The boy in the kitchen bare legs held to the fire ‘this is what hell will be like’
The cupboard under the stairs cold dark locked from the outside an oubliette the young boy left there forgotten
Running upstairs to safety beneath the bed hands grasping at legs and ankles pulling him back down for appropriate punishment
The belt the stick the little red brush that cleans the fireplace with its foretaste of hell beating battering an avalanche of blows the boy buried beneath them
Commentary:
Another unsigned painting by Moo. He told me that he calls this one Orange-U-Happy. Well, it is a happy painting, until you read the poem that goes with it and discover that all the stones of the avalanche are floating around in Moo’s painting, including a nice selection of sticks.
“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” But names do hurt. Names can be cast like stones, and the thrown stone, like the spoken word, can never be recalled. Liar. Cheat. Thief. Little Lord Fauntleroy. Bite the hand that feeds you. Are you laughing at me? I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget. I’ll shake you until your teeth rattle.
Stones can be thrown into ponds. When they are, the ripples reach out, spread further, spread far and wide. Thrown words can enter the soul, ripple through the blood, and they can lodge in heart and brain, forever memories that never fade and never fly away. Heart stones, they are, that strike at the stroke of midnight and leave the victim suffering, gasping for air.
So many silent memories, buried deep, only to rise and parade around in dreams at night, revenants come to haunt and hunt, sharp words made even sharper than flint or obsidian to cut and fracture, and splinter, and slowly, slowly wear down the prey. Words – the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch. Think twice before you throw, speak, wound, injure …. then think again, bite your tongue, stay your hand, drop the stone, think rather of the hand of friendship, of comfort, the feathered wing of the guardian angel that consoles and brings succor.
Succour (or succor in American English) means assistance or support given to someone experiencing grief or hardship. It is a formal, often literary term used to describe help that offers actual relief or comfort to people in difficult situations, such as disaster victims or those struggling emotionally – Wikipedia.
And remember – many words have double meanings – spare – to forbear: deciding not to hurt, destroy, or punish, such as “sparing the life” of a captive or sparing the the rod. Spoil – to indulge: to treat someone, such as a child or pet, with pampering. It can also mean treating oneself to a luxury or relaxing day.
So, what does spare the rod and spoil the child mean? Clearly it is a phrase with a double meaning. Choose which one you will. But remember – “Let us pray” is a better prayer than “Let us prey“.
I see a face in the foliage. The Green Man of Wye stares out at me.
A light breeze moves his lips – what can he be saying? Sweat breaks on his brow – thin, drizzling rain.
Now I see other faces, all a myriad shades of green – young / old, male / female, sometimes somewhere in between.
They welcome this rain, fearing heat, as I do, parching them, making them thirst, and drying out the woods.
I sense their fear and I know how they fear that first spark of fire the worst.
Commentary
It has been a cold, damp spring and summer’s promised heat has not yet arrived. The result is a garden tinged with a thousand shades and hues of green. To many slight variations in color for my vocabulary to name them. Better by far this damp than last year’s raging heat that gave us the hottest summer ever with wild fires raging closer, ever closer.
They gave our subdivision a new name and placed us in a new area under new management. Early last year, before the heat really began, we received a booklet from our now community – What to do in case of forest fires. The first chapters provided some comfort – how to prepare three weeks ahead, one week ahead, three days ahead. But fear spreads s quickly as wild fires when we read – Evacuation – Three hours’ notice – Two hours’ notice – One hour’s notice.
It is amazing how little you can pack into one small car when you have only an hour in which to prepare and gather your things. Frightening. Very frightening. How much can you take? What must you leave behind? Which are your safe exits? Do you actually have an exit?
A car tire hovers above a pothole filled with snarling monster sculptures.
Big Sister replaced Big Brother and generously generated this image
“Watch out for that pot hole!” “Which one?” Snap, crackle, pop! “That one.”
Pot Holes
Jack Pine Sonnet
Welcome to Pot Hole time. It’s all yours and it’s all mine. Mine, possession, not land mine, though hitting one at speed will rattle your teeth, shake your spine, and leave you feeling far from divine.
Pot Holes, Pot Holes, everywhere, filled with water you can’t drink. They hide the depth of every hole with waters, dark as ink.
Spring’s freeze and thaw breed ever more Pot Holes than we had before. I think at night they stay out late, to fornicate, and celebrate.
A low spring sun in the driver’s eyes makes shadows shift and slide.
