Hiraeth

Carved in Stone 64

Carved in Stone
64

I cannot bring you
the sounds and smells
of my own backyard,
let alone those of Oaxaca.

The pungent odour
of the first drops of rain,
falling from a blue sky
into dry dust.

The tang of bees’ wax candles,
burning in the cathedral’s darkness
where la Virgen de la Soledad
clad in black velvet sequined with stars
stands on guard in her small side chapel

Nor can I bring you the high notes
sung at the golden altar
in Santo Domingo
by the old woman, dressed in black,
who sings here every day.

The central market
is a bustle of bursting scents,
rooftop goats snicker above me,
my neighbor’s German Shepherd
patrols the roof-garden
and growls in my ear.

Commentary:

Sun and Moon is the first book in the Oaxacan Trilogy – Sun and Moon, At the Edge of Obsidian, Obsidian 22. I travelled to Oaxaca for 6-8 weeks each year between 1995 and 2001. I taught there and also researched the language, the culture, and the Mixtec Codices. Quite simply, my Oaxacan experiences changed my artistic, linguistic, educational, and cultural life. How? I earned to distinguish between what I could, and couldn’t do. A simple lesson, but one that needs to be understood at the deepest level of understanding.

The lessons took in all of my five senses – touch – dry dust, carved wood and stone, the tares in woven blankets -, taste – mole, flor de calabaza -, sight – the castillo burning -, sound – animals, goats and sheep, herded to the market-, smell – the central market is a bustle of bursting scents – hearing – rooftop goats snicker above me. A select few that blended with music of guelaguetza and the dancing that accompanied the village bands. But the experience(s) went beyond that. I began to realize, deep down, who I was, what I was, and, perhaps more importantly, what I wasn’t, what I could never be a part of, what separated myself from the other, the other whom I loved, who loved me, but who could never be a part of me.


Carved in Stone 63

Carved in Stone
63

Words descend, soft and peaceful.
They brush my mind
with the hushed touch
of a grey jay’s soundless wings.

Yet the grey jays have gone,
vanished along with the grosbeaks,
evening, pine, and rose breasted.

Words can hardly express what I feel
in this diminishing world
when I inhale color and light.

Dawn bursts into bloom,
and the indoor hyacinth starts,
once more, to blossom.

Its immanent beauty
fills me with a warmth
that disperses night’s shadows,
taking away all sense of gloom.

Commentary:

The indoor hyacinth starts, once more, to blossom. Its immanent beauty fills me with a warmth that disperses night’s shadows, taking away all sense of gloom. Indeed it does. Once upon a time, it became infested with little bugs and was reduced to one leaf. Clare worked with it, spoke to it, cajoled it, and bit by bit it came back to life. Now it lives in the front porch in summer and returns to the house, southern aspect, in winter, to flourish when least we expect it.

Hyacinth, Jamaica in Spanish. And nothing more delicious than the miel de jamaica that one is offered in Oaxaca, fruit juice squeezed from the hyacinth flowers. “My wife has gone to the West Indies.” “Jamaica?” “No, she went of her own accord.” Humor flows and the hyacinth flowers, and I spend my winter hours sitting and watching my indoor flowers.

Yet the grey jays have gone, vanished along with the grosbeaks, evening, pine, and rose breasted. They used to flock on the picnic tables but as the weather warmed, they went further north. I remember when 64 mourning doves perched on the power lines. Now, we have two or three who look lonely in the garden and sound even lonelier. Words can hardly express what I feel in this diminishing world when I inhale color and light, but long for the passerines’ morning and evening flight.

But, in spite of all that, sad as it is, the hyacinth’s immanent beauty fills me with a warmth
that disperses night’s shadows, taking away all sense of gloom.

Daffodils

Daffodils

Winter’s chill lingers well into spring.
I buy daffodils to encourage the sun
to return and shine in the kitchen.
Tight-clenched fists their buds,
they sit on the table and I wait
for them to open.

For ten long days the daffodils
endured, bringing to vase and breakfast-
table stored up sunshine and the silky
softness of their golden gift.

Their scent grew stronger as they
gathered strength from the sugar
we placed in their water, but now
they have withered and their day is done.

