Stumps, yes. Firmly planted. Newly arrived at the wicket, I can now take my guard. Last man in with everything to play for.
“Middle and off. Please.” I hold the bat steady, upright, and the man in white nods his head, counts the coins, or stones, he has in his pocket and wonders when he can leave his post and go to tea.
I stand, there, right-handed, and the field adjusts. Then I change hands, keep the same guard, now middle and leg, and stare at the square leg, now a short leg who glares back fiercely.
The man in the white coat tut-tuts in despair. I know he knows this isn’t done. It’s just not cricket. But then, he’s not the one batting on a cloth untrue, with a twisted cue, while the bowlers bowl with elliptical balls.
The field changes over to a left-handed stance. I think about changing over again, but I’m sure there’d be an appeal: wasting time, a nasty crime at this stage of the game, though many do it.
First ball, a long-hop, and I clobber it for four. Three runs to win, four balls to bowl. I block the next ball. The one after is short. I cut it away past gully and call for two. I make it home safe but my partner is run out at the bowler’s end.
We lose by one run. “Serve you right,” says the man in the white coat, racing towards the pavilion for a pee before tea. “That just wasn’t cricket.”
I walk slowly back, stiff upper lip, ramrod straight bat, and no time at all for this sticky dog wicket.
Comment: I wonder how many of my followers will have understood a word of what I have written. Never mind. You can always enjoy the painting. Oh the mysteries of what used to be England’s national game and a wonderful source of metaphor and image. A double-header on the weekend. England vs the West Indies. I wonder if it will be that close?
My usual discipline has deserted me and, as a result, I have deserted my blog, abandoned it, gone absent without leave. It’s not that I am not creating: I am. I am just not posting. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought that, for a change, I would post some of my Pocket Paintings / Peintures de Poches. Maybe I will be inspired to write verse about them. Maybe not. We’ll see.
Supplication
I raise my hand to heaven in fervent supplication: you sever it at the wrist.
I spread out my arms in despair: you take out a tape and measure me for a tailor-made, hand-crafted cross.
I step on my bathroom scales only to find that they have become the scales of your justice: I mourn every pound I have put on.
Where can I turn for solace when all around I see nothing but sorrow and tears?
Covid bears us all down. An albatross, it hangs around our necks and when we raise a hand, your knife is there to cut it off.
Who are you? What are you? Where are you when we need you? Why are you there judging us like this?
I look up at the sky. By day, a great cyclopean eye winks and blinks and tells me nothing. I look at the sky at night: a silver moon slides silently by.
Orion stalks away to the west. He leaves me restless, breathless, agape at all this beauty that I dare not reach out and grasp.
And this has been a dialog with my time and my place. But what is time? A river flowing? A long line leading from my beginning to my end? Alpha and Omega? An instant held between finger and thumb and so swiftly forgotten? A dream I dream when I am awake or asleep? And which is my real dream, waking or sleeping, sleeping or lying awake?
And what is my place? This house in which I now live? The garden I watch from my kitchen window? My town? This forested area where I think I belong? My county? My province? My region? And how do I relate to my “time” or my “place” to this being called “Roger”, this dream-Roger who dreams this post-amniotic ocean of life in which he now drifts? I dream I am male yet when I read Carl Jung I learn that a large part of me is female. I always thought I was masculine / macho / male, yet when a large part of me is feminine / hembra / female, I am no longer sure what I am. And how much does it matter?
I have ten fingers yet I use only two to type. Two fingers manipulate twenty-six letters, selecting some, rejecting others, making careless mistakes, organizing and reorganizing, shuffling all those verbal cards. I turn this black-and-white keyboard world upside down when I think my subversive thoughts and type them onto the computer screen and then print them out on what starts as a snow-white page that slowly fills with ant-size letters. Time and place, male and female: I lay on my side in hospital and the young urologist shot me full of female hormones so my prostrate cancer would not take over my inner organs and destroy my life. Place and time: I lie awake at night and shape disturbing dreams, dreams I have never before dreamed of dreaming.
Some nights I sense the end is drawing near. I fear it. In my beginning is my end. Beginning and end: both belong to me as do time and space, so central to the story of my life. For life will continue with or without me even if I am not there to bear witness. But I have been here, and parts of my story will remain embedded in the mind of each and every one of those who knew me and heard me speak.
Beethoven took the Fifth and rewrote it in his own image. I want to rewrite my life. I want my youth to return. I want to be young and athletic and lithe … I do not want to be this old man with a stick who bends double when he walks and sticks a blue sticker in the windscreen of his car.
I want to refuse to open the door when the postman knocks to deliver my mail. I know that soon he will bring me that registered letter, for which I must sign, with that last fatal message, the subpoena from which there is no appeal. I guess that like the snow and the wild geese, he’ll be back tomorrow, or the next day, in spite of those voices telling me that tomorrow never comes. And so, on an unusually Odd Sunday in a bar they once called Corked, or at another table in another wine bar with a different name, raise a glass to me when I am gone and leave an empty glass on the table for me. If you do, I promise I’ll be there.
