Memories

Thanks Giving

Thanks Giving

Driving from St. Andrews to Island View,
giving thanks for fall foliage as I pass
fields and forests filled with autumn blushes
blueberry patches brushed with cyan,
violet, sprinkled with primary red.

Trees crowd close, encroach, add yellow
and orange, fresh tonal values at each turn.

Sunlight strokes white touches of pointillistic
beauty through showers of golden leaves.

 Ochre and brown burn shades where pinprick 
black ghosts shadow grays through a gilded tree.

Cubist, this fire-bright, iron-sheeted shed.
Surrealist that rusted tractor, abandoned.
The road’s black thread ties together vivid
impressions of leaves as they tumble and fall. 

Midnight

A great NB Winery

Midnight

Primary red, this label, and the wine, fresh-drawn,
plucked from the bottle, tumbling tinto, into the glass.

Swirled, streaked ruby by overhead lights, bubbles
bright with hints of garnet, purple, brick at meniscus.

Sniffed, it smells of warm autumn days, scintillating
leaves, just crisping, turning color, and fruit all ripe.

Tasted: fruit bursts into hints of raspberries,
strawberries, spices, a touch of garrigue, mysterious.

Wine descends like water on a dry, hot, dusty day,
or rain after drought, when thirsty lands lap up

liquids, and rejoice in moisture’s blessings.
Raised now the glass, vineyard and vintners toasted,

midnight greeted, saluted the old day past and gone,
welcomed the fresh day walking in, swaddled, new born.

Carpe Diem

Autumn in the Garden

Carpe Diem

Seize the day. Squeeze this moment tight.
Nothing before means anything. Everything
afterwards is merely hope and dream. 

A tiny child, you chased wind-blown leaves
trying to catch them before they hit the ground
Elf parachutes you called them and trod with care
so as not to crush the fallen elves as they lay leaf-bound.

I stand here now, a scarecrow scarred with age,
arms held out, palms up, in the hope that a leaf will descend,
a fallen sparrow, and rest in my hand.

When one perches on my shoulder and another
graces my gray hair, my old heart pumps with joy.

Comment: Autumn in the Garden was framed by Geoff Slater who gifted it to me this summer. Thank you Geoff. A double picture, it shows the flowers and the trees with that first touch of drifting snow. NB it snowed here in Island View early September this year while we still had flowers and leaves. The poem, Carpe Diem, is from a series of quasi-sonnets. Quasi, because they rarely have 14 lines! Oh Petrarch: shake in your shoes.

Underwater Road

Underwater Road
Chuck Bowie

We met at St. Andrews, at low tide, on
the underwater road. In secret we
shared the closed, coded envelopes of thought,
running fresh ideas through open minds.

Our words, brief vapor trails, gathered for
a moment over Passamaquoddy,
before drifting silently away. Canvas sails
flapped white seagulls across the bay.

All seven seas rose before our eyes, brought
in on a breeze’s wing. The flow of cold
waters over warm sand cocooned us
in a cloak-and-dagger mystery of mist.

We spun our spider-web dreams word by word,
decking them out with the silver dew drops
proximity brings. Characters’ voices,
unattached to real people, floated by.

Verbal ghosts, shape-shifting, emerging from
shadows, revealed new attitudes and twists,
spoke briefly, filled us with visions of book
lives, unforgettable, but doomed, swift to fail.

Soft waves ascended rock, sand, mud, to wash
away footprints, clues, all the sandcastle
dreams we had constructed that afternoon,
though a few still survive upon the printed page.

Comment: I wrote this in St. Andrews during my residence at KIRA (June, 2017). Chuck drove down for lunch, and after we had eaten, we sat by the sea and discussed the writing projects on which we were engaged. I was busy writing a poetry collection, One Small Corner (now available on Amazon / KDP), and Chuck was plotting his way through a new novel, based on St. Andrews, with the title The Underwater Road.

More details on The Underwater Road.

Here is the purchase site on Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Body-Underwater-Road-Donovan-Thief-ebook/dp/B07CLPRG81/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Body+on+the+Underwater+Road&qid=1604981052&s=books&sr=1-1

… and it may also be purchased  at Westminster Books in Fredericton, and Mill Cove Coffee, in Miramichi.

Eyeless in Kingsbrae

Eyeless in Kingsbrae Garden

A feather upon the cheek,
this fern held fragile, hesitant
between fine fingers.
Touch and smell:
two senses engaged.

