Yours
Yours is the voice
that raises me up,
that rescues me
from the hands
that clutch me
in the stairways
of my dreams,
that saves me from
the jaws that bite.
Yours is the hand
that moves the pieces
on my checkerboard
of day and night.
Yours is the beauty
that strips the scales
from my eyes,
then blinds me
with light.
In Praise of the Other
I have lived with the Other. They treated
me well. To them I was the Other, yet
they fed me when I hungered, gave water
when I ran dry. I fell ill and they cared
for me, nursed me back to health. They taught me
their language, culture, history, and skills.
They loved me, never forced me to forget
myself and become one of them. They made
me what I am today: a believer
in the sibling-hood of woman and man.
Friday Fiction
11 May 2018
Woof!
The old man limped up to the check-out in Chapters and placed a brown, hand-made, Italian notebook on the counter.
“Did you find everything you were looking for?” The check-out girl inquired.
“No.”
“Oh dear, what were you looking for?”
“My dog. I lost my dog.”
“Here? In the store? I can page security. I’m sure they’ll find it.”
“No, you mustn’t do that.”
“It’s no trouble. What color is it? Male or female? What breed? Large or small?”
“No, no. You’re much too kind. I lost him at home.”
“I lost my cat last week,” the check-out girl told him. “We searched everywhere for her.”
“I searched for my dog. All around the block. The dog usually comes home. This time he didn’t.”
“That doesn’t sound good. We never found our cat. My mom said the coyotes got her.”
“That’s not nice. We lost a cat.”
“To coyotes?”
“No. To mapaches, you know, to raccoons.”
“I miss my cat.”
“Me too. I also miss my dog.”
“I hope you find him.”
“I will. Oh, look. Here he is. Safe and sound.”
“I don’t see him,” the check-out girl looked around the store from her vantage point behind the cash register but didn’t see any dogs.
“His name’s Woof,” the old man pulled a small, fluffy, black-and-white dog out of his pocket and put him down on the counter. “Here, you have him. He’ll help make up for your lost cat.”
“I couldn’t possibly …”
“Don’t be silly.”
“No. Thank you very much. But I can’t take your dog. Here, put him back in your pocket. Oh, and that will be eight dollars exactly.”
The old man held out a five dollar bill, a toony, and a loony.
“Thank you,” the girl placed the money in the till and the little bell chimed happily. “Here’s your receipt.”
“Thank you,” the old man turned and limped away.
When he passed through the exit barrier, the alarm bell rang, but he took no notice. He walked rapidly to his car, close by in the wheelchair parking spot. He pressed the starter button, placed Woof on the passenger seat, and drove away before security arrived. As he drove, the old man extracted a brindle hound from his coat pocket and waved him proudly.
“Hello Woof,” he chuckled. “I want you to meet Winnie. Welcome to the family, Winnie. You’re free now.”
He put his hand in his other pocket and pulled out a fluffy Dalmatian, all white with black spots.
“And this is Pooh,” he announced. “Woof, Winnie, and Pooh: all broken out of prison. We’re one big happy family.”
He tooted the car horn and Woof, Winnie, and Pooh sat up straight on the front seat, wagged their tails, and woofed in time to the tooted horn.
Recycling
“You never know when you might need it,” my
grandfather said, finger-nails cracking red-
waxed parcel string. Bright sealing wax rained down
on the tablecloth, covering it with hard,
scarlet chips. Wax cracked, tight knots emerged.
One by one, my grandfather first loosened
them, then sought the string’s free end, following
it along its snaking way from knot to
knot. Like Theseus following his twine
through the labyrinth below the palace, my
grandfather mused, hesitated, followed
the clues given him by the knotter’s mind.
Set free from its parceled knots and lashings,
he looped the string around his fingers and
tied the twine into a tight bow that he
stowed away for future use. Reef knots, slip
knots, sheep-shanks, bowlines, bowlines-on-the-bight,
he showed me how to tie them all. He taught
me too how to never tie granny knots.
“Never cut string with a knife: untie knots,”
strict his advice. I follow it today.
