Philosophy

Obsidian’s Edge 29

 

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El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.

Francisco de Goya.

5:00 AM

… bright flowers of penance purchased for a pittance finger knitted spider webs of silence spun into wrinkles between stars and evensong while an old film shadow boxes black and white photographs and a rowing boat lurches over the waves as if a soggy brown cardboard box had dropped down on a moonbeam to pluck the mote from a one-eyed jack-in-the-truck who surveyed his road map for the dead days lying in ambush next to the sudden bonfire that flared on Guy Fawkes night and ignited the world like a Jacky-jumper vaulting a Roman Candle as Catherine spun on her wheel and a sky full of stars wheeled round the North Pole and slid down the Big Dipper’s handle to launch a long white scar of lightning that scared night’s velvet mask and plucked a diamond feather from the peacock’s tail as it strutted through the garden of bifurcating paths where Borges left his summer footprints at low tide in the sandy grief of the autumn leaf that the red fox dripped and dropped as he fled in vain like blood sizzles drizzling from an open vein and observe I say the play of light as it glistens on the voices of young children reaching to pluck the church bells as if they were ripe fruit dangling before us in our dreams and the world is a handkerchief so small it is and now not so clean and so we dream these dreams and pluck this unripe apple from the eternal branch where it lay hidden kicking and struggling up like the float that bobbled then sank through deep water and memory bent itself into two like that fragile reed dead in the water lying as straight as a bowing string at a crazy angle   at the pillows edge where mouths flap open as shadows walk and talk and we slide back into sleep’s dark waters where there are no dreams and nothing from those dark depths is ever recalled …

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6:00 AM

a clicking of claws
needles knitting outwards
towards dawn’s guillotine

the alarm clock shuffles
its pack of sleeping hours

the church bell
lurches into action

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We have come full circle and the sequence of rewrites that I have dedicated to At the Edge of Obsidian / Obsidian’s Edge ends here, with the start of a new day in Oaxaca that will be very similar to the old day that has just passed us by. For those of you who wish to read the full sequence, in its correct order, it will appear (some time soon) under Obsidian’s Edge at the top of this page.

I would like to thank all those readers who have accompanied me on this journey. In addition, I would like to thank all of you who lent your voices to this sequence either below the line with your comments or, and I refer specifically to those who are close enough to know me in the flesh and blood of real life, with your verbal comments and telephone conversations.

I hope this will be the first of many journeys that we make together. My best wishes go out to you. I trust you will consider joining me in my next verbal adventure on this blog.

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Obsidian’s Edge 27

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El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.
Francisco de Goya.

3:00 AM

… often the imprisoned heart pinned like a butterfly and chloroformed into silence like a resurgent Guy Fawkes sitting on his bonfire and waiting for the universe to roll its coloured dice a captive and that heart singing as the dark rum of freedom bites into its jackdaw dreams of bright silver rings married to a bird’s leg and the round open eye of a cat staring at a Queen of Hearts as champagne bubbles burst in the mouth and dash on the tongue as they wash against the tooth’s white rock as it waltzes with the white caps that crest into broken ghosts who shuffle in and out like a pack of cards filled with knaves and the joker is belled with a red fool’s cap and a bladder on a stick as a tom cat’s tom fool grin melts in the mirror when the moon’s face skids and bounces off a snow bank where tranquil midnight mysteries trap trembling worlds in hand-blown glass bubble dreams that distort all distances clasped beneath clutching fingers while the crystal raindrops serve as an eye to behold the crimson glory of the hibiscus with its blood red stains where the baby fell from the rocking horse and confessed to a crime it never committed though speckled like a fresh trout it was drawn from deep water and blamed for the rainbow fire that flickered flames to the harsh crisp sound of the candle licking at its waxen jail where flower faces float framed against the white-washed wall as the wide-open staring eyes of the snowy owl speckle a yellow madness and its feathers are nails to be fired into  a pottery tree in this harsh somniferous light that breathes fear and fire into shavings of dry bark and a beaver gnaws at the roots of the world as an accusatory beak points at the funneling snow and puffed up feathers plump out a body so thin it is unfit to fight these flames of ice or withstand these snow stones cast by blameless flint-eyed innocents who have never themselves done anything wrong though they spark at the trough with one eye clouded by a spider web of hate and the other a sharp sun peering through clouds condemned like a donkey to walk round and round crushing the heart out of the maguey in an interior world of  dust and stone where the mote in another person’s eye is larger than the beam in one’s own and slant-eyed dogs eat dust and shadows of dust as they prowl through the courtyard and bark at the full moon blazing above this world that is sacrificed to a madwoman’s madness and an ancient flesh-devouring god who lives in a nearby volcano and is stoned all day on tequila and mescal …