Dry and shriveled they stand paper-
thin and brown, crisp to the touch.
They hang their heads as their time
runs out and death weighs them down.

Commentary:

A sad poem, really, for a wet, damp, dark, chilly day that begs for some light and warmth. And what warmth and light daffodils bring. Not to mention their delicate scent that lingers long in the nostril, faint, but intoxicating. For ten long days the daffodils endured. This was a joy in itself. Sometimes cut flowers wither so quickly. But ten days … wow! And they do indeed bring to vase and breakfast-table stored up sunshine and the silky softness of their golden gift.

Their scent grew stronger as they gathered strength from the sugar we placed in their water. Indeed it did. And the sugar itself enhanced their ability to linger on. A little Somerset trick that, all the way from Zummer Zet where the cider apples grow. And no, you can’t have real cider without real cider apples from real cider apple trees. But never forget Sally the Sozzled Sow – she got into the storage shed and drank about five gallons of the stuff. It was all over the newspapers. She got loose and knocked the milk churns over and rolled them in the clover. The corn was half cut at the time, and so was she.

Dry and shriveled they stand paper-thin and brown, crisp to the touch. So sad when this starts to happen. Then one day, they just fade away. And then they hang their heads as their time runs out and death weighs them down. Sad, really, as I said at the start – but we must never forget the joy and light and happiness they bring us when they are in their prime.

Carved in Stone 59 & 60

Carved in Stone
59

St. David of Wales once said,
“Do ye the little things in life.” 

I do, and I wander
along the banks of the River Taff,
admiring how wild daffodils
flourish each spring, in Wales.

Young, I run on the beaches,
Brandy Cove, Pwll Ddu, Langland,
Caswell, Swansea Bay,
and, as I write these words,
I hear my footsteps
echoing back through time.

Baudelaire’s words ring in my mind,
“Creativity is nothing more nor less
than childhood recovered at will.”

Or, as Pablo Picasso said,
“I have spent my life
learning to see, paint,
and write again, like a child.”

And on and on I go –
child-hood, youth, maturity, age,
then back to my second childhood,
when I can recreate
that youthful world
in all its joyous beauty.

60

Does life flows through me,
like water in a clepsydra?

Does it flicker like a candle
guttering on a church altar?

Is it circular, like a sundial,
or the Roman numerals
on the face of the clock?

Am I just flesh and blood,
doomed to blossom and flourish,
then wither and perish?

Or will some small part of me
linger on, an unchained melody,
with all my memories slowly erased.

Commentary:

Moo’s daffodils are painted and potted, not growing wild at all. They are still the national flower of Wales and they still grow wild, in the spring, in Blackweir Gardens and beside Roath Park Lake. At least, I hope they do. I haven’t been back to check for 37 years now. Maybe things have changed, and the daffodils have gone the way of the sky lark, the cuckoo, the cowslips, and the bluebells. I wonder if the foxes still wear gloves? Let me know if you know the answer to that one. Just write “I do” on the back of the usual postcard. And you know what to do with it.

As for me, I am moving into my second childhood and, in may ways it is so much better than my first one. Here, I am free to look back on my life, to harvest my memories, to paint what I want – well, what Moo wants, anyway – and to think my own thoughts. Thank heavens Moo doesn’t think for me, though he does get his fingers covered in paint when he reads my mind and puts paintbrush to postcard, and designs his designs.

I feel very sorry for Moo. I guess he never had a childhood, so therefore, ipso facto, he can never have a second one. How much he is missing even he doesn’t know. How could he? Mysterious Moo – I like that idea. Sólo el misterio nos hace vivir, sólo el misterio. Only the mystery keeps us alive, only the mystery. And if you guessed that the author was Federico García Lorca, then you can award yourself a glow of satisfaction, for I have no prizes to hand around.

But hold on a moment, that was the title of one of Lorca’s drawings, so he was the artist, yes, but maybe not the author. Picky, picky nit-picky! Another of the joys of second childhood – annoyingly spotting the minor slips of other second-childhood thinkers – and never, never ever admit the mistakes you might, or might not make, are your own. Blame someone else. There’s always somebody out there whether to own up to your errors, especially if the price is right.