A mazy life full of chance drawing a labyrinthine thread through a maze of Pot Holes that we dread, the morning sun blinding our eyes so we cannot see the Pot Holes’ size nor how they move and dance.
Big Sister replaced Big Brother and generously generated this image
Comment:
This is wonderful fun. Moo has ceased to be jealous of Big Brother and Big Sister with their attempts to read my mind. And what a great job they do of it. All in the cause of the Pot Hole Dance Season. Have you seen the Pot Holes dance? You know, one minute there isn’t one and about and then a split second later – CLANK! The dreaded tire pressure light comes on. You turn it off. It comes back on. You turn it off. It comes back on.
You stop the car at the roadside, turn off the engine, get out, and check the tires. They look all right. You kick them or tap them with a stick. They all sound all right and they all sound the same. You get back into the car. You start the engine. All the lights come on. All the lights go off. Except one – the dreaded tire pressure light. Well, I can swear pretty well in about five languages. I turn the tire light off. Wonder of wonders, it goes away.
I am so happy. I turn on the radio. I clap my hands. And CLANK! I drive into another Pot Hole that appeared from nowhere and walked or danced or shimmied or slithered into the road right in front of your car. You guessed it – and the tire pressure light comes on!
… at the beginning of the end, when more things have gone than are with us and the summer’s sun withers the grass and wrinkles our faces baking us bright red – como un cangrejo te has puesto, hijo mío, en el sol de Somo, como un cangrejo – and — pulpo en un garaje — you grasp at the new words, the new colors, the new delights, your tongue trapped clumsily in your mouth like a red rag doll and the midnight bull charging the spectators who gather and olé, au lait … as the drunken bullfighter climbs the bull and kills the post. The red cape flutters in our memories and to the slaughterhouse we go where the open body hangs loose like a flag and the red meat of him held out for all to see and some to share … and this is his body and this is his blood, sacrificed in a circle of golden sand for our drunken amusement … for whatever I did, I never visited those bull fights when I was sober … at five thirty, they began, and at 3 o’clock we would gather in the city center and slowly wend our way from bar to bar, up the Calle de Burgos, past the street where you lived and upwards, ever upwards, towards the bull ring at the top of the hill, from bar to bar, I say, and the bota, the wine-skin filled and re-filled with that dark red fluid that will set us all baying for the bull’s blood, or the matador’s blood, it doesn’t matter whose blood, as long as someone bleeds and the bull is butchered, torn from this life by a man on horseback, armed with a lance, and he thrusts the heavy blade between the shoulders of the bull, the blood first dripping red, then gushing, a small stream over the rock of the bull’s shoulder, and down the bull’s front legs, to slither on the sand, and the bull still ready to charge the horse, and the bull’s head steadily dropping as the muscles in the back and neck are gashed and torn and there’s no hell like this gaping wound between the bull’s shoulders and the blood flowing freely and vanishing into the sand, the golden sand, once pristine, stained now with blood, and soon to be further blemished with feces and urine, and the picador, his job done, walks his blind-folded, armored horse out of the ring, and the bull, un-armored, un-enamored of the process which turns his torment into a spectacle staged for our drunken delight, as we pass the bota round, and the blood red wine travels from hand to hand, and we squirt the bull’s blood squarely between our lips and it dashes against tongue and teeth and we swallow the body’s sacrifice hook, line, and sinker, as the banderillero runs in, harpoons in hand, waving his banderillas and plunging their arrowed barbs into the gaping wound that flowers on the bull’s back, and the bull stands there, twitching, wriggling, saliva and drool slipping down, sliding stickily into the sand, as the matador doffs his hat, takes his vorpal sword in hand and treads the light fantastique in his laced-up dancing pumps, his waltzing matilda feet so swift, so sure, eluding the lumbering rush of the charging bull, the load of bull, that tumbles down the railway track towards him as he stands there, the matador, poised like a ballerina, as stiff and as steady as a lamp-post around which the bull circles like a drunken man, staggering a bit, but still bemused by the red flag tied to a stick which waves before his eyes and goads him onwards, ever onwards, in his plunge towards a brilliant death, as he pauses, feet together, and the matador makes his move, one, step, then two, and the bull lurching forward to impale himself on three or four feet of curved, immaculate steel, and the matador immaculate in his reception of the bull – and what is happening? What will happen next? Sometimes, the sword pierces the spinal cord and death is instantaneous. Sometimes, the sword pierces the heart, and death is more or less swift, but certainly certain. And sometimes the sword pinches against the bone and flies from the matador’s