 

Peace: Flash Fiction

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Peace
Bistro 17

His cold hand squeezes a broken razor blade between index finger and thumb. His fingers remember how the blade slips along the grain of the balsa wood to carve the ligament and bone that builds the airplane. Using the same technique his fingers invent new ways to test his wrist’s pale flesh. Pins and needles dance their electric shock along a cold cut of sliced skin. A red rivulet seeps to the surface. Lips pinch. Teeth clench. The blade sinks deeper. An icy fire: the cold that burns, the heat that freezes, fire on the flood, and the red blood spurts.

… fear in the gut … an animal urge to surge to and fro and run … feet trapped in mud… dragging through deep sand … crabs’ claws clinging and drawing back … somewhere in his mind’s attic in the scramble of flotsam lining the beach a grey rat scavenges … dry bones … blunt snouts snuff the candle that once brought him a glowworm of hope …

Cold sweat flows, thickens, then dries. A voice inside his head cries out to the emergency numbers on his frozen cell phone but his fingers no longer respond to his mind’s dark urgings. Is this the beginning of the end? Is it the beginning of a world without pain, amen? A century of centuries flash through what’s left of his mind in a single second.

Eternity: that long, dark, endless, winter night — no stars, no sun, no moon, no spark, no hope, just this eternal cold that holds all motion suspended.

Somewhere, within his rib-cage, his heart is a caged animal raging against the white-bone bars. It sees. It senses. It smells the fear that falls to his feet and flows out from his armpits. Nostrils flare and stiffen in a bestial desire that flesh holds for fresh torn flesh. A black velvet band binds eyes, ties hands at the wrists, and pulls itself tighter and closer across his chest. His heart, a stone now, cast into an icy pond. As it descends it bumps into the bodies of vestigial memories that have been here before.

Somewhere in this Arctic night white pads shuffle as sleek feet move across the snow. The polar bear’s snuffle is a whimper of hope that his end will come swiftly in the bright light of midnight descending, all red in tooth and claw. The nightmare draws closer, ever closer with an acquiescent shuffling of feet. Face to face, present and past are ambulant tenses that foretell no conditional. He has no future, let alone a future perfect. A dislocation of infinitives stretches into an intangible infinity.

Lips move and promise an end to heat and cold. Here, they say, is darkness without memory; here is sleep bereft alike of nightmare and dream; here is oblivion; here is the cessation of strife and struggle; here is peace.

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Writing: To Task or Multi-Task?

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Writing: Task or Multi-Task?

“To task or multi-task? That is the question.”

In the lonely world of creative writing, be it in poetry or in prose, is it better to continue with one text until the task of writing it is thoroughly finished? Or should we flit from text to text, developing several at once and thus multi-tasking in the best sense of the word? This is a key question in the revision process and relates directly to the concepts of write, re-write, revision, revisionism, and the creative process, all of which have been mentioned both in this blog and in the comments to this blog. However, there is no single answer to this seemingly either / or question as many factors must be considered.

  1. Deadlines:

Anyone who has worked with strict deadlines knows that they matter more than anything else. “I want this work on my desk by 4:00 pm today,” says the manager rubbing the magic bottle in which the genie is kept. “Yes, ma’am,” says the genie bowing before vanishing back into his bottle. Only one thing matters, the task in hand, and there can be no multi-tasking.