Carved in Stone 58

Carved in Stone
58

Modern shamans
roam the pyramid’s flat top,
looking for its energy point,
not knowing that, seated,
peacefully in silence,
that power will seek them out.

The more they seek,
the less they find,
yet that power seeks me out,
because I no longer seek it.
Is that the secret of creativity?

Commentary:

A long time ago my judo instructor taught me the following –

“The more you strive,
you cannot grasp it,
the hand cannot hold it,
nor the mind exceed it.
When you no longer seek it,
it is with you.”

It was the same with the St. John Ambulance course that I took. The instructor told us that we might not remember now exactly what we were doing, but if the occasion arose, everything we were practicing now would appear before us and we would just do it, knowing exactly what to do. A rugby coach, I saw and met and solves several such injuries on the field of play. Something took me over and I did what I had to do.

I still don’t know how or why. But it is the same with creativity. “When you no longer seek it, it is with you.”

Just breathe deep and believe.



Latch-Key Kid

Latch-Key Kid

In one room in my head, I stand on a stool beside my father’s mother helping her to mix the cake she will later bake in the wood-fired oven of her black, cast-iron stove. Every time she mixes a cake, she places a small piece in a dish and bakes it just for me. As a child, I spent hours in that kitchen, watching her cook. When she boiled vegetables, she never threw out the vegetable water, but used it for boiling other vegetables or for making rich, thick, delicious gravy.

Later, with both my parents working, I became a latch-key kid. I spent all day in an otherwise empty house and cooked my own breakfast and lunch. I also prepared supper for my parents so that it would be waiting when they came home. I grew up loving to cook.

When I went abroad to spend my summers in Spain or in France, I spent as much time as possible in the kitchens, watching, listening, learning. The women always had time for a small child. Then men seldom did. Children should be seen and not heard. They just got in the way. That was the male attitude. I learned so much in those kitchens.

Later, in Santander, my landlady would place one egg, one onion, and one potato beside the stove. It didn’t matter what time I came back from a night out with the boys, my supper was there, a Spanish omelet, una tortilla Española, waiting for me to cook it. Sometimes she left me a piece of chorizo, but I preferred the omelets. I did enjoy making shapes and designs out of the chorizo – that was always fun.

Not many people knew about my cooking skills. One of my aunties always cooked for me. She told me that her husband didn’t even know how to boil an egg. The men in my family seldom cooked, except for my maternal grandfather, who learned how to fend for himself in the trenches and dug-outs during WWI. He taught me how to make stews and soups, rich and nourishing, and always better on the third day. He also told me what he put in them – and you wouldn’t want to know about what he hunted and scavenged to stay alive in those cold, dark days. Nowadays, so many of us just don’t know how lucky we are. I do know how happy and lucky I am, not to be homeless, not to be living out on the streets, dependent on soup kitchens, charity, and fighting the elements just to stay alive.

Banks of the Seine

Banks of the Seine

Gnawing at the carcass of an old song,
my mind, a mindless dog, chasing its tail,
turning in circles, snapping at the fragment
of its own flesh, flag flourished before it,
tournons, tournons, tournons toujours,
as Apollinaire phrased it, on a day
when I went dogless, walking on a mind-leash
before the Parisian bouquinistes who sold,
along the banks of the Seine, such tempting
merchandise, and me, hands in pockets,
penniless, tempted beyond measure,
by words, set out on pages, wondrous,
pages that, hands free, I turned, and turned,
plucking words, here and there, like a sparrow,
or a pigeon, picks at the crumbs thrown away
by pitying tramps, kings, fallen from chariots,
as Éluard wrote, and me, a pauper among riches,
an Oliver Twist, rising from my trance, hands out,
pleading, “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Commentary:

Intertextuality – how many different texts can you recognize in this one piece of verse? I can count six reminiscences of other poets, ones that have influenced me to a lesser or greater extent. A couple of novelists lurk in the shadows as well. Fascinating, eh? Do these voices echo in any other ears than mine? Good question – and does it matter if they do or they don’t? The main thing is that they harmonize, the old world with the new, the centuries that went before with the one that is with us now. Quevedo – “Vivo en conversación con los difuntos y escucho con mis ojos con los muertos.” I live in conversation with the defunct and I listen with my eyes to the dead.

