Uncategorized

Carved in Stone 65 & 66

Carved in Stone
65

Flames flow sparkling waters,
a cataract of fire,
down church walls
as the Castillo burns.

Fireworks claw upwards
to knock on heaven’s door
and waken the sleeping gods
reminding them
not to forget their people.

A knife edge slices sun
from shadow, heat from cool,
solombra, Paz calls his neologism
with its combination
of sun and shade / sol y sombra.

66

I will never forget the taste and smell
of my own sweat as I walk beneath
the heaviness of a midday sun,
its heat falling vertical
and rebounding in waves
from concrete and cobbles.

I recall the roughness
of hand-hewn stone
heated by that burning sun,
the smoothness of silk
contrasting with the harshness
of tares in hand-woven wool,
marketed in the central square.

Commentary:

Fireworks claw upwards to knock on heaven’s door. The celebrants would buy their rockets in groups of 3, 6, or 12. When the first rocket went up – whoooosh – BANG! – we would wait for the fourth. When the sixth rocket went up, same thing – do they have a full dozen? And when the seventh rocket goes up, indeed, we know they do. Sometimes, we would be woken up in the early morning, as the joyful people returned home after a night of reveling. When that seventh rocket flew skywards – we knew it was useless to try and go back to sleep!

I remember leaving the zócalo one night, turning into a side street, and being met by a wall of people. A whole village, with its accompanying band stood there, waiting. Up went the first rocket, the band started to play, and the dancing broke out. No sleep for the gods that night. Their people needed them and had come knocking on the door. I was always amazed by the way the old gods stood shoulder to shoulder with the new gods of Christianity. The number of people who worshiped both also surprised me.

I last visited Oaxaca in 2001. I wonder how much has changed. I hope the dancing trees never change. Inside them, young children, their eyes peering through the bark, followed the band music. Occasionally, one of them would stop, open his or her tree, and invite you in. Alas, I never had the courage or the skill to accept the invitation. Even by 2001, the traditional carnival figures – monos – were gradually being replaced by Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Tragic, in so many ways. I hope they keep the traditions of the rockets and the music and the trees.

People of the Mist
A Poet’s Day in Oaxaca

If you want to read more about Oaxaca
Click here to purchase this book.

Carved in Stone 12

12

A Ruffed Grouse sought refuge
among the berries
of the Mountain Ash.

I shot him,
not with a gun,
but with a camera.

Intertextuality –
a friend borrowed the photo,
turned it into elegant brush strokes,
and now the painting
hangs on my wall,
opposite the tree
where once he sat.


 
A still-life
face to face with its reality
as early morning dew
forms on spider webs,
hammock-strung
between grass-blades,
bending in the wind.

And what if the spell breaks
and I can no longer see the fine seeds
of the dandelion clock kissed away
by the lisping lips of time?

What is life?
Is it just an illusion?

Commentary:

I shot him, not with a gun, but with a camera. Interesting. I have never seen the need to take the life of living creatures, except in cases of absolute necessity. And no, I have never killed, let alone for fun or sport. Shooting with a camera, that’s my ideal, and when a friend and fellow KIRA artist likes the photo and offers to paint it … well, that leads us into the nature of intertextuality, where reality becomes photo, becomes painting, becomes a text, and you, dear reader, are contemplating all those moments that join us.

The fine seeds of the dandelion clock kissed away by the lisping lips of time. This image comes from my walks in the Welsh countryside around Brandy Cove, Gower, with my paternal grandmother. “What time is it Nana?” I can still see her, bending down, plucking a dandelion, and holding it out for me to blow the seeds away – one puff, one o’clock, two puffs, two o’clock. I recall the seeds, drifting away on the summer breeze. “The Good Lord loved those dandelions,” she once told me. “That’s why He planted them everywhere.”

What will happen when the wells run dry and water runs out and there are no more dandelion seeds? How long will it be before I can no longer see them? Vis brevis, ars longa. The answer to my questions – I care, but I really don’t know.

Carved in Stone 10 & 11

10

Firelight dances,
bringing things back to life.