  1. Novellas and Novels:

With longer texts, while there might be room for manoeuver, provided no deadline is in sight, it is better by far to focus on the task in hand — the extended narrative — and to dedicate all tasking and multi-tasking to that prime task. The majority of writers who have written on the art of writing, including Stephen King, Graham Green, and E. M. Forster, emphasize the necessity of sticking at it, maintaining focus, and getting on with the task. Graham Green’s recommended approach is to write four to five pages a day, re-reading them and revising them the next day, before writing another four pages. That way the events, the action, the characters, are kept well in mind. In addition, Joan Clark and Norman Levine, in their workshops, advise writers to get to know their characters intimately, to think about them, and to write and rewrite until they come living from the page. Anyone who has taken a longish break and then returned to the writing of a novel knows just how difficult it is to get back into the mind of those characters. With an extended narrative, a dialog abandoned is a dialog lost. And one must learn to listen to one’s characters and to never forget what they have said, mustn’t one?.

  1. Poems, Prose Poems, and Flash Fiction:

This is where multi-tasking can truly take place. The brevity of these pieces, and I classify epic and extended poetry with narrative rather than with poetry, allows the writer time to pick the pieces up and put them down again, to play around, to abandon the text and to return to it later. Being shorter pieces by definition, one can re-read them with ease, correct them at leisure, and research around them with impunity. In an extended narrative, or when writing to a deadline, focus is necessary. With shorter pieces, easily recalled, procrastination is a pleasure, not a crime. With poetry, focus is sharper but for shorter periods.

  1. From Poem to Poetry Book:

As the poems accumulate and the writing, or rather the putting together, of the collection becomes more important, so the need to concentrate and single-task, rather than to procrastinate and multi-task becomes paramount.

These are my initial thoughts on Task or Multi-Task. What happens when we apply them in real life to real questions?

  1. On Revision (Chuck):

Will this exercise (revision of older texts) provide you more gratification than starting new ones that may or may not be so important to you?

The question of revision is key. While I would like to avoid revisionism (Al: There is value in showing poetry as a snapshot in time (if only to avoid endless revisionism), the question of how to revise a text is of maximum importance. The text to be revised may be old or it may be recent, but the act of revision — how and why and what to revise — is one that must concern us as writers if we are to eschew automatic writing in a search for le mot et la phrase justes. If I can learn from the revision of older texts what I need to look for in order to revise newer texts, then my search for a way in which to recognize and achieve better form of writing can be justified, for the techniques discovered can surely be applied to future texts as well as to past ones.

  1. The young Roger who was once you is no more (Kevin):

This is a beautiful thought: thank you, Kevin. Much of that earlier writing must stand as it is (and was) as a monument to what and who I was back then. However, some thoughts and phrasings may well be weak and need revision. The recognition of weakness and the realization of how to strengthen and how to renew is surely a part of our ongoing growing writing process. That is what I would argue, anyway. I would argue further that revision is NOT multi-tasking, but is single-tasking in the sense that I, as reviser, am teaching myself how to revise: an ongoing process in the act of creativity.

  1. Conclusion:

In my current situation, I have five creative works (Echoes …, Waiting, Bistro, Stars … , People … ) lying fallow and waiting for their final touches. As I look back on what I have previously written and how I have written it, I am, in my opinion, multi-tasking. That is to say, I am working with many texts rather than concentrating on a single text. However, at the same time, I am working hard on a single task: that of teaching myself, once again, how to revise and how to rewrite. Hopefully I will put a little, objective distance between my current self and my recent texts. Then, when I return to them, I will be able to take them, one at a time, and revise them properly. That is my hope and my intention.

To task or to multi-task … writing or re-writing … each has its place in the creative process. To conclude: I thank all of you who contributed to this conversation (mentioned or not!), and I wish you joy in your (re-)creativity.

Selecting a Selected

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Last Year in Paradise, my first book of poetry, was published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books (Fredericton, NB) in 1977. I am once more re-reading Last Year in Paradise  in search of some early poems to include in the Selected Poems that I am putting together.

As I leaf through the pages, the words of T. S. Eliot come to my mind: “every attempt / is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure /  because one has only learned to get the better of words /  for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / one is no longer disposed to say it.”

So: how do I select from poems that no longer say what I want them to say or that are expressed in a way that I am no longer disposed to use? I keep struggling with these ideas. Are my selections signposts along the way of my poetic development? Do they say ‘this is what I was, where I came from’? Or should I re-write, revise, and bring thoughts and poems up to date to fit in with my current way of thinking and expressing?