hand, and the matador must bend, and pick it up, and try, try again, the red rag below the bull’s nose, the bull drawn forward, yet again, to impale himself, yet again, on the sharp end of the sword, and this time, the sword goes in, but the wound is in the lungs and the peones, the pawns, the workers, the drones, the little men who help, turn the bull round and round in ever tighter circles so the sword will open and even larger wound, sever the main arteries perhaps, and the bull, blood spurting through nose and mouth, lurches now, then falls to his knees, and lies there, bleeding, and the matador chooses the descabello, that little sharp sword with the razor blade at the end and he tries to sever the spinal cord, there at the back of the neck, and sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t, and if he can’t then it’s the little men again in their colorful parrot suits all gleaming with sequins and stars and they carry a sharp little instrument, with a pointed end, la puntilla, that short, double-edged, stabbing knife which is plunged into the occipito-atlantal space to sever the medulla oblongata in the evernazione method of mercy killing, and the puntilla is plunged again and again into the bull’s neck at this atlanto-occipital joint, until it severs the medulla oblongata, and when it is severed, in this glorious neck stab, then finally the bull drops dead, and the show must go on and on, and on, and the horses come in, black funeral horses with bright feathers on their heads and they loop a rope around the bull’s horns and away he goes, trailing blood, and urine, and shit, all across the sand and other little men appear to sweep the sands clean, and my neighbor who wears a large walrus moustache stained red now and purple with the wine that he has splashed about, shakes the wine skin and finds it as not as full as it was, so he sheds a bitter tear, and since the death was slow, the crowd all whistle and boo the matador and his merry men, but when the death is swift and quick then the crowd is aroused and they wave white hankies at the presidential box and the president awards the matador an ear, a salty, smelly, sticky ear which the peones cut off the bull before he is towed away, and then the matador throws the ear in the direction of his current sweet heart, the fairest lady in the crowd although she be as brown as the beauties baking daily on the summer sand where the sea horses dance and there are no bulls, and no bull shit, and no maids with mops, just the scouring sea, and sometimes the president gives away two ears, or two ears and the tail, dos orejas y el rabo, though this I have seldom seen, and what does the bull care that he dies bravely and well, for now he is dead he hasn’t a care in the world, and the butchers in the butcher’s shop are carving him away, carving him to the skeletal nothingness of skin and bone that awaits us all, the nothingness of this more or less glorious death, with our tails cut off and our ears hacked away to be pickled or smoked or otherwise kept in the fridge as the butcher’s trophy … and who now will walk stone cold sober into that magic circle of sun and shade and stand there, unbowed, before the might of the untamed beast, the untamed bestiality that drives us wild as it wanders through our nightmare cities and our wildest dreams … and now the crowd call ¡música, música! and the band strikes up and martial music plays as the bullfighter and his troupe march gaily round the ring, their trophies held high for all to see before they are thrown to the ravening crowd who bay like the dogs they are as they taste fresh, bloodied meat …
You cannot hide when the black angel comes and knocks on your door.
“Wait a minute,” you say, “While I change my clothes and comb my hair.”
But he is there before you, in the clothes closet, pulling your arm. You move to the bathroom to brush your teeth.
Now,” says the angel.
Your eyes mist over. You know you are there, but you can no longer see your reflection in the mirror.
Comment:
The last poem in the series and Rage, Rageagainst the dying of the light is over and done. Many of you will recognize the title from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that dark night. I guess the theme itself has become part of the Welsh culture. And now we have exported it to New Brunswick, Canada, and perhaps beyond.
I bought The Black Angel, pictured above, in Avila, Spain. It is a plaster cast of one of the Angels in Roger Van der Leyden’s paintings, if I remember correctly. Here is the angel’s face in close up.
She or he brings a promise of rest and peace, a freedom from earthbound woes and sorrows. She stands on the shelf above the fireplace insert in our sitting room and brings blessings to the house. I look at her every time I light the fire. And she smiles down and blesses me. I think of her as a lady, but her peace and beauty outweigh any formal signs of sex.
As for that reflection in the mirror, well, I don’t have one of me. But her is a photo to reflect upon:
Raining in Avila and puddles in the street. Now you see me, now you don’t. But I am there, holding the camera, and looking down at the water where —- rain has stopped play. The bails have been removed. Old Father Time has gone back to the Pavilion at Lord’s, and the cricket game is over for the day.
