Books

Rage, Rage 44 & 45

Rage, Rage
44

But all is not lost.
Highlights of the day:
waking to birdsong,
making it safely to the bathroom,
shaving without cutting my face.

I step high to get into the shower
and wash my body
without dropping the soap.

I emerge
without slipping or falling
thanks to the safety rails
Extra-Mural
inserted in the walls.

I stand on the bath mat
and dry with my towel
those parts of the body
that are now
so difficult to reach,
especially between
my far-off toes.

45

I pull my shirt over
still-wet, sticky patches,
damp from the shower,
and negotiate each trouser leg
without catching
my toe nails in a fold.

I tug at the pulleys
of the machine
that helps my socks
to glide onto my feet.

I force those swollen feet
into undersize shoes
and hobble
to the top of the stairs.

Banister in one hand,
cane in the other,
I lurch down them,
descending with caution
one step at a time.

Comment:

I lurch down the stairs, descending with caution, one step at a time. Indeed I do. That whole process of getting up, washing, dressing, going down stairs, takes me a good half hour, sometimes more. I do things in order, one after another, each step the same every day. That way, I remember everything and forget nothing. Easier said than done! I often forget something, or do something out of order, and then I get muddled and I stand there befuddled. Muddled and befuddled. Not a good way to start the day.

Moo sometimes visits and watches me as I struggle with my clothes. He has been known to help, especially when my back is still wet and my shirt won’t go on, or my feet get stuck in my pants or my socks. Usually, though, he’s very good. He sits or stands there quietly, just watching. I think some of his paintings come from some of my struggles. I know the titles do. When I am muddled and befuddled he says I am all shook up. he says that’s where the painting comes from. I’m not so sure about that. I think he has a secret liking for Elvis Presley.

Funny going back over those old songs from the fifties and sixties. Long gone are the days when boarding school boys stuck their chewing gum on their bedposts overnight. I remember when we used to dare each other to sing ‘does your chewing gum lose its flavor’ in the school chapel during the morning service. I remember once having a bet with a friend how many Hallelujahs there were in the Hallelujah chorus. We dared each other to sing the number we chose. His number was higher than mine, and I remember his voice, singing out a lone solo Hallelujah and shattering the deafening silence of the packed school chapel.

And those limericks – “There was a young boy in the choir, whose voice rose up higher and higher. One Saturday night it rose right out of sight and we found it next day on the spire.” And that might be the only non-filthy Limerick that this old man can remember. Oh dear – all those songs we sang on the school bus!

Rage, Rage 38

Rage, Rage
38

Now, my heart is once more
a time-bomb ticking
beneath her fingers.

I dream of walking tall,
with her by my side,
in the youthful paradise
of a distant,
long-promised land.

My tom-tom heart,
softening clay,
putty beneath her fingers,
thumps out a hoodoo
voodoo beat on its drum.

Victor Sylvester,
and his orchestra,
Sundays on BBC radio,
announces his signature rhythm –
slow, slow, quick, quick, slow –
my mind waltzes to the music
plucked from my heart strings.

Wild winds blow in from the shore
buffeting my heart, breaking it apart.
Blown open, in spite of my dreams,
my secret is not a secret anymore.

Comment:

Absent without leave, I have chased the dreams of rugby and cricket and abandoned my poetry until another today. And here I am, a week after St. David’s Day, still dreaming, still raging, still recalling so many things.

Wild winds blow in from the shore buffeting my heart, breaking it apart. You can see, in the photo above, the wind tugging at the waves. A lurid sky fills with heavy clouds and oncoming rain. My heart is out there somewhere, wave-washed, blown open by the simple beauty of wind and sea.

How many now recall Victor Sylvester on BBC Radio on a Sunday afternoon? Or the Billy Cotton Band Show? That was our Sunday afternoon entertainment long before we had TV. You can’t imagine it, can you? A world without TV. So many things fade away from far too many people.

