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Bird’s Nest

Bird’s Nest
Jackson Pollock No 5 (1948)

This bird’s nest starts with a startling tweet
that wins a trilled, thrilled response. A flutter
of heart-string wings, creator, viewer, join

with the creation. Thin threads of life mix
and match their tangled weave, existential
tapestry, fathered in a feathered nest.

World without end, this labyrinth without
an entry point, without a beginning,
with a spaghetti-thread middle that meets

not in a breath-catch of the mind, but in
a brush-flick of coloured rain, a cycle
recycled of circled paint, circular

in its circumnavigation, its square
eight by four-foot globe of a new world whirled
in stringy whorls, reinvented beauty

drawn haphazardly from the bicycle
tour de force of this artist’s inner mind.

Comment: In my latest poetry book entitled The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature, I explore the relationship between art and the natural world. I have always been fascinated by what we see, how we see it, and how it affects us. The tiny print above is scarcely representative of the eight by four-foot world that the artist creates, or re-creates. And what is modern art? Is it a re-creation of the world as we see and feel it or a representation of a new internal world glimpsed by the artist’s mind and hand-turned into a new reality, the work of art? I guess it depends on the artist, his or her way of life, the way they approach the macrocosm, and how they view the microcosm of their own inner lives.

Creation: such a lovely word. Such joy generated as we create something new, be it something verbal, visual, or tactile. For me, it is more a verbal world than a visual one. My forays into art are wonderful, enjoyable, but very personal and artistically limited, even though I love taking a line for a walk or allowing the marker to trace images on the page. Dreams and a dream world: we need them. Sometimes reality is too much for us and we have to shut out the noise of the world and, in Antonio Machado’s words, ‘saber estar solo entre la gente‘ / know how to walk alone among the crowd. The loneliness of the long-distance runner. The isolation of the loving heart trapped within its cage of flesh and bone. The solitude of the spring nest on the pillars at Long’s Creek, overlooking the head pond at Mactaquac, as it waits for its restless occupants to return from their long journey back to the north from the south and start the rebuilding process, each twig, each straw, a minor miracle. And then the hatching and the fledglings and the return flight south that gifts the empty nest such loneliness as it waits for the cycle to begin again once more.

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Memory Loss

Time-Spirits

Memory Loss

A carton of eggs
abandoned in the supermarket.
Her cousin’s face, her daughter’s name,
the parking spot where she left the car.

Forgotten phone numbers.
Birthdays of family members
never remembered.

“What day is it today,” she asks,
for the third or fourth time.

Her programs no longer work.
Many files now inaccessible,
are written in coded jabberwocky.
I show her photos but to her they are
blank spaces, gaps in her photo album.

“I recognize your face,” she says to me,
but I can’t remember your name.”

Comment: Towards the end of her life, my grand-mother started to lose her memory. I penned this poem a long time ago, then recovered it from my poetry discards. Some years ago, a virus entered my computer system and destroyed many of my files. I had backed them up, but I never really accessed them all when I bought this new computer. Now, in this time of much sitting and screen viewing, when friends no longer knock on the door to share a cup of coffee or tea, time weighs heavy, and I can look at those old files again. This also what I have done with my chess, breaking out the first travelling chess set I bought back when I was nine or ten years old, and re-playing favorite games with its red and white pieces in their cardboard box. I haven’t played serious chess since I came to Canada and, as a result, I have forgotten the openings, mislaid the combative combinations of the middle game, and can now plot only the simplest of endings. This too, in its own way, is a sort of memory loss. Yet as I replay the Fischer-Spassky series of 1972, so much comes flooding back. Memory loss: some things do return, but as I age, I wonder if that other memory loss, the more fatal one, will one day grip me, as it gripped my grand-mother, and leave me damaged and un-repairable. I wake up some mornings, confused from sleep, and wonder whether this is what awaits us all.

Scorched Earth

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Scorched Earth

A scorch mark
still scars this woodland
where deer grazed
until spring grass
fed the flames
sown by an unknown hand.

RCMP
cars blocked
the lower road,
uniformed officers
directed us to detour
up and away.

Below us we could see
smoke, no flames,
two firetrucks.
The acridity of ash,
breeze-borne,
filtered through the car
making us cough.

No more will the deer
roam this particular place
until wounds are healed
and all trace of the fire,
like them, has fled.