Each morning,
I take time to empty my mind
of those restless cats
I herd at night as they shimmy
through my troubled dreams.

By day, each cat
throws a different shadow
that parades before me
in the sweetness of soft sunlight
where a honeyed sweetness reigns
and no bitterness dwells.

My own cat haunts me,
purring for butter,

sitting there, staring,
eyes wide open, hypnotic.

What, I wonder,
does she really want
as she turns her back,
walks away,
and stalks a different prey
among my books?

11

Does she hear the clock’s dry tick
and sense the Roman numerals
marching round, left – right – left,
always in step
with the pendulum’s sway.

Does she recall migrating birds
or those gaudy summer butterflies,
fanning their wings
as they perch on Cone Heads,
Bees’ Balm, Black-eyed Susans,
generic butterflies,
specific flowers,
planted by my own hands?

I often ask myself –
“What does she know
that I don’t know?”

Commentary:

A strange thing knowledge. I have learned the hard way that “the more I know, the more I know I don’t know.” Just look at today’s second stanza. I would love to know more about, and understand better, migrating birds, summer butterflies, especially the lovely Monarchs that fly at Mexico and back, the flowers themselves, the way language substitutes the generic (butterflies, flowers) for the specific (Red Admirals, buttercups), and as for that cat, I really would like to know what she knows that I don’t know. I have never been able to train her, but she has certainly managed to train me!

And I would love to understand humor and laughter. Slapstick aside, humor is one of the cultural secrets that travels least in translation. Jokes in French or Spanish just do not translate well into English. It takes a deep cultural and linguistic knowledge to grasp foreign humor at first glance.

Take today, for instance. I drove the car to the garage to change the tires from summer to winter. I asked the garage guy, my friend, if he would drive me home, and he said he would. He got i the passenger side and I drove home. Then he drove the car back to the garage. He opened the garage doors, drove the car in, turned the engine off, hoisted the car up, and changed the tires. When he’d finished, he tried to start the engine. No luck. He called me – “Where’s the key?” “In my pocket!” I replied. We were having such fun chatting we never thought to offer or request the car key when we exchanged drivers. Well, we are all still laughing about it.

When I got into the house, even the cat was laughing, and as for that cat, I really would like to know what she knows that I don’t know. Maybe, it’s just that we humans, especially as we age, aren’t as clever as we sometimes think we are. Some things, I guess, I’ll never know.

Carved in Stone 4 & 5

Carved in Stone 4 & 5

4

Maiden Castle –
Rome’s victorious Legions
sought out the main gates,
broke them down,
and placed their altars
to Mars or Mithras
on the ruins of the pagan temples
they desecrated.

What were they, those Romans,
but pagans themselves?

Their false gods
replaced the fake gods,
worshiped there long before
the legions’ arrival.

5

Later, the Saxon sword-song
superseded them
and the Roman Empire fell,
with a pendulum swing
that led to another set of gods.

How did they know
which was the true god?
Was it the belief in miracles
or the military might
that resolved the issue?

Bonfire night.
The sacred texts go up
in fire and smoke.

Brave is the man
who risks his hand in the fire,
defying the flames
to hold on to his truth.


Commentary:

“Brave is the man who risks his hand in the fire, defying the flames to hold on to his truth.” It appears that the Congregation of the Holy Office, aka the Inquisition, threatened to hold Galileo’s right hand in the fire unless he recanted and denied his scientific observations. Church theory held that the universe was terra-centric – the sun moved round that earth and the earth stood still – while Galileo showed that it was actually heliocentric – the sun stood still and the earth moved around it. Old and sick, he recanted in public, but was heard to mutter eppur si muove – yet it still moves.

Bonfire Night celebrates the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Barrels of gunpowder had been placed beneath the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, but they were discovered on November 5, 1605 and removed. Bonfire Night is also called Guy Fawkes Night, Guy Fawkes being one of the key plotters to remove the English Parliament. Leading up to Bonfire Night, young children in the UK place a ragged scarecrow, called a Guy, around the streets begging for “a penny for the Guy”! With these pennies they buy fireworks. Then, on November 5, the Guy is set atop a large bonfire and the fire is lit. This autumn burning is accompanied by fireworks.