Commentary:
The photo shows my grandfather’s chair sitting before my basement desk where I write and store my books. I used to climb up the back of this chair when I was a tiny child, and blow on the bald spot on his head while he was asleep. Such memories nesting in the attic corner of the dormant mind. One day, I will write about that. Oh: I just did.
Darning Socks
(for Angela Wink)
My grandfather taught me how to darn socks.
I sat beside him by the fire and placed
a grey, wooden mushroom inside the sock,
stretching the sock wool to expose the hole.
He chose his colors with care, bright yellows,
oranges, reds, sky blues, anything that
stood out against the sock’s dark drabness. If
the socks were thin, he split new wool, pulling
it into individual strands that
he would draw through tongue and lips, wetting them
so they would thread with ease through the needle.
Curled wool threaded, I would cross-hatch the sock’s
hole, slowly forming a life raft that I’d
fill with colored wool. All my life, I have
darned socks, sewn buttons, mended my sweaters.
I always use bright colors, to my wife’s
dismay. Then, I know who did the darning,
and when. I still have my grandad’s First World
War sewing kit, all wrapped up in his signed
canvas wrap with his needles and some wool.
It’s lovely just to touch where his hands touched.
I still see dark blood traces where he pricked
his thumb, and where he sewed up wounded friends.
Commentary:
This poem comes from a comment, made by Angela Wink, on yesterday’s post. Such exchanges are precious and help create new memories. Thank you Angela.
Friday Fiction
6 April 2018
Big Blue Sea
… bad story I shout … because anger is stronger than fear … and I can’t analyse this story … I can’t look at it objectively … lucidity fails me … because I’ve been there … and because this story takes me back … returns me to that dark tunnel of the machine’s mouth … back to those flashing lights … back to the clacking teeth of the surgical saws … back to my own biopsies … those invasive surgeries … so deliberately concealed … so little understood … back to the memories of my mother … lying there … silent … needles taped to her arms … motionless but moving … ceiling lights casting orange shadows over African violet bruises on her arms … I communed with her in silence … my spirit seeking her spirit … in a wordless dance of two spheres … bonded by a common gravity yet circling suns … each in a different universe … spheres that would never again meet … not in this life … not in this dance … a beach … she was … with the tide running out … abandoned … empty … and nobody told me … nobody … said … a … word … as I sat there … and now … as I sit here … I find … I cannot write a word …
… yet when I dream … I revisit these scenes … or do they drop round to visit me … returning like dream-ships in the night … white sails flashing beneath the moon … pale figures restless on spider-fine cordage … and the sequence a black-and-white conjunction of something just beyond my fingers … shy sparrows that I reach out for … yet cannot quite grasp … nor can my night mind exceed them …an Easter flower on a white-clothed altar … flickering candles snuffed out between finger and thumb … dark ghosts of spirits spiraling … surreal images dredged up from the unconscious and paraded at the tide-mark edge of the semi-conscious mind … only to be flayed by the rays of the rising sun and scattered into a million diamond drops that cling to the eye-lashes … and I remember looking at the pastel-paint walls of her hospital room … or looking out at the place I parked the car … beneath her hospital window … and a black dog played in the car park … ran round in circles … chasing its tail … as my dreams chase their tails and weave their willow-wand images in and out of my Mind’s flawed flower basket … weird this fishing weir … these circled sticks netting dreams on the open sea … as a dream-catcher traps them at the window and holds them … stopping them from coming in … and they perch like chirping sparrows in search of breadcrumbs … welcome on the window-sill … singing their mourning chorus … and no … I will not mourn … I cannot mourn her passing … for she is long gone now … I watch the last bus … the last train … pulling out of the station … and me in my dreams abandoned on the platform … and the train pulling away … like a sailing ship … bearing her to her final holiday … a cruise across the big blue sea …
Herring Bones
Last winter, a heavy snowfall
toppled the garden wall.
Bricks and mortar now litter
the grass in untidy piles.
I take my child by an arm
and a leg and swing her round,
faster and faster till, dizzy,
she calls ‘no more’,
and I let her go.
She can hardly stand,
staggers like her grandfather
who lurches around the garden
leaning on a walking stick.
He jabs at the red-brick wall
he wants me to rebuild
and claws,
with twisted fingers,
at words,
bricks laid
like herring bones
and
caught in his throat.