Comment: Driving to the head pond at Mactaquac, a week or so ago, we met an RCMP roadblock and were diverted by the officers. We ascended Mactaquac heights, and came down the other side, rejoining the lower road which was blocked by another set of RCMP cars. It was the week after the shootings in Nova Scotia. All we could think of was the respect we have for the RCMP. The knowledge that, if someone drove a police cruiser, stolen or faked, and wore an RCMP uniform, stolen, faked, or genuine, and flagged us down, well, we would have had no doubts and we would have obeyed that person implicitly. This was apparently what happened in Nova Scotia when the gunman, dressed like an RCMP Officer, flagged some of his victims down, then shot them as they sat in their cars. I guess the wounds of forest and deer will heal more quickly than those of the victims’ families. Pax amorque / peace and love.

Rain

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Rain

rain
song-birds
trilling liquid notes
spring songs
flooding gardens

oh!
competitions
ritualistic rivalries
staking out territories
winter stalwarts
versus
nouveaux venus
with their summer wealth
of well-fed health

everyone competing
for their garden niche
males en garde
guarding each square inch
their earthly paradise
carved in my yard

Comment: They lit up the Mountain Ash as if it were a Christmas Tree, American Goldfinches, twenty-four of them. The rain ran down the window panes and all the photos blurred and distorted. One at each end of the garden, two robins sang. Two pair of Purple Finches, the bright male and the dowdy female, pecked beneath the feeder as the chickadees, siskens, and juncos flitted in and out. The red squirrel scattered the ones in the tree and the grey squirrel ran at and over the ones on the ground. Chaos. And the rain, rain, rain came down, down, until the garden was empty and birds and animals had taken shelter.

Applause

Applause

All that I hear
around me:
the mixing and matching
of shingle and stone,
waves hissing,
grinding the beach down
as they move in and out.

Comment: We are surrounded by news, fake news, false news, and systematic deception. What can we now trust? I no longer know. But I do know that the above poem is not nihilistic. It expresses the reduction of applause and insubstantial glory to the minutiae of the daily doings of the natural world, in comparison to which we humans are nothing. “Look on my works ye mighty and despair” … hand gestures, smiles, thunderous applause from the chosen gathered to bear witness and paid to applaud, whatever the event. Alas, I cannot say it as well as Shelley. Here’s his Ozymandias (11 January 1818).

I met a traveler from an antique land
who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

and on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Biopsy

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Biopsy

Driving home
from the hospital
after the biopsy,
thinking of the indignities
inflicted on my body,
cold, exploratory fingers,
the insertions,
the ardent desire
to say
“Enough,
no more!”

Oh God,
I am so cold.

Fierce winds
push me
along a snow-packed road.

I dream of sunshine
of summer flowers,

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of chipmunks and squirrels,
of bird seed scattered
so others may survive.

I dream of five deer
walking at midnight
through my garden.

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Magic,
their shadows
under moonlight
on the snow.

I skid into a snow bank
and my world shakes in shock.

A thirty-wheeler slithers by:
there are so many ways to die.

Comment: Was it really only five years ago that I wrote those lines? I hadn’t even started this blog back then. So much melted snow, so much water under so many bridges. I look back at my journal and read that on April 1, 2020, in the USA, there were 3,800 dead from Covidis and 300,000 people affected. This morning, when I got up, those figures were higher, much higher: 63,019 dead and 1,070,032 affected. What a difference a month makes, let alone five years.

Affected, such a silly word when each individual person that these figures represent is, or was, a living, thinking, loving, human being, with an extended network of family and friends, each one of whom is in turn affected by the loss or sickness of a group member, be it a brother, a child, a sister, a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, or just a friend … just a friend, another silly thing to say, as if just friends were not important, collateral damage, so to speak … and now, throughout our world, in macrocosm and in microcosm, we are, each one of us affected, in one way or another. Here in New Brunswick, Canada, we wash our hands, we wear masks, we stay home as much as possible, we maintain distancing when we go out on essential errands … I know it is different in other parts of Canada, and of the world, but we are all affected, and some so much more than others.

So, wherever you are, whoever you are, be strong, be brave, dance when and if you can, sing to yourself, sing for your family and friends, reach out to others, and above all take care of each other and survive.

My heart and these words go out to you: Byddwch lawen a chadwch eich ffyd a gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd / be joyful, keep your faith, and do the small things in life as Dewi Sant, St. David of Wales, a real person, is said to have said, almost 1500 years ago.

Black Angel

Black Angel

You cannot hide
when the black angel arrives
to knock 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 may know you are there,
but you can no longer see
your reflection in the mirror.