Bonfire night also refers to the old medieval book burnings of texts that were anathema to whatever religion or regime was in control. Cervantes refers to them in Don Quixote, I, 6 (1605).

Clepsydra 34

34

… my heart so broken
     I can’t count the pieces
          nor solve the puzzle

scars are trenches
     deep defensive lines
          gouged into my face 

every night
     the black dog returns
          and I wake up from a dream
               to find myself pincered

attracted by the light
     squeezed tight
          between cave walls

my top half struggles to be free
     my bottom half
          hips down is held
               in a ferocious grip

I scream the way
     a stuck pig screams
          when the knife flashes
               and the hot blood spurts

all at sea
     I move up and down
          on dark restless waves

I reach for a life raft
     but find only an apple
          bobbing as it floats …

Commentary:

Moo thought I needed cheering up, so he did this painting for me. U R My Sunshine, he said to me, then gave me the painting for today’s post. I think he was rather taken with the phrase ‘attracted by the light’ … hence the nice, bright, sunny painting. Whenever I feel down, Moo reminds me that every cloud has a silver lining. Today’s clouds over Island View certainly do. They have actually brought rain and we need that rain so badly. We are in the middle of a drought, in places it is a severe drought. Wells are drying up, the river and the aquifers are low, we need rain – and now we have some. Too late for the apple orchards and the farmers who do not have enough winter feed for their cattle. Too late for the local deer who do not have their usual post-summer glossy looks. And too late for the trees that look drab, having lost their usual fall glow to appear very pale and peaky. Let us hope that a little more rain, on a regular basis, will change all that, and give us the sort of silver lining that, next year, will produce golden apples and brightly colored fall leaves

Book of Life

Book of Life

When I lost my place, I tied my hanky in a knot,
to help me remember the number of my page.
Last night I looked in pockets and sleeve, but
I couldn’t remember where I put my hanky.

At midnight the stars dropped liquid fires and they
pooled like letters on the fresh snow of my dreams.

One night I caught some falling stars and I joined them
together, one by one, till they stretched their daisy chain
across the garden. Words grow like flowers in the Spring.

Once I could accelerate the universe. But now I slow
down when I spell my name. There is a circlet of gold
on the sky’s bright brow. What gave these stars the right
to write my future in expanding letters? A satellite moves
in a straight line, north to south and starlight crumbles
in the wake of artificial knowledge spanning the eye ball
of the planet.  Who will repair these broken tunes? Who
will glue these scattered notes back into the piano’s frame?

My tongue stumbles against my teeth and trips on my lip.
A leaf of fire scorches the deep bell sound of my throat.

Commentary:

I looked over my shoulder, backward into time and space, and discovered this poem, penned more than a quarter of a century ago and abandoned in an old folder. Moo tells me he hasn’t painted for some time – I wondered if he was on a rotating striking, like our posties (Canadian for mail men and women), but he assured me that he had been sleeping, not sleep-walking in circles. Anyway, he felt inspired, put paintbrush to postcard and gave new life to my Book of Life. Thank you, Moo.

Do you remember when we used to tie knots in our hankies to remember what we had to do? Paper tissues put an end to that. No point in tying a knot in a soggy tissue, even if you could. And as Francisco de Quevedo told us – no point in looking in your hanky after you’ve used it. No point in searching for diamonds and emeralds, let alone pearls of wisdom, they just won’t be there. Good one, Franky. Of course, he was writing in Spanish, not English and my translation can’t do him justice.

It used to be fun watching the night sky out here in Island View. So clear – the satellites passed overhead and followed different paths from the stars. No Platonic dancing to ethereal music for them. Tone deaf, the lot of them, cutting their own little paths across the night sky. We used to get Northern Lights too, Aurora Borealis. They were always spectacular. Great crackling curtains of light hanging down from the heavens almost to the rooftops. Moo wishes he could paint everything h sees. I wish I could write down in verse every thought I think. If each of us had our wishes fulfilled, we’d have two books of life – one in color and one in black and white!