Who now will talk of my Voce and my Larwood, long ago? How many saw Hammond at his best, with his imperial cover drive? Ken Jones? Cliff Jones? JJ and JPR? Lloyd and Bleddyn? Old visions, buffet my heart, breaking it apart. Frank Worrall in Swansea at St. Helen’s. Everton De Courcy Weekes at Bristol, in the County Ground. I have the photos. I have the memories. And I have a broken heart when I remember things, some personal, some not, that so few people do.

Rage, Rage 34

Rage, Rage
34

A squiggle of spaghetti
or twisted noodles,
that’s what my brain
has become.

My second-hand mind
is a hand-me-down,
an antipersonnel bomb
from another place
and a distant time.

Blind, in so many ways,
with nowhere I want to go,
my soon-to-end days
lie humped on my shoulders,
weighing me down
as I limp along.

Comment:

You can blame my friend Moo for the painting. “That’s my view of your brain,” he told me. “A squiggle of spaghetti or twisted noodles.” I think his painting looks like what my Beloved, courtesy of Corrie Street (as was), calls a Spag Bowl. Funny how easy it is to become muddled and confused as we age. Did I shut the back door? Double-check. Yes, I did. And you can multiply that to the power of N (or DR – for don’t remember!). And what about those windmills that wave their arms in my mind? Will that be cash or “Charge!”

Re-reading the Quixote, side by side with a very good friend, I forget some of the ideas that I once had. I try to read my penciled marginal notes. What fun! First, I can hardly read them. Second, I can hardly understand them. And third, I have to reinvent what they might possibly have told me. All good fun. But sometimes, at the end of a session, my mind feels like the bodies of Don Quixote, Sancho, and Rocinante, after their meeting with the Yanguesans – battered, bruised, and beaten! Why, can someone kindly tell me, did Cervantes treat his two main characters to such frequent and brutal assaults?

Ah well, Friday today, and Friday is fish – not Spag Bowl. Are scallops fish? Not when they are sliced off your body with a razor-sharp sword. But then, I doubt if Quixote’s sword was razor sharp. It was probably vencida de la edad – conquered by age – just like he was. Conquered? No, not yet. Happily, I just limp along, however slowly. Ah yes, I forgot. I need a name for my Nexus. Maybe I’ll call it Rocinante, like DQ’s horse.

Book Burnings

Book Burning

A sharp-edged double sword,
this down-sizing,
this clearing out of odds and ends.

Library shelves emptying.
books disappearing, one by one.

So many memories
trapped between each page,
covers, dust-bound now,
dust to dust and books to ashes.

Sorrowful, not sweet, each parting,
multiple losses, characters
never to be met again,
except in dreams.

Heroes, thinkers, philosophers, poets,
their life work condemned to conflagration.

Alpha: such love at their beginnings.
Omega: such despair,
with Guy Fawkes celebrations
the means to their ends.

Word-fires:
the means of forging
those book worlds that surrounded us.

Bonfires:
the means to end them.

Steadfast, the book-fires,
flames fast devouring

all but an occasional volume
snatched by burning fingers,
from the flames.

Comment:

Funny things, book burnings. Why would anyone burn anything as innocent as a book? Good question. Yet people do. And people always have.

I think back to Don Quixote I, 6 and the Scrutiny of the Library. The Priest and the Barber go through the mad knight’s library and one by one examine the books of chivalry and either spare them, or cast them into the flames. This, in itself is a parody of some of the judicial actions of the Spanish Inquisition. In particular, any book that they considered to be unsafe or heretical went into the flames. Our Spanish Knight, of course, went mad through reading too many books of chivalry – and his brain dried up so that he totally lost all reason.

It is very interesting to read which books were spared and why. Equally interesting to find that many were burned on aesthetic grounds – they were not well written, or they were boring. Fascinating.

Fascinating too the book burnings that took place in Mexico during the Conquest of that country by the Spanish Conquistadores. Many pre-Columbian codices were burned. Priceless treasures and histories lost forever. Some, I think the Vindobonensis, still bear the marks of the flames when they were pulled from the fire in an effort to save them.

