waste, Timothy curled up like a fox in his den and fell asleep. He dreamed of the proud brush of a tail flying in the wind, of a warm stone wall, drenched in sunlight, and of a farmer’s strong, all-protecting arm.
Comment: I have written several versions of this story, some longer, some much shorter, some in the first person singular, some in the second person. In all of them, the word-play on the little red brush (fox and fireplace) is paramount. This particular version occurs in my short story collection, Nobody’s Child available on line. Sometimes a story will not leave me alone. It wanders around, takes slightly different twists and turns, and new images and scenes emerge, as they do in this particular piece. Alas, I didn’t have a photo of a fox, so I used a photo of three plump pigeons hiding, you might even say ‘cowering away’, from a hungry hawk circling overhead while they hid in a crack in a wall in Avila, Spain. It always surprises me to know how many people (and animals) flee from what Robbie Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man”.
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Inquisitor
Inquisitor
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.
Inquisitor was also a requested reading last Saturday. My promise, to put it up on the blog, with a reading in my own voice is now fulfilled. I love this poem: it speaks volumes about the Catholic Church in Oaxaca and the relationship of the Dominicans with the local people, aboriginals all and inhabitants of the Valley of Oaxaca for at least 10,000 years. The numbers represent the approximate date, 1523, of the arrival of the Conquistadores in Oaxaca, about three years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, now Mexico City. The poem, Inquisitor, can be found in Sun and Moon and also in Stars at Elbow and Foot, both available through this link.
Well, it’s been a couple of Tiz-Woz days sitting here, looking out of the window, waiting for the results of the bone scans I underwent a week or so ago. I should be getting the results next Monday, on my father’s birthday. He would have been 111 years old and I always celebrate his birthday by wearing either his watch or the one he gave me for my own 21st birthday, way back when.
This is a very special photo. It shows my 21st birthday watch together with the bracelet, with my name on it, that my grand-daughter made for me when she was four years old. Four generations of memories sitting on my wrist. I think she put my nick-name (nom de plume) on the bracelet in case I forget who I am. She knows it can happen in old age. The four dots are to remind me that she was four when she made this present for me.
Allan Hudson very kindly interviewed Jane and I for his blog: the South Branch Scribbler.
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Full Moon Over KIRA
Who shall dredge this midnight moon from the shoals of Passamaquoddy Bay? Gaunt the moon-rakers’ faces, harsh their hands hauling on nets, heaving her up, rippled and dimpled, blunt her bite as she emerges from submersion, raked from water in the traditional ritual.
Upside down, these reflected clouds, as bright as full-moon fishing boats distorted from below as the night wind blows clean dry bones across a mirrored sky where shadow fish fly wet with moonshine.
Oh pity her, you people, as she’s dragged from her element and exposed to air and oxygen that will slowly kill her, make her fade, frail and fragile, not meant for this world of rock and stone, flower and field, but destined to walk in heavenly meadows or to rest in the shallows where she rocks to sleep in the sea’s endless cradle.
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Duende “Todo lo que tiene sonidos oscuros tiene duende.” “All that has dark sounds has duende.” Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
It starts in the soles of your feet, moves up to your stomach, sends butterflies stamping through your guts. Heart trapped by chattering teeth, you stand there, silent, wondering: can I? will I? … what if I can’t? … then a voice breaks the silence, but it’s not your voice.
The Duende holds you in its grip as you hold the room, eyes wide, possessed, taken over like you by earth’s dark powers volcanic within you, spewing forth their lava of living words. The room is alive with soul magic, with this dark, glorious spark that devours the audience, soul and heart. It’s all over. The magic ends.
Abandoned, you stand empty, a hollow shell. The Duende has left you. Your God is dead. Deep your soul’s black starless night. Exhausted, you sink to deepest depths searching for that one last drop at the bottom of the bottle to save your soul and permit you a temporary peace.
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False Spring
Winter whiteness slowing now, and the tide that full bore crashed white waves against our house receding to garden’s foot where warm roots wait their waking.
But winter still stalks the land and April brings snow, more snow, as if there will never be an end to these waves of whiteness, thinner, trimmer, true, but unwelcome as spring days grow longer and sunrise beckons ever more early with Crow and Blue Jay breaking the morning’s peace into raucous pieces as they bounce from branch to branch …
.. and brown the earth, and barren, and bare, the robins finding no food and flying on, while the passerines just call and pass us by, finches at the feeder, purple and gold, yet singing no songs, and the robins, hop-along casualties of this long-delayed spring that promises, to come but never arrives …
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Comment: Not so bad this year, the weather, but it’s been a funny winter, most strange, and totally discomforting, what with the pandemic, the lockdowns, the relief of going back to yellow, fresh lockdowns, and so many things happening everywhere while we were trapped inside where nothing was happening, save in the various forms of virtual reality that replaced quotidian reality with a mixture of faux, fake, and false, all wrapped up in a brown-paper bag of honey-sweet smiles and scowls, raised voices, and bottled anguish.
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Not on My Watch!
The black-and-white cat sits in the window and watches the ginger cat that lounges on the porch and watches the five deer that stand in the woods at the garden’s foot and watch the neighbor’s little dog that watches the raccoon that disdainfully removes the garbage can lid and fishes out the food, scattering paper and wrappers and cans as four crows sit in the tree and watch the wind as it whistles the papers round and round in a windmill that wraps itself round the feet of another neighbor who is watching the raccoon with open-eyes as a seagull flies above him and bombs him from above, damn seagulls, and the bird poop falls right on my neighbor’s watch face and he cries out “Oh no, not on my watch!”
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Comment: The photo shows the Omega watch that my father gave me for my 21st birthday. I am wearing it now, together with the bracelet that my four year old granddaughter, his great-grand-daughter, gave me for my birthday two years ago. Four generations in one photograph. Unbelievable.
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GBH on the TCH
She climbs up from the river where she’s been drinking. She ripples tawny, red, and orange across the TCH.
As quick as a fox, they say: black socks, brush winter-thick held high and proud, as quick as a shadow melting into dark woods on the highway’s far side.
Her cub follows close behind, but he’s not quite as quick. A passing car tries to swerve only to grind him into the gravel.
Sudden, that fox-stink, still clinging to my nostrils like a slow-motion death, dreamed at night, frame by bitter frame, until a life-time of silence seals the lips of parted lovers.
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