The first poem in the book illustrates this quandary in metaphoric fashion.

Renovating

The carpenter swings
His bell-faced claw hammer
The closet’s gyproc sides
Tremble
Shiver into dust

Each splintered layer
Reveals
The closet’s secret skeleton

Memories
Spill out flood in
Shake grinning skulls
Like jacks of this box-room

Released from sloughed skins
We stand knee-deep
In a debris of recollections

As I re-read this poem, the scene comes back to me in vivid detail. An old closet cluttered the small room downstairs in our first house, an old army home. We needed more floor space, not another small room. As we tore the closet down, different layers of wall-paper showed up and we found ourselves knee-deep in memories of other times, other places, other renovations.

As I re-read, I also remember working with my first editor, Fred Cogswell. I recall the typed manuscripts going in to his office and the pencilled suggestions and corrections coming back out. What I no longer remember is how much of this poem was actually mine and how much was his. Re-reading it, I find I have no desire to re-write it, to resurrect those memories that the poem preserves. But I do feel an urgent need to trim the poem, to weed it as if it were a flower-bed. I notice repetitions, a doubling of statements, an excess of adjectives … I would like to suggest more with less words. The poem needs minor readjustments. As I rethink, I come up with the following.

Renovating

The carpenter swings
his hammer
The closet’s gyproc sides
shiver into dust

Each splintered layer
reveals the closet’s
secret skeleton

Memories spill out
shake grinning skulls
jacks in this box-room

Released from sloughed skins
we stand knee-deep
in a debris of recollections

I find this sharper, less cluttered, and perhaps a good poem with which to begin my Selected Poems. I need a title for the Selection and will share some thoughts on that later. A Debris of Recollections springs to mind as a first possibility, but there are many other possibilities. In the meantime, I will begin a new journey on this blog and along the way I will read, re-read, commentate, and occasionally re-write the poems that I select.

I invite you to accompany me on this journey. I look forward to any conversations we may start and any comments you may care to make along the way.

My Top Ten Books

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My Top Ten Books

For Tanya Cliff
https://postprodigal.com/2016/07/14/top-ten-books-that-changed-my-life/

It sounds so easy, doesn’t it, to choose your ten favorite books? But really: it isn’t.

Clare’s great aunt made the best sponge cakes and rock cakes I have ever tasted. Her formula? Not weights and measures but a simple scale: the egg on one side, the flour on the other — and balance them.

How do I weigh a book?

I think in terms of authors rather than their individual books. For example, on one side of the scale place Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire and on the other, his Petits Poèmes en Prose. Literary and cultural history would opt for Les Fleurs du Mal, and quite rightly so. My own personal preference, and I love them both, is for Petits Poèmes en Prose. De gustibus non est disputando / there is no arguing over taste. My choice is for Baudelaire, the author, rather than for one of his works, selected above the other.

If I apply this theory to other authors, what happens to, for example, William Shakespeare? Must I choose MacBeth over Henry the Fifth,  King Lear over Julius Caesar or A Midsummer Night’s Dream over The Merchant of Venice? And what if I refuse to do so? I would much rather choose Shakespeare over any of his plays, the Complete Works, including the sonnets, over any single play. And why shouldn’t I?

By extension, should I choose Shakespeare over Lope de Vega? Corneille over Molière? Racine over Calderón de la Barca? Mira de Amescua over Jean Anouilh? Bernard Shaw over Samuel Becket or Beaumarchais or Ionesco? And look at how Euro-centric (English, French, and Spanish) I am, especially when I am not familiar with the great playwrights of other Western nations: the Russians, the Norwegians, the Germans … and yet they are all Europeans. Are there no other literary nations in the world? Of course there are, but I am not that familiar with their literature and culture, and there is only so much a reader can read in its original form.

