She’d been there. She’d have walked those waxed floors, looked down at her feet to see her face distorted in the elbow-grease of sheen and shine.
Alone, she was, all alone, abandoned. Tonight, on her birthday, I feel the chill hand of her sorrow clutch my heart.
Who can reach in, who can melt the iceberg rising beneath my ribs? Who can warm chilled bones, charm lost feelings back into throbbing life?
Gone, all gone, lost, forgotten, forsaken, abandoned on those same ice floes, where she walked on thin ice, with the darkest depths calling out to her from far below.
Comment: My mother, had she lived, would have celebrated her 109th birthday. Watching Episode One of The Queen’s Gambit, I was overwhelmed by what my mother must have felt, all those years ago, when she lost another child. Did she actually feel and think in manner portrayed above? I’ll never know now.
Finley has left. She has left me with a selection of her art and instructions to ‘show it to the world’. S o, here we have the Portrait of Moo by Fin. I guess many of you don’t know who Moo is, but don’t worry about it, neither do I and Fin has been busy for three weeks, trying to work it out for herself. Oh dear – what can the matter be? Finish the song for yourself, if you remember it in any of its many versions.
Meanwhile, I go back to my old friend, Robbie Burns, with whom I spoke only yesterday. He spoke to me through my eyes and, as I sat there talking, I digested his words of wisdom: “Ah would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.” The giftie gie us is, as you well know, the Scottish dialect for what comes out in Standard English as the gift give us.
So that’s how Fin sees Moo. When I next meet him, if he cares to show up chez nous, I will show him Fin’s portrait and ask him what he thinks. Until then, his identity – and I am assuming he is a he not a she – must remain a mystery as mysterous as this mysterious painting that appeared on my desk.
Finley has decided that this is how we should see “man”, in all his or her complicated manifestations. Human / hu-woman – mankind – womankind – people-kind – art of this type has no gender attached. It is singular, so not people. It is you, it is me, it is all of us.
Finley has decided, quite rightly, that what she wants to paint, draw, or colour, is much more important than any of the page prompts in the drawing book I got her. That said, this could easily be a comic book cover – or the cover photo of my next book.
“I want to see the world again through the eyes of a little child” – Picasso. The gift of so doing is precious.
A friend wrote to me today and sent her greetings to ‘you and your bride’. Well, that delightful phrase set me thinking. Clare (my bride!) and I have known each other for 61 years and we have been married for 56 of them, 57 this Christmas. I often wonder how this wonderful woman has put up with me during all those years.
Mrs. Thomas Thomas, my good friend from the little village in Wales where my parents had their house, once told me about a friend of hers. That friend had been married for 35 years and had never had a quarrel or a fight with her husband. ‘There she goes,’ she told me one morning. ‘Never a fight with her husband. Bloody boring marriage, if you ask me.’
The point, I suppose, is that yes, there can be disagreements within a marriage, and doubts, and uncertainties, and questions about major decisions, and no, we don’t agree on everything? How could we? And one of the best parts about marriage, well, ours anyway, is agreeing to differ, and then making up again, as quickly as possible, after any disagreements.
Whatever, it is hard to argue against 61 years of togetherness and happiness. The secret formula? Clare’s – to learn my languages with me, to help me with my work, to lift me up when I am down. Mine – to love cooking for her, spoiling her, bringing her flowers, and trying to support her as she has supported me.
We have often led separate lives – Clare as a tennis player, a national gymnastics judge, a dedicated show secretary of the local kennel club, a show dog owner, groomer, and handler. Me – as a rugby player and coach, a researcher who has travelled frequently and visited important libraries in my field, a poet and short story writer who has taken and led workshops and writing groups.
We have also worked together at all levels. Each of my four graduate courses (MA, Toronto, 1967) demanded a paper every two weeks. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – paper #1. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday -paper #2. Saturday – rugby with U of T Blues or Toronto Irish. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – paper #3. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – paper #4.
I would sit in the kitchen and write the papers in longhand. Clare would sit at the other side of the table and type each page as I finished it. She did the editing too, when and where necessary. She also developed her computing skills faster than I did. Result: web pages, art work, design, photography, and several of my book covers. Our keys to success include team work, mutual assistance, deep caring and sharing, but separate paths, when and if we needed to take them.
So, there you have it. A swiftly-penned picture of me and my bride, or, as I call her, my better two-thirds. My life would have been very, very different without her. And don’t forget: behind every lucky man, there stands a wonderful woman.
Some have it, many don’t. Some find it floating one morning on their pillow, short or long, all gone, a dream faded in the light of day.
A woman’s crowning glory, or so they say yet I admire the bald skull, its stiff stubble stubbornly growing back beneath head scarf or cap.
The lucky ones wear wigs, often made from another person’s loss.
The bravest flaunt their baldness, battle flags their shining skulls, blazing like badges of glory, shiny medals awarded in this never-ending war against our own fifth column and the enemy who devours us from within.
