Looking back at my old photos from Oaxaca I am amazed at the contrasts between sun and shade, light and dark. I will never forget that ultimate glory: a sunbeam through a stained glass window, casting fragmented light.
San Pedro Oaxaca
A single sunbeam descends. Sharp blade of a heliocentric sword, it shatters the chapel’s dark. Fragmented light stains me with glazed colors.
A pallid lily truncated in the dawn’s pearly light, Peter, the young widower, kneels in prayer.
His head wears a halo. His pilgrim palm presses into the granite forcing warming fingers into a cradle of cold stone.
His flesh clings to the statue’s marble hand. A mingled maze: marble and human veins.
Luck, sometimes, just being in the right place at the right time. One step, two steps, and up he went and look at those footsteps. His flight, a step of faith, two steps of faith, and away he goes, fait accompli.Another golden oldie. I do love rediscovering them. The photos, too.
Flight of Fancy
Just by chance, I caught this cormorant. “Behind you, quick,” said Clare. I turned and ‘Click!’
Such a miracle: the first steps of flight taken over water. That first step heavy, the second one lighter, and the third one scarcely a paint brush pocking the waves.
The need to take flight lies deep within me. Fleeing from what? Running towards what? Who knows?
All I know is that the future lies to the right of this photo and the past lies to the left, and I don’t know the meaning of either.
But I do remember the words of Antonio Machado: ‘Caminante, no hay camino, sólo hay estela sobre la mar.’ “traveler, there is no road, just a wake across life’s sea.”
Comment: I revised this poem a few minutes ago and cut it down to its essentials. If you want to read the original and check the revisions, click on this link to the earlier poem. Any comments on the rewrite and the revision process would be welcome.
Diagnosed with a terminal illness that I also call life I know this sickness will surely terminate in my death.
Death: it has walked beside me for more than seventy years. It has gazed back from my mirror, as I shave my face, and part my hair. It has lain its head on the pillow beside me as I lie in bed.
We have shared so many things: the soul’s dark night, the winding ways of life’s once infinite, now soon-to-be-ended maze.
Now, arm in arm, life, death, and me, an intimate ménage à trois, we are running a three-legged race while carrying an egg in a spoon and playing life’s ultimate game of chicken.
Comment: Look carefully at the second picture: you will see the fish he has just caught, sideways in his beak. These photos are from the bay at Alberton in PEI, taken about two seconds apart!
A crow, but not a beach. You’ll have to click on the link at the bottom of the page for the real beach photos.
Crow’s Feet
a convict’s arrows marking the eye’s corner and the beach at low tide with its crackle of wings as sea-birds fly their defensive patterns feathered sails on a canvas wind
how many crabs made in the image of their carapaced god hide in the sand half-buried waiting for the tide to turn and water to return and give them refuge
abandoned shells postage stamps glued in the top right-hand corner of a picture post card beach
who can decipher the sea’s hand writing this mess of letters stitched by sandpipers who thread the beach’s eye inscribing dark secrets with the sewing machine needles of their beaks
pregnant this noon tide silence this absence of waves where the quahaug lies buried secured by a belly button a lifeline to air and light surrounded by crow’s feet tugging at the beach’s dry skin
sand beneath my feet sand between my toes dry sand sandpapering
Light through glass, darkly: bottles set in one of the bottle house walls in PEI. The gardens are wonderful and well-worth a visit.
Bottle House, PEI The day begins with flowers: at the entrance, beneath the windows, flowers everywhere, a delicacy of scent. Beyond these flowers, even more flowers, then playthings in the garden: a child’s paradise, these sculptured faces, this glass among the trees, sun and shade, the fountain’s water, this dream of an old man, kept alive now by his children, a dream of health and sanity and peace out by the bay, where the mud red waters roll and the tide’s hand grasps at the land and pulls it down with watery fingers. Everywhere: faces and elements of faces: a nose, eyes, a mouth, open in surprise. Carved wooden faces, glass faces, pottery faces, flesh and blood faces, grandma’s face, grandpa’s face, then the grandchildren. Tourists travelling, old islanders returning to see family and friends, young islanders returning to visit the almost forgotten farms which their families worked a generation or three ago, before their exodus from the land. “This was grampy’s house!” they say or “that was my grandmother’s farm!” as if a life could be reborn in that pointed finger, those casual words. How many memories are snapped in each picture? How many lives are caught in this snapping of the fingers as the past is instantly summoned and perfection is bottled for a second or two in the magic of this house, this garden where the builder’s spirit roams. Sit still awhile. Be silent: you may hear him breathe, glimpse him, for a second, staking out the flowers, extracting a weed, checking the set of the concrete foundations, polishing a bottle, resting on a wooden seat, avoiding the slow snail on the path bejewelled by rain-drops from the trees or spray from the fountain. For where there are flowers, there must be water and rain and peace and happiness and all good things, glimpsed darkly through smoked glass yet grasped so smoothly in the sun’s bright light. This is the house of bottles, the glass house, where rough winds are shunned and the bottles are set in concrete. It is a museum of light and dark, the creation of sun and shadow as sunshine fails and the lighthouse’s flashlight beam reverberates from glass to stone and back again. Shapes, shadows, memories curved and carved in glass, set in glass, this shimmering beacon this glass house, this light house built as a heaven-haven for harboured ships and the soul’s refreshment, here, in these gardens, among these bottles, and at the chapel door, an angel-in-waiting.