Slipping Away

Slipping Away

Some days I feel you are slipping away, sliding
slowly into yourself, losing all thoughts and feelings
in your mind’s twisting maze of secret ways.

It gets harder and harder for me to drag you away
from the color tv and back into the black and white
realities of the daily life we used to share.

I do my best. I drive you out for a daily walk
in the local park. I do the shopping on my own,
selecting the groceries I think will please you.

I pick up your prescriptions from the pharmacy.
I prepare a croissant sandwich for your lunch.
Every night, I cook you the supper of your choice.

The possibility of losing you starts to affect me.
Already I am feeling alone and desperate and I grieve
for that which I might lose, your active presence.

What is happening to us? Is it just old age?
The longer it goes on, the more it seems that you are
like a sailing ship at sea, diminishing in the distance,
or like early November snow, slowly fading away.

Commentary:

Moo liked this poem. He thought that First Snow was an excellent choice for the painting. This is Canada. We all know how that first, early snow storm can suddenly drift away into nothingness. The original poem ended with the line ‘like a sailing ship at sea, diminishing in the distance’ but Moo begged me to add another line – and so I did ‘or like early November snow, slowly fading away’. Good old Moo, he mothers me like a mother duck with only one duckling. He has some good ideas, though, and I love some of his paintings. It’s Thanksgiving Monday in Canada today and yes, we can all give thanks for Moo and his paintings! Well, I can anyway. So, here goes – thank you Moo.

Not that there’s any early snow here. Not yet, anyway. Frost yes, but last year I only used the snowblower on three occasions. That is a crazy winter. We used to get nine feet of winter snow here in Island View, and when the spring melt came, our black Labrador retriever could swim around the block in the flooded ditches. Now we scarcely get enough water to fill the aquifer and we live in fear of a water shortage that may, next year or the year after, dry up our wells. “De Nile ain’t just a river in Egypt.” No water shortage yet this year – but we are being very, very careful with our water usage. The St. John River is lower than anyone can remember – four feet down at least as it descends towards the sea. And that is not good news for anyone. “Those who have eyes, but will not see until the river fails to reach the sea.”

Many of us care. And we all do our little bit. No watering the lawns. No washing the car. No watering the flowers. Use the dish-washer once every few days, one weekly load, not multiple daily loads. Don’t leave the tap running while you brush your teeth. When they stayed with us, our friends from Oaxaca looked on in astonishment at the amount f water we wasted. We learned a great deal about water conservation from them. I must include them in my Thanksgiving Thanks as well.

Inquisitor

Inquisitor
Sun and Moon

He told me to read,
and plucked my left eye from its orbit.
He slashed the glowing globe of the other.
Knowledge leaked out, loose threads dangled.
He told me to speak and I squeezed dry dust
to spout a diet of Catechism and Confession.

He emptied my mind of poetry and history.
He destroyed the myths of my people.
He filled me with fantasies from a far-off land.
I live in a desert where people die of thirst,
yet he talked to me of a man who walked on water.

On all sides, as stubborn as stucco,
the prison walls listened and learned.
I counted the years with feeble scratches:
one, five, two, three.

For an hour each day the sun shone on my face,
for an hour at night the moon kept me company.
Broken worlds lay shattered inside me.
Dust gathered in my people’s ancient dictionary.

My heart was like a spring sowing
withering in my chest
It longed for the witch doctor’s magic,
for the healing slash of wind and rain.

The Inquisitor told me to write down our history:
I wrote … how his church … had come … to save us.

Commentary:

No wonder the little girl in Moo’s painting looks so sad. She must have read this poem and understood how the exercise of power and authority, be it religious or secular, can effect those upon whom it is exercised. Times change, but so many things remain the same. The pendulum swings, and it moves from chaos to order and back again. The meaning of meaning – how we define chaos and how we define order define who we are.