“What is this sound?” It is your own death sighing, groaning, growing while you wait for it to devour you.
“What is this feeling” It is the itch of your own skin wrinkling and shrinking, preparing to wrap you in the last clothes you’ll wear.
“What is this taste?” It is the taste of your life, bottled like summer wine once sweet tasting, now turning to vinegar.
“What is this smell?” It is waste and decay, the loss of all you knew and of all that knew you.
“That carriage outside?” It is the dark hearse come to carry you to your everlasting home.
Comment:
Moo thinks that his portrait of me is perfectly good for this poem. He told me not to rage, rage against the accuracy of the portrait, but he did tell me to rage, rage against the lack of paper. Où est le papier, indeed. As for the rest of it, he said it’s the same for everyone, so stop making a fuss about it. “You’ve got one last bottle of mescal on the shelf,” he told me. “I know. I’ve seen it. Just swig it down, worm and all, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”
Oh dear. The worm in the bottle. They used to sell the gusanos in Oaxaca’s mescal street at a price of five for ten pesos. I used to buy a two litre coke bottle, filled with mescal from a barrel, and drop ten worms in it. They made yellow streaks as they descended through the liquid. Sweet dreams when you chewed on that lot – and an end to your worries. El brujo, the witch doctor, told me to stick a marijuana plant in the bottle of mescal and when the leaves turned white to rub the liquid into my arthritic knees. “Which doctor was that?” one of the tourists in my apartment block asked me. But I didn’t tell her. Nor did I do it. A waste of good mescal. And to think I now have one last half bottle left. And one little squirmy, crunchy, chewy worm.
Speaking of chewy, crunchy – I had never eaten chapulines, fried grasshoppers, until I went to Oaxaca. I didn’t like the look of them. At the first party I attended was confronted by the host who demanded I eat some. I told him they were taboo, against my religion. He shrugged. When he, and the other guests lost interest in my presence, I tried a couple. They were delicious. A real delicacy. I loved their crunchy little legs.
I guess one is always afraid of the unknown – the gusano in the mescal, the chapulines on the plate, that first plate of calamares en su tinta – squid in its own ink. I love bara lawr – Welsh laver bread – or Welsh caviar, as Richard Burton used to call it. I also know that people who have never eaten bara lawr won’t go near it – it looks like cow pats – but luckily doesn’t taste like them. Don’t ask me how I know. Some people get over their fear of the unknown, others don’t. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
A silvery thatch bears witness to the winter of my withering.
My broken body hangs from the coat hanger of my shoulders, its worn-out sack knitted from skin, bonded with blood.
I walk with two canes, not just a sick man, but a stick man.
When I fall asleep, my enigmatic body haunts me with its death-rattle of drying bones.
Comment
Sometimes no comments are needed. However, when it comes down to it, I guess it’s worth saying that I am raging, raging against the dying of the light.
The dying of the light – in the evening, when the sun goes down, the house grows silent and cools around me. Some nights, when the news is bad or depressing, I feel we are entering another dark age. Luckily, spring is on its way, with summer not far behind. But what will spring and summer bring?
I fear the heat, the gathering of muttering trees, the ambush nature is setting up for humanity. We live among trees. Trees, all around the house. Trees, climbing the hills into the distance. I loved them when I came here first. The maples, the paper birches, the mountain ashes with their spring finery and the light green fuzz of forming leaves. Winter – the firs and pines dressed in their winter coats.
Last summer, fires broke out all over the province. The closest was a mere 30 kms down the road from us. We could smell the fire, see the smoke, and sense the discomfort of the proximity of possible outbreaks closer to home.
As I grow older, I become more fearful. Walking downstairs in the morning – cada pie mal puesto es una caída, cada caída es un precipico / each badly placed foot is a fall, each fall is down a precipice. Luis de Gongora. ( d. 1627). Alas, it’s that time of life, and it comes to anybody who, like me, has walked this far.
It’s the animals that I pity. The birds who move on and away and no longer stay with us. The deer who also have nowhere to go when their habitat is destroyed. The moose, the bears, the coyotes, the foxes, the jack rabbits and yes, they have all been visitors to our backyard.
Last summer, the local council circulated some ideas on how to prepare for immediate evacuation of our property- what to pack with a day’s notice, three hours’ warning, two hours’ warning, one hour’s warning. I hope it never comes to that. But now, I no longer know, and so I rage, rage, against the dying of the light.