Comment: Another Golden Oldie from the same dusty manuscript (as if e-files could get dusty), but a little bit more sinister, this one. As long as you can see your reflection and as long as your shadow is still clipped to your heels when the sun shines, you are probably all right. A friend of mine had a nasty turn the other night. He woke up with cramp at 3 in the morning, got out of bed to stretch, blacked out while he was stretching, and came round on the bedroom floor an hour later. It took him 10 minutes to roll over, perform a push up, get onto his knees, crawl to the chair, and pull himself upright. He climbed back into bed and forgot all about it until it was time for him to get up the next morning. Then he lay there worrying until the forces of nature forced him to his feet. Now he says he’s fine … he might be. I checked his shadow and it’s still there and when I talked with him on Messenger, he’d managed to shave.

Last Dance

Last Dance

The shy lady in the corner,
body withered by cancer,
stands up to dance.

She bows to the band
then floats into movement.

Dancing alone she clings
to the empty air as she
once clung to her man.

Nymphs and shepherds play
sweet music at midnight in this
room turned sacred grove.

Her dance-steps are a draught
of joyous water from the fount
of eternal youth and lasting love.

Comment: Another Golden Oldie pulled out of the magic hat of a forgotten manuscript. Such a joy to rediscover these things. Draught is the English form of American draft, incidentally, as in draught cider. I hate how my spell-checker corrects my spelling, even when it is correct. Wednesday was dance night in the hospice. At seven o’clock a band would arrive and set up at one end of the dining room. Tables were cleared away and chairs placed in rows so that patients could sit and listen or move onto the dance space that awaited them. This one old lady, shy and very much worn down by her treatment, stood up when the last dance was called and floated in an ethereal space that was hers and hers alone. The other patients stood around in a circle and applauded as she danced and the band played on and on until everyone was dancing and the room was filled with joy and forgetfulness. Such is human strength, even in the face of apparent and imminent disaster. Dance on, my friends, dance on.

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Heroes

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Heroes

In 1898, when Spain lost Cuba, they lost the last vestige of their world-wide Empire and were forced to turn back in on themselves. Miguel de Unamuno, along with other artists from the Generation of ’98, turned to the concept of intra-historia. Historia / history means the great historical events, battles and conquests, kings and kingdoms (how male it all was!). Intra-historia / intra-history meant the every day lives that ordinary people led, lives that had remained basically unchanged for centuries, except when the men who made history rode through.

Do the small things in life: that’s all most of us can do and have done, throughout the centuries. And we are the true heroes, certainly of intra-history, you and I, and people like us, because we have worked all our lives at our daily tasks, we have brought up our children, we have made the small, micro-world which we inhabit into a better place. Intra-history is dedicated to the house-wives and the house-husbands, heroes all, who have done those small things in life, walked the dogs, fed the chickens, milked the cows, gone out to work, day after day, to put food on the table, delivered and brought up the children, looked after the sick, assisted the dying on their departure from this world, buried them, and given them peace. Heroes all, especially in these times of troubles, I salute you.

Nurses, health care workers, pharmacists, ambulance drivers, supermarket workers who allow us to bring the food to the table, care-givers, cleaners, garbage men, street-workers, heroes all, I salute you. It is time the ‘little people’ reclaimed their world and took it back for the REAL people, the real heroes.

So, my heroes, be brave, battle on, and accept this floral tribute.

Empty Nest

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Empty Nest

The wind at the window
scratches tiny notes.
I can no longer hear the tune
nor read the words.

Who walks beside me
as I pace my lonely path,
abandoned in this empty house.

My self-portrait
stares back at me:
a splintered selfie,
framed in a sliver
of silvery glass.

Above me,
a monkey moon,
that itinerant tinker,
walks a fractured way
over broken glass.

The knapsack on his back
is cobbled together
from cobwebs and clumsy
veils of drifting clouds.

Comment: Another Golden Oldie from that same throw-away manuscript that I discovered a couple of days ago. I wrote this one the year after my mother’s death. My father was in hospital and I had flown back to Wales to visit him. When I was not with him, I wandered alone in a large house, empty of people, but filled with memories. The whole experience was rather surreal, just like the imagery I conjured up to describe it. Early spring, but a cold one. After hospital visiting hours, I wandered an untidy house and an unkempt garden. My mother had departed. My father was on the way out. I was alone with a life-time of memories. “No hay pájaros en los nidos de antaño” wrote Cervantes in the Quixote. “There are no birds in last year’s nests.” With no brothers, no sisters, no close family, and no friends left in Wales, I found that out the hard way. Those days of wandering, ‘upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber,’ taught me that most difficult of lessons in the hardest of ways.

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