Moo tells me that my books will never be burned. And I am thankful for that. I asked why they wouldn’t be and he replied that nobody reads them anyway! Not such a comforting thought. So, in an effort to keep me happy and to preserve my books from the flames, another of my friends laid them out on the beach at Holt’s Point, New Brunswick. They certainly won’t burn when the tide comes in.

More important, I see that junk from Canadian Beaches, dated about 1960, has just arrived on the shores of the European continent, sixty plus years later. So – a floating book, a message, perhaps, in a time-bottle, destined to achieve immortality and live for ever. What a comforting thought for those of us who believe in the time and the tide that wait for no man! But they both might wait for his books.

Rage, Rage 2 & 3


Rage, Rage
2

These problems start the day
you realize you are alone.
Your beloved goes away,
for a holiday,
to be with your daughter
and grandchild.

Now the house and the cat
are yours, and yours alone.
No problem you say and
everyone believes you.

You jumped in the car,
drove daughter, and child,
holidays done,
to the airport.

Your beloved went with them,
her holiday about to begin.
And that’s when it all began.

3

When I come back home
from leaving them at the airport,
the front door stands open.

I thought I had closed it
when we left.
I tip-toe in and call out
“Is anybody there?”

Echo answers me –
‘… there, there, there …”

Commentary:

Raymond Guy LeBlanc, one of my favorite Acadian poets, published his poetry book, Cri de Terre, in 1972. My painter friend Moo, who also likes Acadian poetry, borrowed the title and changed it slightly when he painted this painting – Cri de Coeur. Earth Cry / Heart Cry.
What is all creativity, visual of verbal, but a cry from the land or a cry from the heart? Sometimes it is more than a cry – it becomes a clarion call, a shout out, a calling out.

So many of us are born with creativity in our hearts. So few of us carry that creativity, be it verbal or visual, into the adult world, a world that all too often grinds us down and sifts us out. We become grey people in grey clothing sitting behind grey desks beneath artificial lighting, doing grey jobs that slowly turn us into nine to five (or longer) dusts.

Moo has promised me a series of red paintings for this sequence. We shall see how he does. Red for anger, red for age, a red flag for danger, a red rag to wave at the raging bull of life, to provoke it, then bring it under control.

Nadolig Llawen – Welsh for Have a Joyous Festive Season. You can add other languages, as you wish. But above all remember Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s words – “Life is a dream and dreams are nothing but dreams.” One day, we shall all wake up. Artists and dreamers, grey ghosts and people of straw and dust.


Angel

Angel

Oh yes, I have been with them, the lost folk, the tramps, the homeless, the bag-women, all the gente perduta. I have stepped on their fingers as they sprawled on the sidewalk. I have trodden on their toes, tripped over their legs, bumped into their stiff, stumbling bodies and stepped in their wasted body fluids. I have stayed out all night, shared a pack of cigarettes, producing another pack or a bottle from the pouch beneath my wings. Such stories they tell, and they tell them in that antiquated language that I first heard hundreds of years ago. They know me now. I won’t say they trust me, but they tolerate my presence, a Jacques Cousteau voyeur, looking into the sea-depths of their despair.
            Garbed in garbage bags, thin trickles of wine and vomit slipping over their lips and cheeks, bloody bandages wound around needle wounds, they have scars at elbow and foot. I hear the warmish blood whistling its snake song through their arteries and veins but death shall have no dominion, not while I am on watch.
            I enfold myself in my wings and weep as these people, my people now, pillow their heads on bloody bandages. Their world is a world of vomit and reek, yet the edges of their shattered lives rip chunks from my hands and fingers, pluck feathers from my wings, tear holes in my heart. Needles I have seen and touched, blunt, shared between three, five, and twenty-five. Round and round, they go, slipping the thin threads of drug-dreams and tainted blood from friend to friend while the blunt points stab at bruised flesh and leathery vein until the freed blood oozes through fingers and hands clenched tight to hold and staunch.
            Night after night I have watched them searching for something just beyond their fingertips. As the late-night diners emerge from their opulent restaurants, I have seen my people fortifying shop doorways with cardboard castles. I have watched them climb inside, shut down the portcullis, and enfold themselves in the plastic that will keep them free from wind and rain. They all crave the bottle’s warmth. They fight and scratch for that which will hold them together, body and soul, that spiritual glue that binds the spirit before setting it on its drunken dreams of freedom. Kings and Queens, tumbled from their earthly thrones, they dream of the paradise they lost, yet think they can find again at the sharp point of a needle or the bottom of a bottle.
            Oh bird-on-a-wire dreams held captive in a skull-bone cage, how you yearn to grow wings, like me, to soar, to fly, to be released from the body, to at last be free …