So, blessed and privileged as I admit I am, I can read books in English, French, and Spanish … lucky for me. However, I admit to difficulties with books written in Portuguese, Italian, German, Catalan, and Galician. As for Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Arabic … I can only offer my apologies, but for me, these are closed books and I can only reach them in the translations, however good, however bad, that are placed before me. This is true too of the Pre-Columbian Mexican codices, the Zouche-Nuttall, the Vindobonensis et. al. These are also books and they outline the peoples and cultures of Mexico as they were before the arrival and conquest orchestrated by Cortés. And let us not forget Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the man who, in later life, wrote the true history of  Cortés’s conquest. And speaking of conquests, how about Julius Caesar’s Bellum gallicum, his personal account, in the third person, of his conquest of Gaul? As a school boy, long ago, I struggled through it in Latin, but I enjoyed it later, in translation.

Translation: traductor / traidor, according to Cervantes, who was undoubtedly following someone else, means translation / betrayal … or does it? Translation: the reverse side of a tapestry (also Cervantes) from which we may through a glass, darkly, glimpse only shape and shadow while stumbling over all those knotted threads … so here’s another question:  why would we choose a translation, with all its flaws, over a work we can read and enjoy and hopefully understand in the original?

So far, I have mentioned mainly playwrights; Cervantes was a playwright and wrote a goodly number of plays (Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses). I should also mention novelists. Charles Dickens, for example; or Honoré de Balzac or Gustave Flaubert or Marcel Proust or Pío Baroja or Benito Pérez Galdós or Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Fuentes or William Faulkner or Kurt Vonnegut or William Golding or Chuck Bowie or John Sutherland or Kevin Stephens … not to mention Charlotte Bronte … Emily Bronte … Jane Austen … Virginia Woolf … Should I then choose just ten novelists and forget the world’s playwrights? And how can I choose just one book from a single novelist’s vast production, think Trollope, think Balzac?

What about poetry? My ten favorite poems? My ten favorite books of poetry? My ten favorite poets? Perhaps the latter is more achievable. If that is so, I must then choose between Quevedo … Góngora … Antonio Machado … Juan Ramón Jiménez … José Hierro … Wilfred Owen … Dylan Thomas … Gerard Manley Hopkins … Baudelaire … Verlaine … Rimbaud … Prévert … R. S. Thomas … Federico García Lorca … Miguel Hernández … T. S. Eliot … Seamus Heaney … Pedro Salinas … José María Valverde … and how do I choose between the writers I know and love … Patrick Lane … Richard Lemm … Fred Cogswell … Norman Levine … Donna Morrissey … Susan Musgrave … Joan Clark … Erin Mouré … and the ones I work with on a regular basis … Jane Tims … Kathy Mac … Shari Andrews … Michael Pacey … allison Calvern … Ian LeTourneau … Judy Wearing … Rachelle Smith … Cheryl Archer … Judith Mackay … Julie Gordon … ten poets … ten books … ten poems … ten fingers … ten toes … ten commandments … only ten?

Hold on a second: I have forgotten St. John of the Cross / San Juan de la Cruz, one of the western world’s great mystics. I must also mention St. Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the catholic church, and Fray Luis de León, and now I am about to enter a great cloud of unknowing in which mystics, some named, some unnamed, have blessed us with their life thoughts and works.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold … and I have also forgotten W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and I have failed to remember the Poema de Mío Cid and the anonymous epic poems and ballads of the European middle ages, some of which are so deliciously delightful. Alas, I will be forced to abandon so many of my teachers and my friends … ten books, ten speeches, ten lectures, ten words … my life in literature reduced to ten teaspoons of instant coffee, instant tea, instant knowledge.

“My friends, we will not go again
nor ape an ancient rage;
nor let the folly of our youth
become the shame of age.”

Oh yes, that’s G. K. Chesterton. I had forgotten him. When asked what book he would take with him to read in exile on a desert island, he replied: “Green’s Practical Manual of Ship Building and Ship Sailing.” Now that’s a book that should be in everybody’s top ten, especially with the seas rising and disaster lurking round every corner of the suspicious, weather-warmed mind.

However, as I look back on my reading life, believe it or not, some books do stand out. When I entered graduate school and realized the enormous amount of reading that was being thrust upon me, I took a speed reading course. Over the ten weeks of that course my reading speed rose sharply from about 200 words a minute to 800 words a minute. Without that one book, I would have been unable to read so many of the others. Where is it now? It is not on my shelves: ah yes, I gave it to my daughter when she went to law school.