Birds of a feather flock together. Manners maketh the man. Wonderful sayings. But fine words do not necessarily make for fine men or women at that. Serpents and senators, both can speak with forked tongues. It is up to us to apply discourse analysis and distinguish between what they say and what they actually mean. As my friend Jean-Paul Sartre once said – “L’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il fait.” A man is nothing more than what he does. His deeds reveal his true inner self – and remember – the plumage doesn’t necessarily make the bird.

St. Mary Redcliffe

St. Mary Redcliffe

Time and Temple Meads
have begrimed your wand-thin spire,
the tallest in England.

You waved goodbye
to the Cabot boys,
Nova Scotia bound,
as they set sail.

Starling lime your belfry,
gift and inspiration
of Merchant Adventurers,
that gentlemen’s company.

Worms wriggle and gnaw
at your ship’s figure-head,
harbored now, bare-breasted,
sturdy in your oak-beam nave.

Rust rustles and creaks
at the Edney Gates,
wrought to last centuries
by Bristol ironmasters,
themselves apprenticed
to learn time’s laws.

Commentary:

Yesterday, via Zoom, I met with the Canadian Alumni of Bristol University. Sarah Price (Bristol Alumni Association) and Heather Proctor (Alumna) set the meeting up for us. Golden Oldies, all of us, we sat there and reminisced about our days, so long ago for most of us, at Bristol. I graduated in 1966, the same year I came to Canada. Most of the other alumni graduated long before I did. My last visit was in 1986 when I met with the Spanish Department, much changed, and talked abut my most recent research. One alumnus had visited just last year and talked of his returning to his old hall, his old room, his olde department, and all the changes that he had seen.

Most of those gathered had been in halls of one sort or another. Their experiences and friendships seemed very different to mine. Digs out in Knowle, Bristol, my first year. Then rooms in a rooming house, up by the Clifton Suspension Bridge, with other members of the Cross-Country team, for my next two years. Summers in Spain and France distanced me enormously from both England and the university. I remember coming back from Spain one summer and standing at the bus stop in Clifton, waiting for a bus to take me to Temple Meads Railway Station, a Number 18, if I remember correctly. Well, the bus arrived and drove towards me at enormous speed. It didn’t look as if the driver had any attention of stopping. So, I ran out into the road, waving my arms. He braked, gave me a very strange look, and asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to go to Temple Meads. He said well get on the ****ing bus then. I looked at a great expanse of green metal, with windows, but no door, and asked him “Where’s the door?” Of course, after three months in Spain, like an idiot, I was standing on the wrong side of the road, and the wrong side of the bus. Such bitter-sweet memories.

I suppose I wasn’t a very good student. My only talent was speaking Spanish fluently. I worked hard at that, completely immersed in Santander, playing soccer on the sand, wandering through bars at night, learning to drink from a porrón and a bota without disgracing myself, and fishing on the weekends for panchos and julias in the Bay of Santander. I also learned how to row an old battered row boat, un bote. And it was all marvelous fun.

I also wrote a great deal of poetry and even managed to publish regularly in the Nonesuch Magazine. St. Mary Redcliffe, the poem above, dates from those days. I loved that church and visited it regularly. I wonder how many other Bristol students went in there and walked around inside. I also wonder how many stood with Jorge Luis Borges by the polished, black slate of the city hall, with its coal mine on the green, and gazed at their reflections in those shiny azabache mirrors. As I wrote yesterday on my blog – “How much can we know, your life of mine, my life of yours? At what point do those twin railway lines meet at the edge of time? Or are they doomed to a parallel universe where mind and mind, rail and rail, neither meet nor understand?” Sometimes, we can take a great joy in working out the answers to such questions. 

Poisoned Pawn

Poisoned Paw

Openings are so important.
They should be magnets
drawing the opposition in,
but sometimes they’re whirl-pools
dragging you down.

You try to hold your breath,
but you must breathe deep, let go,
go with the flow and prepare for
whatever awaits you in the deep.
Down there, it’s a different world.

Light breaks its black and white bishops,
and the knights walk a forked path
when not pinned down. When you lose
do you mourn for the simplicity of draughts,
or Fox and Hounds or do you strive
to establish, once more, your light in the dark,
down there, where no sun shines.