And look at that painting. No, not the Banks of the Seine, but the banks of the Fundy, near St. Andrews. And it’s Moo, at his best, doing a cross between a cartoonist, a genuine artist, a surrealist, and an amateur artist who lends his paintings to friends when they want a picture of water, or a river bank, or something or someone else that will add to the intertextuality of his works. Yea, Moo. Go Team Moo, go. Long may you survive and work together.

Carved in Stone 50

Carved in Stone
50

Here, in the castle of my own home,
I sit and write and patiently wait
for the enemy’s superior forces
to arrive and overwhelm me.

But death is not the enemy.
He is the friend
who has walked beside me
every day, since the day
that I was born.

I know him and I trust him,
though I am unaware
of when he will come to call
and I am ignorant of the shape
he will finally take.

Commentary:

Francisco de Quevedo, the 17th Century Spanish Neo-stoic and Metaphysical poet, wrote “the day I was born I took my first step on the path to death.” And so it is, with all of us. Sometimes we are able to choose our paths, sometimes they are forced upon us, sometimes they appear – with choices – and we make our selection and move on.

There are so many roads to travel. For Antonio Machado (Spain, Generation of 1898) there is no road. There is only a wake upon the sea – “Caminante, no hay camino, solo hay estela sobre el mar.” We must look back, to see where we have come from and where we have been. But there are many other possible paths, beside that of the sea – gravel paths, cobbled ways, log trucking roads in the Canadian Forest, cattle roads, transhumance roads, winding roads, straight Roman roads, roads that run up hill, down hill, or twist and bend following the paths of rivers.

The picture above shows the old Roman Road that leads to the Puerto del Pico, in the province of Avila. It followed the contours of the hill and formed part of the Ruta de la Plata, the road that took Latin American silver from Seville to the Spanish capital in Madrid. Look carefully and you can see the modern highway that runs parallel to the old Roman road. Nowadays, that older road is used for transhumance, the movement of cattle from the valleys in the winter to the hills in the summer. The same road, the same pass, so many different uses, and the road a wake upon the path of so many lives.

Carved in Stone 36

Carved in Stone
36

Words, cast stones,
ripples spreading out
across water, reaching out
and beyond this shore,
traveling, how long,
in time and space?

Will they last longer,
than the sanderling’s prints,
their silent words upon dry sand,
wet, when waves come in
to wipe them all away.

Gone forever,
until next day,
when the outgoing tide
permits new birds
to create fresh messages.

Commentary:
La poesía se explica sola, si no, no se explica. Pedro Salinas (Spanish Poet, Generation of ’27). Poetry explains itself, if it doesn’t, it’s inexplicable.

The quote certainly works well for this poem! Not much else we can say about it. The phot (taken by Clare at Pointe Wolfe Beach, Fundy National Park) shows sandpipers, sheltering from the wind, not sanderlings. They are both beautiful shorebirds and can often be seen together.

Sign Language

Sign Language

A skater leaving marks on fresh ice
or a stone cast into a pond,
with multiple meanings, multiple ripples
moving slowly outwards,
to end up where?

Who knows? Not me.
I only know that the thrown stone,
like the spoken word,
can never be recalled.

Each word a stone,
and each stone leaving its mark
on many people of many cultures
and multiple languages,
though English is the language
in which I now write.

Frost and snow here this morning.
Not much, just a dusting.
I look out of the window
at the crows’ claw prints
on my yard’s white surface.

My eyes draw silence
out of the white space
with its runic language
written by the crows.

The meaning of meaning –
tell me, if you can,
what do they say?
What do they mean?
What do they want from me?

Commentary:

Intertextuality – this poem came directly from this morning’s commentary, with some minor alterations. The commentary itself, emerged from Carved in Stone, 35. Three separate steps in the great chain of intertextuality, where text speaks to text and the crows cock their heads, turn them to one side, listen, and write their answers in the snow.

Sometimes words just flow. Sometimes, I force them to flow. However, I have learned over the years that the secret is to relax and to allow the words to come to you of their own free will. Sometimes they whisper, occasionally they shout. But if you are willing to listen, you will hear them everywhere. And they have so much to say, if you will only learn to listen carefully and try to understand their language.