The second special book is the Spanish text book that, in regularly updated versions, I relied on for teaching basic Spanish grammar throughout my academic career in Canada. Without that textbook and the employment it ensured me, I would not have been able to put my family’s bread on the table. I guess you might call it influential. Perhaps the third special book is my own doctoral thesis: that allowed me to gain academic employment and is so very, very special to me, but for all the wrong reasons.

Ladies and Gentlemen and Fellow Bloggers, here I am, marooned in Island View, with not an island in sight, and no reason, as yet, to build a librarian’s arc. I will now replace my selected books and authors back on the shelves from which, one by one, I have taken them down, dusted them off, and glanced through the pages. I admit my inadequacy. I cannot for the life of me choose ten books, let alone ten authors. I lay down my pen. I remove my fingers from the keyboard. I abandon my task. Soon I will leave the room with one of my favorite books in my hand. Will it be Jane Tims’s Within Easy Reach or Chuck Bowie’s Steal it all or John Sutherland’s master work, The Two-Shot Compendium. I think I’ll go with Two-Shot and re-read the first story, Two-Shots Lands in Trouble, as I sip my mid-morning coffee. Meanwhile, I will leave you with this thought from Guillaume Apollinaire.

Je voudrais dans ma maison
une femme ayant sa raison,
un chat passant parmi les livres,
et des amis en toute saison,
sans lesquels je ne peux pas vivre.

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Miracle: Flash Fiction.

 

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Miracle
Bistro 15

A tiny man in a dark brown robe bustled into the library.

“Brother Marcos: come quick. There’s a miracle. We’re witnessing a miracle.”

Brother Marcos raised his eyebrows and Robin looked horrified. Will didn’t know what to think.

“A miracle?” Brother Marcos asked. “What kind of miracle?”

“There are angels and visions. Oh, I can’t explain. It’s happening now. You must come and see. Oh, you must come and see.”

The tiny man scampered out of the library door and Robin and Will followed him.

“Ship of fools,” said Robin to nobody in particular. “We’re all sailing in a ship of fools.”

“Wait and see,” said Brother Marcos. “We must not pass judgment. Wait and see.”

The man in the brown robe led them to the main altar at the heart of the monastery where the lignum crucis stood on display.

A group of tourists clustered around a man on his knees in front of the true cross. A ray of sunlight pierced the stained glass window and picked out the kneeling figure whose arms spread out like an angel’s wings as he knelt there motionless.

It was LJ. His eyes were open and his chest hardly moved. Fragments of colored light from the stained glass window flowed over and around him and at times they gave the impression of flowing through him too. They gifted him with what, in the shifting light of the sun’s ray, seemed to be a halo round his head. Golden specks of dust sparkled in the sun’s bright rays and danced like little angels in the air.

Brother Marcos drew in a deep breath, knelt, and made the sign of the cross.

“Little angels, ascending and descending,” he mused out loud. “How many, I wonder, could dance on the head of a pin?”

“It would depend on the size of the pin,” said Robin. He pushed past the staring crowd. Some were on their knees, their rosary beads clacking through their fingers. Others stood and looked on in wonder at the light descending. Others crossed themselves and looked towards the altar where the lignum crucis was displayed, the time-blackened nail hole exposed in all its glory.

“Come along, now, LJ,” said Robin, touching him on the arm. “That’s enough of that. Get up off your knees now. We’re going.”

There was a low mumble of disapproval from the absorbed spectators.

“Don’t touch him,” said one.

“It’s a miracle,” said another.

“Noli me tangere.” The voice, a deep voice, not at all the voice of LJ, rose seemingly from the kneeling man’s mouth.

The crowd sighed. Some drew closer, in seeming awe. Others drew back in fear.

“I didn’t know LJ spoke Latin,” Will said.

“He doesn’t,” Robin shook his head. “But he could have learned those words at any time while he was in school. Even I know them. It’s a neat trick with the voice, though.”

“It’s no trick,” Brother Marcos crossed himself. “We have witnessed other miracles in this very place, though none quite like this.”