Comment: Yet another of my friends is suffering from cancer. When will it ever end? This is my tribute to all who fight, or who have fought, the enemy within. Meet him head on. Never surrender. D o not give in.
“I work in a match factory.” “Do you put the heads on?” “No. I put the gloves on. They’re boxing matches.”
A golden oldie, still vibrant, from the Goon Show, BBC, 1950’s.
Your gloves are off now and they lie on the table where you work. How long have you had them? Fifteen, twenty years? Like good wine, carefully stored, old friends are better with age.
A second chestnut from the Goon Show: “Have you put the cat out?” “No, dear. It wasn’t on fire.”
And that’s another good reason why the water tower, and its full renovation, is so very, very important.
Bible and Water Tower, hand in glove: “And Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any of these.”
Comment: A gorgeous photo, colors and textures, light and dark, from my friend, Geoff Slater, the line painter and muralist. He is working on restoring the mural on the water tower in St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, Canada.
Septets for the End of Time ~ Why do the people? by Roger Moore
1
Divide and Conquer
They divided us into houses, Spartans and Trojans, and encouraged us to compete with each other, single combat, and then team against team, house against house, eternal, internal civil war.
We divided ourselves into Cavaliers and Roundheads, Monarchists and Parliamentarians, Protestants and Catholics, and we continued those uncivil wars that marred the monarchy, brought down the crown, and executed the Lord’s anointed.
We fought bitterly, tribe against tribe, religion against religion, circumcised against uncircumcised, dorm against dorm, class against class, territorial warfare. We defended our bounds, bonding against all outsiders to guard each chosen ground.
With it came the denigration of the other. Not our class. Scholarship boy. Wrong end of town. Wrong accent. We don’t talk like that here. Speak the Queen’s English, you… and here … we inserted the appropriate word of vilification.
Our wars never ended. We carried them from prep school to junior school, to senior school, sometimes changing sides as we changed schools or houses, always clinging grimly to our best friends, protectors, and those we knew best.
After school, all those prejudices continued to hold us down, haunted us through university, red-brick or inspired spires, Trinity Oxford, Trinity Cambridge, or Trinity Dublin, each gilded with the white sniff of snobbery that gelded us.
Alas, we carried them, piled in our intellectual rucksacks, through university, into grad school, out into the wide world, infinitely small minds based on prejudice and pride, continuing our tribal warfare, unable to understand anything at all, other than us or them, shoulder to shoulder, divide and conquer.
2
Rage, rage …
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you realize that you can do no more. What is it about family split-ups, the ugliness of a disputed divorce, the glue coming unstuck in an already unstable marriage, a financial settlement that satisfies nobody and impoverishes both sides of a divide?
And how do you bridge that divide when you are friends with father, mother, children and the wounds are so deep that everyone wants out, whatever the costs and whatever it takes? And what is it about the deliberate wounding of each by the others, leaving permanent scars that will never heal over, no matter how hard one tries?
And what is it about lawyers, when too many guests gather around the Thanksgiving turkey and knives are out for everyone to take the choicest cuts leaving nothing but a skeletal carcass, no flesh on the bones, and the guests all hungry and their empty bellies rumbling for more, more, more.
3
Reconciliation
Rant, I say, rant and rage away, rage, rage against the death of friendship, and loathing built now on what was once holy oath and undying love. This is a blood sport where even the spectators are spattered with the refined frenzy of friends turned into fiends and foes, and this is a protest, a rant against love that doesn’t last, that doesn’t stand the test of time, against families that break up, against a society that breaks them up, driving wedges and knives between people once bound by the puppet strings of love, against relationships that can no longer continue, against the rattling of dead white bones in empty cupboards where skeletons dance their way into legal daylight and the spectators call for more: more blood, more money, more blood money, and the engagement diamond is a blood diamond now, a tarnished garnet, and where is the Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, that spire inspired needle that will stitch their world back together, and stitch you back together when you’ve been shocked out of your own ruby-sweet rose-tinted world and torn into little bits in their oh-so-bitter one, the biters bitten and those bitten biting back in return, a new world this world of snapping turtles, turtles standing on the back of turtles, and turtle after turtle all the way down until this carnival world puts down its dead clown mask and turns turtle in its turn.
Roger Moore is an award-winning poet and short-story writer. Born in the same town as Dylan Thomas, he emigrated from Wales to Canada in 1966. An award-winning author, CBC short story finalist (1987 and 2010), WFNB Bailey award (poetry, 1989 & 1993), WFNB Richards award (prose, 2020), he has published 5 books of prose and 25 books and chapbooks of poetry.
Over 150 of his poems and short stories have appeared in 30 Canadian magazines and literary reviews, including Arc, Ariel, The Antigonish Review, theFiddlehead, the Nashwaak Review, Poetry Toronto, Poetry Canada Review, the Pottersfield Portfolio and The Wild East. He and his beloved, Clare, live in Island View, New Brunswick, with their cat, Princess Squiffy, but they live on the far side of the hill from the St. John River, with the result that there is not an island in view from their windows in Island View. Visit Roger’s website here.
rogermoorepoet 