Sometime, make the time to drive to Alberton where the Great Blue Herons stand thigh deep in the incoming tide. Lobster boats spark stars from the waves.
They white-water surge through a gap in the sandbank where the lighthouse stands red and white, outlined against blue sky, golden sand, sparkling bay.
Follow the fast-eroding coastline, a little less each year, past Jacques Cartier Park to Kildare Capes. Black-backed gulls ride shotgun on the red sand beach. Piping plovers charge up and down the wind-rush of surf digging for treasure, the crustaceans that will fill their bellies and enable them to survive their long journey south.
Head north past Sea Cow Pond to North Cape. Quixotic windmills wave their arms, like giants. The sand and pebble reef stretches its low-tide footpath out to the lazy seals basking in late summer warmth. Sea-birds seethe in great white clouds while fishing boats bob on wild waves and a black horse hauls Irish Moss off the beach to be sun-dried on the shore.
An osprey hovers, drops its lightning bolt to spear a flapping flounder on sharp claws. The magic of that great bird’s fall and rise will drive a wedge through your heart and split it open.
My heart is an empty nest, all feelings fledged and flown. I yearn for the warmth St. Kevin felt when the blackbird settled, nested in his hand, laid her clutch of eggs.
Oh, the cold dark stare of the under-earth, growing its cold chill upwards through feet and knees, and the winter branch stiffness of hands frozen into concrete branches, week after week, until the blackbird’s eggs are hatched and fledged.
No saint am I. Just a father deprived of his distant child, of his granddaughter developing, growing older and wiser without him there to help her on her way, or hinder, as old men often do, unaware of the changing times and the ferocious pull of new ideas, new tides, the swashbuckling effects of the new world now upon us, a world we oldlings, so long ago fledged and flighted, will never understand nor grasp. How could we?
And yet that hand stretches out from the window of the cells that hold us, bind us, imprison us, and make us realize how strong are the wings of love that flutter in our ageing hearts.
Memories deceive me with their falsehoods, flashing shadow shapes, shifting with a move of the fingers, dog into man, shift, man into a frightened mouse, squeaking, like the ungreased iron-rimmed wheels on a farm-cart with its load of hay and snapping dogs. Watch out for the horse’s sideways kick, for the sting of the farmer’s cruel whip, for the dogs’ white teeth.
What magic lantern now slips its subtle slides across night’s screen? Desperate I lap at salt-licks of false hope that increase my thirst and drive me deeper into thick, black, tumultuous clouds.
My grandfather in the trenches, drenched in a gas cloud, groping, choking, invalided home, returning, so brave, to face that gas grave again and again, only to cough up the last of his tortured lungs thirty years later. I remember him bent over the table, struggling for breath, balancing his hesitant life against an immanent death. Today it is
so different. A pandemic storm lays waste to memories that dog my mind. At night a black dog hounds me, sends my head spinning, makes me chase my own tail, round and round. It snaps at dreams, shadows, ghosts of family members who drift, slowly fading, through my mind.
I try to track them through Ancestry, through Tarot Cards and Tea Leaves but they are all lost in a Mad Hatter’s illusion of a dormouse adrift in a teapot in an unkempt nursery rhyme of a tail within a tale and hunter home from Caer-Filthy hill, I return to find my house empty, my deserted body devastated, my future a foretold mess.
One of my best friends came over today and we talked. We also went out shopping: blinds and curtain rails. I can no longer put them up. He can. We had a fun time. So much exchange of information in the car and in the store and afterwards, coming home.
We left the mounting of blinds and curtains for another day. But I invited him to choose a painting from my collection to recompense him for his time, his care, his attention, his help, and to thank him for his friendship and his reaching out. He chose this one, Spirit Dance, the one above, quite unique, one of my favorites. It was one of two that he liked. This was the other to which he aspired.
I asked him to help me choose a painting for the cover of my last book, Stars at Elbow and Foot, and this is what he selected. It is now on the cover of the book. He has a great eye for art. Well, it matches mine and he chooses my favorites. So I am happy with that.
But my Thursday Thought is this: in writing we say “kill your darlings”. Meaning, there are some great ideas in our poems, stories, novels, but they don’t quite fit. We love them. But we must kill them and cut them out. Sure we save them for later, but oh, do they ever belong.
