There are striations in my heart, so deep, a lizard could lie there, unseen, and wait for tomorrow’s sun. Timeless, the worm at the apple’s core waiting for its world to end. Seculae seculorum: the centuries rushing headlong. Matins: wide-eyed this owl hooting in the face of day. Somewhere, I remember a table spread for two. Breakfast. An open door. “Where are you going, dear?” Something bright has fled the world. The sun unfurls shadows. The blood whirls stars around the body. “It has gone.” she said. “The magic. I no longer tremble at your touch.” The silver birch wades at dawn’s bright edge. Somewhere, tight lips, a blaze of anger, a challenge spat in the wind’s taut face. High-pitched the rabbit’s grief in its silver snare. The midnight moon deep in a trance. If only I could kick away this death’s head, this sow’s bladder, this full moon drifting high in a cloudless sky.
Comment: This is the prose version, from Fundy Lines (2002). The prose version was based on an extract from a longer poem that first appeared in Though Lovers Be Lost (2000).Though Lovers Be Lost is also available on Amazon and Kindle.
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.
A single sunbeam: sharp blade of a heliocentric sword, it shatters the chapel’s dark.
Fragmented light speckles white-washed walls.
The priest’s face: a pallid lily truncated in the dawn’s pearly light.
A wanderer kneels and prays. A halo of sunshine runs a ring around her head.
Her flesh now clutches a statue’s marble hand.
Her pilgrim palm presses into granite forcing warm fingers into cold stone.
Her veins weave a warm spell over frosted rock.
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.
Angel Choir (on seeing the Northern Lights at Ste. Luce-sur-mer)
listen to the choristers with their red and green voices light’s counterpoint flowering across this unexpected son et lumière we tremble with the sky fire’s crackle and roar
once upon another time twinned in our heavenly bodies we surely flew to those great heights and hovered in wonderment now our earthbound feet are rooted to the concrete if only our hearts could sprout new wings and soar upwards together
the moon’s phosphorescent wake swims shimmering before us the lighthouse’s fingers tingle up and down our spines our bodies flow fire and blood till we crave light and yet more light
when the lights go out we are left in darkness our hearts fill with dreams of what might have been
Where’s Home (2) Part II of an open letter to Jan Hull
I ended yesterday’s letter with the words “There is a brighter side too, and I will get to that another day.” This is the day, and the brighter side is the sacredness of place. The Celtic Nations believe strongly in the sacredness of place. In the old religions we believed that places held spirits who dwelt in the rivers and streams, who lived in the trees and the orchards, who were a large part of the spirit of place and sacred space. You can still read some of this innate pantheism in The Chronicles of Narnia. Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French … we all have Celtic roots and, like the First Nations of Canada, we still believe in the sanctity of the land. This is an old tradition and a worthy one. Not all great ideas were born in Western Culture post the Industrial Revolution. Many pre-date our so called modern culture. Some should replace it.
I believe very strongly in the power of place. Sometimes, turning a corner one day, we know we are home. This is the feeling that comes so strongly through the second chapter of your book, Jan. Yes, the Maritimes (NB, NS, and PEI) are home for many people. It is indeed their One Small Corner. their querencia. What is a querencia, you ask? Well, it is the place that calls you, the place in which you want to live, the place in which you want to die. And yes, in this time of pandemic, death is on all our minds: those twin realities, sickness and death. Neither is easy. These times are not easy. But they become easier for those of us rooted in our time and our place and, like it or not, the human being, male, female, or other, must live in a dialog with their own time and place. This is the chrono- (time) -topos (place) of the Russian Philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin.
Life is so much easier when we are in our own beloved space. When we are out of it, away from home, down the road, that is when we suffer most, Sometimes we are still able to flourish. Oftentimes, we wither and perish, like leaves on the tree. You, in your book, Where’s Home?, have offered us a glimpse of what that one small corner, the province of Nova Scotia, means to your correspondents and the ones with whom you have held dialog. We are all of us richer for that experience. Thank you, Jan, and on all our behalves, mine particularly, please thank your contributors.
And this is the good thing, to find your one small corner and to have your one small candle, then to light it, and leave it burning its sharp bright hole in the night.
Around you, the walls you constructed; inside, the reduced space, the secret garden, the Holy of Holies where roses grow and no cold wind disturbs you.
“Is it over here?” you ask: “Or over here?”
If you do not know, I cannot tell you.
But I will say this: turning a corner one day you will suddenly know that you have found a perfection that you will seek again, in vain, for the rest of your life.
My body’s house has many rooms and you, my love, are present in them all. I glimpse your shadow in the mirror and your breath brushes my cheek
when I open the door. Where have you gone? I walk from room to room, but when I seek, I no longer find and nothing opens when I knock.
Afraid, sometimes, to enter a room, I am sure you are in there. I hear your footsteps on the stair. Sometimes your voice breaks the silence
when you whisper my name in the same old way. How can it be true, my love, that you have gone, that you have left me here alone? I count the hours,
the days, embracing dust motes to find no solace in salacious sunbeams and my occasional dreams.
Comment: Another golden oldie, polished, rewritten, and revised. Today is Clare’s birthday and fifty-five years ago today we got engaged, on her birthday, in Santander, Spain. I wrote this poem a couple of years ago when she was visiting our daughter and grand-daughter in Ottawa and I was left alone to look after the house. I will be including this poem in my new collection, All About Ageing … in an age of pandemic, on which I am currently working.
My vision of absence and of the bereaved wandering, lost, the house the couple once shared, is sharpened in this age of pandemic in which we live. My heart goes out to all those who have suffered short term or long term effects from the pandemic. My premonitions and visions, my memories and dreams, reach out especially to those who have lost loved ones and who live in the daily reality of that loss.