“This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” The voice spoke again. And immediately the crowd responded and with the exception of Robin and William those still standing dropped to their knees and joined in the prayers. More rosaries appeared.

“Let the night’s stone be rolled away. Let sunshine pierce the shadows. LJ, my son, pick up thy cross and follow me.”

Two things happened almost at once. First, the sunray that illuminated the scene flickered and vanished and then LJ toppled over and lay on his side.

 

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Obsidian’s Edge 23

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11:00 PM
Calling it a day

1

This auriferous sky,
sewn with sharp sequins.

Is there a warp, I wonder,
a lurch towards meaning,
a leaning towards
sun or moon?

When they planted
our first footsteps
did those little prints
take root and grow
or did they wander,
restless,
across this planet?

A rampant foot stands firm
on the highest rampart:
instant gratification,
timeless possession,
each passing cloud.

2

A rocket streaks upwards.
Immediate
this release from the sender’s
earthbound misery
or is it merely
a message of anguish?

Who knocks
now at heaven’s gate?

The low moon glows:
lesser incandescence,
departed sun.

3

A satellite glides
its razor edge,
slicing distant pin
pricks of light.

The moon rides
her orange unicycle
across a thin black
line of hill.

Here on the azotea,
midnight slowly
covers the sparkling town
with a dark gray cape.

4

If their grief is our grief,
and all grief is one,
do we all then bleed in vain?

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Nochebuenas, tulipanes,
flowers of every crimson hue
pour blood from each
thorn-pierced wound.

5

This zapotec measuring cloth,
this mixtec weaving wool,
this trique with her knife:

who will sever the artery
that binds us to the loom
at Obsidian’s Edge?

Building on Sand: Poetry

Building on Sand

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1
Everywhere the afternoon
gropes steadily to night.
Some people have lit fires;
others read by candlelight.

Geese litter the river bank,
drifts of snow their whiteness,
stained with freshet mud;
or is it the black
of midnight’s swift advance?

They walk on thin ice
at civilization’s edge.
Around them,
the universe’s clock
ticks slowly down.

2
Who forced that scream
through the needle’s eye?

Gathering night,
the moon on the sea bed
magnified by water.

Inverted,
the big dipper,
hanging its question
from the sky’s dark eye lid.

Ghosts of departed
constellations
walk the night.

Pale stars scythed
by moonlight
bob phosphorescent
flowers on the flood.

3
The flesh that bonds;
the bones that walk;
the shoulders and waist
on which I hang
my clothes.

Now they stand alone
beneath the moon
and listen at the water’s edge
to the whispering trees.

They have caught the words
of snowflakes
strung at midnight
between the stars.

Moonlight is a liquor
running raw within them.

4
There are striations
in my heart, so deep,
a lizard could lie there,
unseen, and wait
for tomorrow’s sun.

A knot of
sorrow in daylight’s throat;
the heart a great stone
cast in placid water,
each ripple
knitted to its mate.

Timeless,
the worm at the apple’s core
waiting for its world to end.

Seculae seculorum:
the centuries
rushing headlong.

5
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.”

6
You can drown now
in this liquid
silence.

Or you can rage against this slow snow
whitening the dark space
where yesterday
you placed your friend.

The silver birch wades
at dawn’s bright edge.

Somewhere,
sunshine will break
a delphinium
into blossom.

7
Tight lips.
A blaze of anger.
A challenge spat
in the wind’s 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.

Full moon
drifting
high in a cloudless sky.

8
After heavy rain
the house shrinks.
Its mandibles close.

A crocodile peace
descends from the jaws of heaven.

I no longer fit my skin.
Iguana spots itch.
Walls encircle me,
hemming me in.

The I Ching sloughs my name:
each lottery ticket,
a bullet.

None with my number.

9
Late last night I thought
I had grasped the mystery:
but when I awoke
I clasped only shadows and sand.

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Writing or Re-Writing? 5

 

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High Tide exists in two separate forms under two different names: (1) the prose poem High Tide and (2) the poem, Though Lovers Be Lost. The title of the poem comes, of course, from Dylan Thomas.