Comments: This, as promised, is the final chapter from On Being Welsh. Chronotopos is Bakhtin’s theory that all our writing is a dialog with our time (chronos) and our place (topos). “Know me, know my time and place.” When we discover and explore our time and place we begin to understand ourselves and our roles in life. Then we can start rethinking who and what we are, what we have been, what we want to be, what we need to do in order to change. But first, we must know ourselves, for without self-knowledge, we are ships adrift, floating rudderless on a rising sea, or driven by the forceful wind of others into places where we may not wish to go. My friends, I raise a glass to you, filled, alas, with orange juice, because it is breakfast time, here in Island View, on the first Sunday, damp and cold and wet of 2022.
I walk past the Jesuit Church where the shoe-shine boys store polish, brushes, and chairs overnight. I walk past the wrought-iron bench where the gay guys sit, caressing, asking the unsuspecting to join them.
Nobody bothers to ask me for a match, for a drink, for charity, for a walk down the alley to a cheap hotel.
The witch doctor is the one who throws the hands of all the clocks into the air at midnight, in despair. He’s the one who leaves this place, and returns to this place, all places being one.
The witch doctor sees little things that other men don’t see. He reaches out and flicks a fly away from my nose. “It too has lost its way,” he sighs.
I think I know who I am, but I often have doubts when I shave, rasping the razor across my chin’s dry husks. The witch doctor, my lookalike, my twin, stares back at me from my bathroom mirror.
Three witches dance on the waning soap dish. One spins the yarn, one measures the cloth, one wields the knife, that will one day sever the thread of I, who the same as all poor creatures, was born only to die.
You too must one day look in that mirror, oh hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.
Comment: My thanks to all those who click on earlier poems and express their liking for them. I am particularly pleased when an earlier poem lacks a voice reading. Then I can revisit it, rethink it, rewrite it, record it, and speak it aloud. Here’s the link to the earlier version of the poem Charles Baudelaire. Fast away the old year passes, and we must renew ourselves, our thoughts, and our poetry for the new year soon to be upon us. To all my readers, old and new, welcome to that world.
North Wind descended from the pole sending its wolf pack through snow- bound trees. Listless, they stood there, then wind and wolves came, cutting and shuffling, playing snap-the-branch, chase-the snow-flake, and strip-jack- naked. Wolves danced on their hind- legs, round and round, shaking trees, biting at branches, testing winter games until trees stood naked, stripped of snow, tresses and garlands gobbled and gone.
Oh the wickedness of winter, its cold- cut cruelty, the lash of the wind, ice- pellets hurled, picketing fences, pecking a wild winter-song, forlorn in its fury, its pace, its power, its reckless race to hurl everything away, out of its way, snow twisted, tormented, twitching its snake-way down barren highways devoid of secret places in which to hide tender faces from the North Wind.
Just out today, thanks to my good friend Jared who turned a difficult task into a simple one. And yes, this is my first art book, though there are two more, at least, to come. Thanks to Patti too for the delightful portrait of the author as a flower-child. That was some time ago. This is a very limited edition. Best friends only – BFF. NB The photos are rotten. I apologize for that. However, the cartoons are very special. Here are the two on Climate Change, much debated, sometimes denied, but all too true for this poor snowman.
Climate Change aka
“I won’t believe in climate change until April or May.”
She surveys her empire from a tall tree, then steps into space, plunging her body’s weight downwards, diving into fragile air.
A feathered arrow, she makes contact, feet first, and pins the unsuspecting robin to the ground. His shrill shriek emerges from a beak that shreds failing life.
The hawk’s claws clench. Her victim weakens. His eyes glaze over. One final spasm, a last quick twitch, the robin is gone.
One wing drags, flaps weakly, borne skywards in the hawk’s triumphant claws.
Someone stole the nose from a sacred statue. He placed it on his face and I watch it as it crosses the central square.
A moving shadow: zopilote flies high above. I talked to him once on a midnight bus. He begged me to fold his wings and let him sleep forever.
The balloon lady sells tins of watery soap. Children, newly released from school, fill my days with enchantments. They blow soap bubbles, tiny globes, circular rainbows, born from a magic ring.
The voices in my head slip slowly into silence. Some nights I think they have no need of me, these dreams that arrive in the early hours and knock at my window.
When morning comes, I watch them fade and then I know they cannot live without me. When I am gone, they will go too.
Water: does it remember when the earth was without form and darkness lay upon the face of the deep?
Water gathered into one place and the firmament appeared. Then light drifted apart from darkness and with light came The Word, more words, and then the world …
… the world of water in which I was carried until the waters broke and my life sustaining substance drained away ejecting me from dark to light.
Here, in Oaxaca, the valley’s parched throat longs for water, born free, yet everywhere imprisoned. It languishes in bottles, tins, jars, and frozen cubes, its captive essence staring out with grief filled eyes.
A young boy on a tricycle pedals past my apartment. He carries a dozen prison cells, each with forty captives, forty fresh clean bottles of warm water. “¡Peragua!” he call out to me. “¡Super Agua!” he holds out his hand and asks me to pay a handsome ransom to set some of these captives free.
Real water yearns to be released, to be set free from its captivity, to trickle out of the corner of your mouth, to drip from your chin, to slip from your hand and seek sanctuary in dust and sand.
Real water slips through your hair and leaves you squeaky clean. It is a mirage of palm trees upon burning sand. It is the hot sun dragging its blood red tongue across the sky and panting for water like a great big thirsty dog.
rogermoorepoet 