A paint brush sounds,
brush-brushing lightly
on expectant skin.
Faint the taste tested
suggestive on tongue tip.

No sight, just insight.
I have a sense of senses lacking.
My words reach out like fingers,
but they can neither retain
nor explain the meaning of it all.

Eyeless in Kingsbrae,
They push me, blindfolded,
around the garden.
Gravel crunches beneath
the wheelchair wheels,
sharpens my inability to be sure
of shadows and shapes
that are no longer there.

The ones who push me talk
and tell but cannot show.
How could they hold a rainbow
before my sightless eyes
or explain those lights that
crisp and crackle in the night sky?

There’s warmth in a color,
and heat’s visible to the touch.
Shocking pink has a different
feel beneath blind fingers,
and it has no name
that you and I, sighted,
would ever know.

Oh, Song of Songs, and the singer
deaf to his own sublimity.
Oh dealer of false cards,
fingerless pianist,
and dancer shuffling
on amputated stumps.

Comment: The poem Eyeless in Kingsbrae Garden is contained in my book One Small Corner: A Kingsbrae Chronicle (2017), available online at Amazon / KDP.

Monkey Throws Away the Keys

Monkey Throws Away the Keys

Monkey is tired of writing reports
that are never read.
He is fed up with frequently asked
questions and their unread answers.
To every lock, there is a key.
Monkey looks at the red and gold
locks of the last orang-utangs
and wonders how to unpick their DNA.

Monkey would give his kingdom
for a key, a key, a little silver key:
the key to a situation, the key to a heart,
the office key, the key to the door,
at twenty-one, the keys of fate,
the Florida keys, the key to San
Francisco’s Golden Gate,
a passe-partout, a skeleton key,
the key to Mother Hubbard’s cupboard,
where she hides dry bones …

On the last day, when monkey leaves work
he takes a lifetime of keys
and throws them down a deep dark well.

As they halve the distance to the water,
he listens to the sound of silence and wonders
if they’ll ever hit the bottom.

Monkey Temple:
the complete book, is available on KDP and Amazon.

Monkey’s Clockwork Universe

Monkey’s Clockwork Universe

Some days, monkey winds himself up
like a clockwork mouse.
Other days he rolls over and over
with a key in his back
like a clockwork cat.

Monkey is growing old and forgetful.
He forgets where he has hidden the key,
pats his pockets, and slows right down
before he eventually finds it
and winds himself up again.

One day, monkey leaves the key
between his shoulder blades
in the middle of his back.
All day long, the temple monkeys
play with the key,
turning it round and round,
and winding monkey’s clockwork,
tighter and tighter,
until suddenly, one day,
the mainspring breaks
and monkey slumps at the table:

no energy, no strength, no stars,
no planets, no moon at night,
the sun broken fatally down,
the clockwork of his universe
sapped, and snapped.

Candle Light

Candle-light

Five candles burn at my table.
Outside, the night wind howls like a dog
and scratches its pelt on my roof.

The wind has torn branches from the trees
and polished the evening frost until
it sparkles like eighteenth century silver.

A moth circles, sizzles, and flares.
I keep my vigil at night’s altar
and place a wrinkled palm
into the candle’s liquid flame.

Put out a candle, put out a child.
Who would put out a dog on a night like this?
Outside, playing tag between dark trees,
the wind runs wild.

Paella

Paella

A bullfrog lives in my computer.
He eats all the full stops and I can’t
type a period to end my sentences.

I imagine he thinks they are tadpoles,
though the commas, with their short,
twisted tails, would be visually better.

I could live without commas, I can’t face
an endless future with no periods in sight
and www-comma-com just isn’t right.

I guess I could survive a future without
frogs, though cuisses de grenouille appear
each summer at my local super market.

I ate a paella québécoise in a Spanish café
in Montreal once. It was full of frogs’ legs
and was very, very tasty. I wonder if I can
find that bullfrog and put him in a paella.

October

October

… and the wind a presence, sudden,
rustling dusty reeds and leaves,
the pond no longer a mirror,
its troubled surface twinkling,
sparking fall sunshine,
fragmenting it into shiny patches.

It’s warm in the car, windows raised
and the fall heat trapped in glass.
Outside, walkers walk hooded now,
gloved, heads battened down
beneath woollen thatches.

A wet dog emerges from the pond,
shakes its rainbow spray
soon to be a tinkle of trembling sparks
when the mercury sinks
and cold weather closes the pond
to all but skaters. Then fall frost will turn
noses blue and winter will start to bite.