Angel or fairy? It doesn’t matter. She was a gift one morning, when we visited. In this photo you can see how the bottles are set in the wall.
Tigger blowing his coat in Spring and waiting on the picnic table for his daily grooming. Some days I am convinced he is still out there, waiting for me.
What’s in a name? At the Farmer’s Market there are fourteen puppies in a cardboard box. One of the puppies, still blind, clambers whimpering over the side of the box and totters toward me. An elderly lady picks him up, thrusts him towards me and says: “Here: he’s your dog. He wants to be with you!” “No way, Lady!” I say and turn away. When I exit the market, I walk past the dog box. There are five dogs left but the one that wandered in my direction has gone. The salesman calls out to me: “Hey you!” He walks towards me. “That woman said you’d be back for your dog. Here: take him!” He unzips his coat, and there’s the dog, snuggled against his chest. “When was he born?” I ask. “January 16!” comes the reply. January 16 is my birthday. Today is March 8, the anniversary of my mother’s death. The dog is 53 days old, much too young to leave his mother. When I get home, my wife tells me to take the dog straight back to the market. “I can’t do that!” I say. “The man will be gone by now.” “But we don’t know anything about the dog!” “I’ll clean up after it.” I say. “I’ll feed it and train it.” “You’ll have to put it in a cage.” She tells me. “I’m not having it peeing and pooping all over the floor. You know why they’re called poopies.” Later that evening, I force the little puppy into the old dog’s crate, and I retire to bed. No sooner have I gone upstairs than there’s an unholy noise from the kitchen. “Help me!” I say to my wife. She laughs. “Not a chance! You know the rules!” Down in the kitchen the puppy is in distress. I take him out of his cage and he waddles and wags and promptly pees. I clean up after him and wonder what to do. The cage isn’t a solution. There’s no box in which to put him and any form of captivity, like a board across the door or a baby’s gate, sets him howling again. I gather my sleeping bag and a couple of cushions and I lie down on the kitchen floor. He immediately snuggles up to me, finds my finger, and sucks on it. I get up off the floor, make my way to the fridge, open the door, and pour a glass of milk; for the rest of the night, every time the dog gets restless, I stick my finger into the milk and the dog sucks my finger. I spend the next week doing this. While I’m lying on the floor, I study the dog. “What is your name?” I ask him constantly. Then, one night, as I watch him bounce across the room towards my milky finger, I know what to call him. “Tigger!” If I had waited another week, I might have called him Pooh! Tigger never leaves me. He is like an orphaned duck who follows the first human being who feeds it. Tigger follows me around the house with his nose behind my knee and if I stop suddenly, he bumps into me. My wife has started to call me Dada Duck. I now call her Mother Duck and our daughter has been renamed Baby Duck. Tigger has a second name: Dada Duck Dog. We have a little corner piece on our lot where the roads join and all the dogs stop, including mine. I went out there one day and put up a large sign with “Pooh Corner!” written on it. Beside it I placed an arrow which points “To the house!” All the children on the block love Tigger. When he came home, he weighed 6 pound and covered six tiles. Full grown, he weighs 110 pound and covers 108 tiles! He is gentle and well-behaved and everyone adores him. Some of the children want to buy a little saddle and ride on him, he is certainly big enough, but I won’t let them do that. The children on the block now call me Christopher Robin. At Christmas, they bring me pots of honey. As eleven years went by, Tigger grew old and slow. He developed cancer and had arthritis. On fine days he was fine, but on damp days he could hardly place one foot in front of the other. He had difficulty climbing the stairs and would sleep for hours rising only for his morning and evening walks and his food. Yesterday, el cinco de mayo, at 12 noon, Tigger passed away. Today, there is a little white cross at the corner of our lot. The children have laid a circle of flowers around the cross. On it somebody has painted: R.I.P. Tigger.
I looked for a picture of music, but could find nothing. No Carlos, no flute, no nothing. So, I invite you to use your imagination: just pretend these are the notes of an Andean flute, floating in the early morning air. Now close your eyes and listen carefully. Can you hear the music?
The Red Room
Carlos makes music on his flute. He lives in the Green Room, with its door just opposite mine
He creates the highest note of all and it floats before me in the air, a trapeze artist caught in a sunbeam and suspended between the hands that fling and those that catch.
His musical rhythms are different. I try to follow his fingering.
In the space between notes, tropical birds flash jungle colors as they flit between flowers.
With a whirring of wings, all music stops, save for the robin’s trill refreshing the early summer with his eternal song.
Comment:
I finally found a photo of Carlos. Here he is, in Kingsbrae Gardens, playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on ‘half-filled’ water bottles tuned to play a perfect scale. Like an Andean bird, the man could pluck notes from the air and fill the world with music.