I search for the key that will re-wind me, but I fail to find it.
Who will winch up the pendulums on my grandfather clock, resetting it in spring and fall?
Who will watch time’s sharp black arrows as they point the path of moon change and the fleeting hours?
Each hour wounds, or so they say. Who will tend me when that last one kills?
Comment:
Omnia vulnerant, ultima necat. / Each one wounds, the last one kills. That’s how the Romans thought about the collection of hours that make up a day. An interesting way of putting it. In lapidarian fashion. Four words that are worth a whole book of philosophical thought.
What is this thing called time? Good question, and one which is being asked more and more. Clearly time does not flow evenly within the human mind, though it is remarkably regular on the clocks we have invented to mark time for us. And remember, there are many types of time – seasonal time – spring time, summer time, autumn time, winter time. Strange that autumn – or fall as I have now learned to call it – is the only one that doesn’t have the word time attached to it.
And what about time changes – spring forward, fall back – when we change our clocks in order to make the most of daylight hours. A tedious process for many of us. I see some provinces are rejecting those changes and sticking to the same time, all the year round, from season to season. Personally, I would prefer life without those time changes, as would many of my friends.
Celestial time also known as sidereal time – the time as showed by the planets as they seem to march around the earth in the terra-centric universe. Rephrased, the positions of the planets as the earth turns slowly round the sun in the helio-centric universe.
Then there is the personal time of individual experience. An hour watching football or rugby on the tv set passes much more quickly than an hour passed in the doctor’s waiting room or the dentist’s chair. Of course, an hour watching a five day cricket test can also be a slow process, unless England are playing Australia in the Ashes. As one friend of mine commented, a long time ago, “I thought those English cricketers were unfit. But I’ve never seen anyone go out to bat and come back to the pavilion so quickly. They must be super-fit.” Alas, their cricketing problem, as usual, was centered on the three cants – can’t bowl, can’t bat, can’t catch.
En fuga irrevocable huye la hora. La que el mejor cálculo cuenta en lectura y lección nos mejora.
Irrevocable is the hour’s flight. The one that counts the most in learning or reading improves us.
Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645)
And remember – the hours fly by and your time is limited – spend it wisely and enjoy each and every day to the full limits of your abilities.
Terminal and terminus, they both mean nec plus ultra: the Pillars of Hercules, the end of the known world, and my own world’s end.
I throw my hands skywards in desperation: “Is anybody up there?” There’s no reply, and I see no ladder for angels to descend or ascend.
Only the crows, those black-winged monarchs destined to wear the survivor’s crown, cry out their anguish as they wait for the day when they’ll pick clean my unburied bones and rule this sickening world, an earthly paradise no more.
Comment:
When I said “I am looking for a picture of a crow,” Moo went wild. “Me,” he said. “I’ve got one.” And indeed he had. Here it is – two crows perched like vultures over the body of a fast melting snowman. Our current world in miniature – and don’t forget the yellow snow and the doggy doing a dump. “Moo,” I said, “That’s not nice.” “True to nature, though,” he replied. “You want reality – you got it.”
Reality – what a strange word. Who knows nowadays what is real? The barber’s basin in Don Quixote – is it a barber’s basin or is it Mambrino’s Helmet? Good question. Relativism – it depends on your point of view. U a barber’s basin – turn it upside down Ω and it’s a helmet. So how do we deal with an object that has two functions and can be seen both as one thing and then another?
Good question. Cervantes solves the problem in his own unique fashion – U – bacía / basin and Ω – yelmo / helmet. Put them together and you get the neologism [newly invented word] baciyelmo – a basin that serves as a helmet and a helmet that serves as a basin. Wonderful – if it weren’t for the snout, I’d swear that was the origin of the pig-faced bassinet.
Some days, I try to understand all this – but I throw my hands skywards in desperation: “Is anybody up there?” Another good question. I often ask myself that question but I despair of an answer.
My friend Francisco de Quevedo voiced the same question in a dream that came to me last night.
¡Ah de la vida! ¿Nadie me responde?
Life ahoy! Will nobody reply? Is anybody up there? Will someone reply?
Blas de Otero once made a similar utterance –
“I raise my hands in supplication – you cut them off at the wrist.”
Tell me, if you know, – what is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. And look at those crows, standing there, staring, waiting … waiting for their turn to come. Patient, eternally patient. Just standing around. Waiting.
rogermoorepoet 