I have never sold a painting. I cannot say ‘money talks’ like another of my friends, because to me it doesn’t. El Poema de Mio Cid: ‘partieron como la una de la carne‘ — they parted like the nail from the flesh. But, as another friend of mine, a preacher, said, when I visited my father in hospital: “there are no pockets in shrouds — you can’t take it with you.”
I am grateful to my friend for accepting the gift of my painting. I know he will cherish it and that it will be happy with him. But oh, I miss it. No: I don’t want it back. I want it loved and appreciated and yes, I know that when I go, I will not be able to take it with me. Nor any of the others. Does anybody want to adopt them, my beloved children?
Someone stole the nose from a sacred statue. He placed it on his face and I watch it as it crosses the central square.
A moving shadow: zopilote flies high above. I talked to him once on a midnight bus. He begged me to fold his wings and let him sleep forever.
The balloon lady sells tins of watery soap. Children, newly released from school, fill my days with enchantments. They blow soap bubbles, tiny globes, circular rainbows, born from a magic ring.
The voices in my head slip slowly into silence. Some nights I think they have no need of me, these dreams that arrive in the early hours and knock at my window.
When morning comes, I watch them fade and then I know they cannot live without me. When I am gone, they will go too.
This photo just reappeared on Facebook, posted 17 October 2016. I couldn’t believe it then, and I can hardly believe it now. What an honor. What memories. Imagine: immortalized on a beer pump in the bar of a foreign-to-me-now rugby club.
“There is some far corner of a foreign bar that is forever Canada, and Wales. And in that bright brew, a shadow will remain, a memory, ghosting through, whose stay was not in vain.”
Vanity of vanities, all things are vanity. The Olde Order changeth lest one good custom should corrupt the world. The memories fade as faces age and friends grow distant. They fade away like dreams in the early light of day.
How could one not give thanks for the bounties of Thanksgiving? Listening to Cross Country Check Up, last night, as I have done for the last 55 years, I was amazed at how people, some of them in dire circumstances, were able to find things for which to be thankful. I haven’t made a list of the things for which I am thankful and I certainly didn’t call in to the talk show to give my opinion, but let me think…
I am thankful for the beauty of the natural world. Just look at that sunrise! Yesterday we walked in Mactaquac and admired the beauty of the changing leaves. Migrating geese put on a display, taking off from the waters of the head pond, flying, then settling down again. We: I am grateful for the presence of my beloved, still beside me after all these years. I am grateful that we are together and that we are both of us able to walk and indulge in this province’s autumnal beauties.
I am grateful for faithful friends. I will not name them all. If I did, this blog would never be finished. This morning, an e-mail from Geoff Slater, whose paintings and drawings have often appeared on the blog, spoke of the nature of ritual and how we use it. He spoke of external rituals and how, during times like these, when our normal lives are upside down, we lose the ability to follow our external rituals. This may cause dismay and a loss of stability to many. However, he also reminded me that we, as practicing artists, have established our own internal rituals. These keep us going in the difficult times, for they are always there to fall back on. Following his line of thought, I explored my own daily rituals, the ones that have kept me going throughout Covid-19. Thank you, Geoff, for those ideas and for your long-term friendship.
I am grateful for the initial offer, from the University of Toronto, to come to Canada to study all those years ago. Canada gave me a chance to challenge my established rituals and to build and shape new ones that were more suitable to my inner being, a being that I had kept well hidden from the Masters of the Universe who limited my creativity, and ruled the rituals of my Boarding schools and my undergraduate studies. Above all, I am grateful for that rich, inner world of creativity and dream and I am doubly grateful for those who have allowed me and encouraged me to express it and set it down for others to share.
So, Thanksgiving Day: a day on which to give thanks for all the blessings that are in our lives, large and small. Sure, times are tough. Sure, we could all do with more money. Sure, we could go on and on about our wants and needs. But today my want and my need is to give thanks for who, what, where, when and why I am. As my friend Norman Levine once wrote: Canada Made Me.
Meditations on Messiaen. Quartet for the End of Time.
3
The End of Time
A thin violin crying its cat-gut heart out in tears of sound, falling, rhythmic raindrops, down a grey-streaked face tight with stress and pain.
Such concentration, such soulfulness packed into each mindful note.
An audience of one, I sit, head bowed, meditating on the meaning of meaning and nothingness, the nothingness of being condemned to oblivion yet oblivious of the how and when.
Each note a hammer-blow, then, the piano hammering nail after nail into this coffin body I drag through the motions of extracting meaning from this meaningless life.