High Tide     

High tide in the salt marsh and now you are a river flowing silver beneath the moon, your body filled with shadow and light. I dip my hands in dappled water. Twin gulls, they fly down stream then perch on an ice floe of half-remembered dreams. An eagle with a broken wing, I am trapped in this cage of flame. When I turn my feathers to the sun, the black and white of a convict’s bars stripe my back.

Awake, I lie anchored by what pale visions fluttering on the horizon? White moths wing their snowstorm through the night. A feathered shadow ghosts frail fingers towards my face. Butterflies stutter their kisses against the closed lips of shuttered eyes and mouth. Hands reach out to grasp me. A candle flickers in the darkness and I am afraid.

Who mapped in runes the ruins of this heart? Eye of the peacock, can you touch what I see when my eyelids close for the night? Black rock of the midnight sun, blocking the sky’s dark cave, when will I be released from my daily bondage? Last night, the planet quivered beneath my body and I felt each footfall of a transient god.

The prose poem shortens the verse poem and turns it into a rushing hurly-burly of breathless words strung together by metaphor and magic. They flash and twist this way, that way, like minnows in shallow waters, allowing no time for pause, no time for thought. When I have read the passage in public, the listeners have always looked slightly stunned, bemused, battered almost by the storm of emotion tied into the piece.

The prose poem was published in Fundy Lines (2002) but it was originally conceived as a poem written in stanzas and took this form when published in Though Lovers Be Lost (2000). When the poem is set out in stanzas, it is shaped by the spaces that surround each line. These spaces slow the poem down, allowing the reader to permit the listener, to dwell on each group of words. Obviously, in a silent and private book reading, each one of us will read poetry and prose in our customary way. That said, in a public reading, I usually read the prose slightly faster than I do the poetry. The metaphoric nature of the language stands out in the longer version, and instead of the rush of words (prose), we have a measured resonance that shapes meaning. Impact in prose versus depth of meaning in poetry: I think both forms work in different ways.

In addition, the prose poem has been very selective and has abandoned several of the images and themes that appear in the poem. This increases the sense of urgency and unity while diluting the strength of the metaphors. Although the words are basically the same, the shapes and forms make for two different works, two distinctive appearances.

Though Lovers Be Lost

1
Once,
you were a river,
flowing silver
beneath the moon.

High tide
in the salt marsh:
your body filled
with shadow and light.

I dipped my hands
in dappled water.

2
Eagle with a shattered wing,
my heart batters
against bars of white bone.

Or am I a killdeer,
trailing token promises
for some broken god to snatch?

Gulls float downstream.
They ride a nightmare
of half-remembered ice.

Trapped in my cage of flame,
I return my feathers to the sun.

3
Awake,
I lie anchored by
what pale visions of moths
fluttering on the horizon?

A sail
flaps canvas wings
speeding my way
backwards into night.

A feathered shadow
ghosts fingers over my face.

Butterflies
stutter against
shuttered windows.

Strange hands
reach out to grasp me
and again I am afraid
of the dark.

4
When was my future
carved in each sliver of bone?

A scratch of the iron pen
jerks the puppet’s limbs
into prophesied motion.

Who mapped in runes
the ruins of this heart?

Above me,
a rag tag patch of cloud
drifts here and there,
shifting constantly;

like this body of water
in which I sail.

5
Eye of the peacock,
can you touch
what I see when
I close my eyelids
down for the night?

Black rock of the midnight
sun, rolled up the sky,
won’t you release me
from my daily bondage?

Last night, the planet
quivered beneath my body
and I felt each footfall
of a transient god.

6
Thunder knocks
on the door of my dream
and I am afraid.

I no longer know my way
through night’s dark wood.

Who bore her body
out in that rush of rain?

Could she still sense
the sigh of wet grass?

Could she still hear
the damp leaves whisper?

7
A finger of fog
trickles
a forgotten face
down the window.

The power of water,
of fire, of frost;
of wind, rain, snow,
and ice.

Incoming tide:
stark waters.

Rising.

I would welcome any comments you may have (a) on the difference between the two forms, as they impact you; (b) on the perceived differences between the prose poem and the poetry; and (c) on the perceived revision and thought process that turns poetry into prose, and vice-versa.