You are the glow-worm,
glowing where no light glows.
You are the line, the sinker, the hook,
the bait, the temptation that encourages
your opponents to sacrifice their own peace,
 to join you, and together, to swim, or drown.

Commentary:

My family didn’t play much chess. I bought my first chess set when I was ten years old, at Boot’s the Chemist, down by the market, in Swansea. I also bought Harry Golembek’s book The Game of Chess. I still have both the set and the book, seventy years later. Descriptive notation. Absolutely bewildering. I stared at the chart that gave the code names of every square and remained totally confused. I had to look up each square, from its notation, locate it on the chart, then move the piece on my board into the appropriate position. And remember, each side had exactly the same format – QR1, QKt1, QB1, Q1, K1, KB1, KKt1, KR1. Not quite a mirror image as the squares reversed themselves on the other side of the board.

I remember clearly the day that ‘Light broke where no light shone.’ I looked at the maze of numbers, and suddenly the pattern clicked into shape in my mind and I understood the whole idea of descriptive notation. Boundary Knowledge – you cross a boundary after days of bewilderment, and enter a new phase of enlightenment ‘light breaks where no light shines’. When I watched the film, The Poisoned Pawn, I remembered my own learning days in chess. Great fun, that particular opening. Do we take the poisoned pawn, or do we leave it? I will leave you to decide. But remember, it’s not called the poisoned pawn for nothing, damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

I used descriptive notation throughout my school days. I had one particular friend in boarding school who also played chess. We slept in the same dormitory, two beds apart. After lights out, no talking, no reading. Prefects prowled at night to enforce the rules. After lights out, one of us would call out ‘P-K4’ and thus the game started. We weren’t exactly talking, so it wasn’t easy to catch us. Every night, we played the game in our heads. A great memory trainer. Occasionally we managed to finish a game – not often – we were both too wary of Fool’s Mate and the simple early traps! Each day, during one of the school breaks, we would restart the game of the night before, from memory, and then play it to its end. We very rarely forgot the moves we had made and we virtually never disagreed on the board position.

This was totally unlike chess with my family. The grown-ups would all gather round the board. Their object was to distract me, to move pieces when I wasn’t looking, to remove (MY) pieces and leave me in a desperate situation. “‘Knock, knock!’ ‘Who’s that at the door? Go and look.” And off I would go to return to a battlefield that had totally changed its shape and mood. I would carefully reconstruct it, piece by piece, square by square. But I have never forgotten the black looks, the accusations of cheating, the fury of the old ones being beaten by the younger generation. In the end, nobody within the family would play me, unless I gave them a handicap by removing a rook or one of the bishops.

I didn’t discover algebraic notation until I lived first in France, and then in Spain. Algebraic notation. Each of the 64 squares had its own letter and number and, as a result, there was no way to confuse the position of the pieces. Staunton chess sets in England became a variety of different piece shapes on the continent and I often lost games when I forgot that the pawn had one circle, the bishop two, and the queen three, but they all looked like. Many a time I gave up a bishop thinking it was a pawn – oh that poisoned pawn again.

Now, in my dotage, I play chess against the computer. I haven’t played a live opponent for years. But I do have a chess book collection and I have played Fisher’s best games, and Fisher vs Spassky, and I have studied the Russians and how they play and think – very differently from me. And so, in my old age, I sit at the chessboard of my life, and I move the pieces here and there, and remember old friends, and how we shifted across the shifting boards of our days. So many pieces have dropped from life’s chessboard, but a few of us are left, and we move more slowly, but we wander on and on.

PS Moo, sometimes slow in understanding, offered me several paintings that suggested the aftermath of the Poisoned Prawn. When I explained the basics of chess to him, he said he didn’t have a chess painting he could recommend, so he suggested this painting – the correct way to teach. ‘You can’t teach chess,’ I said, ‘it is so instinctive.’ I took one look at the right way to teach and loved it. Here we go The Right Way to Teach! X – WRONG!