Commentary:

This book, All About Angels, is available online at Amazon.ca. Click on the link below to purchase the book.

All About Angels
Paperback edition

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!

On Loneliness

Loneliness

58 What relationships have a positive impact on you?

I think one of my poems answers this question best. I write “one of my poems” but it is really my ‘free’ translation of one of Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnets – Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos. I have changed the poem slightly, but I am sure Don Francisco (1580-1645) will excuse Don Roger’s impoverished effort (2023).

On Loneliness
29 December 2023

Resting in the peace of these small rooms,
with few, but welcome books together,
I live in conversation with my friends,
and listen with my eyes to loving words.

Not always understood, but always there,
they influence and question my affairs,
and with contrasting points of view,
they wake me up, and make me more aware.

The wisdom of these absent friends,
some distant from me just because they’re dead,
lives on and on, thanks to the printed word.

Life flits away, the past can’t be retained.
each hour, once past, is lost and gone,
but with such friends, I’m never left alone.

And there are so many of those literary friends. I still read Rudyard Kipling and I have just finished Kim, Captains Courageous, Stalky and Co., Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies. I read these first when I was nine or ten years old, and I return to them regularly. Other friends include Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de León, St. John of the Cross, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón, Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, various members of the Generation of 1898, the majority of the poets from the Generation of 1927… and these are just my Spanish literary friends. I have French friends, English friends, Anglo-Welsh friends, Canadian friends, Mexican friends, and, in translation, many, many more. My relationship with each of these friends has had an impact upon me.

A recent painting, by my friend Moo, is called Fiat Lux – Let There Be Light. It is reminiscent of Dylan Thomas’s poem, Light breaks where no light shines. Intertextuality – Quevedo drew inspiration from the Stoics. I drew inspiration from Quevedo. Moo drew inspiration from Dylan Thomas. The nature of creativity, and its continuing links throughout the ages, shines clearly through these wonderful associations. Long may they continue, and may others enjoy them and be influenced by them as much as I have.

Comment:
The funny thing is that I do not remember writing this blog prompt, nor do I remember having translated Quevedo’s poem into English. I wonder how many other forget-me-nots there are out there. Or, to be more precise, in my books and in my notes. A treasure trove – that’s my guess. Borges wrote of Quevedo that he was more a library than an author, and I am beginning to think that way about my self. A strange world, this, one in which the creator abandons, and then forgets, his creations. Perhaps we should change the image – not so much a library as an orphanage, and so many lost and abandoned orphans wandering around The Little World of Don Rogelio.

Clepsydra 4 & 5

Clepsydra 4 & 5

4

… candles and the clepsydra
     marking time
          witnessing
               the transition
                    from day to night

drip-by-drop
     falling water
          flickering candle flames

less certain
     than the monotonous
          tick-tock
               of a pendulum clock
 
time and tide
     wait not
          for ship nor man

though time is marked
     on calendars
          and prison walls

days passing into weeks
     spring into summer into autumn

daylight lengthening
     shortening
          until bleak mid-winter
               comes again …

5

… black midnight
     all is lost
          who now can count the cost

stiff upper lips
     forget how to pray
          fingers clasping
               unclasping
                    never grasping
                         life’s simple flow

with silent steps
     planets and stars
          slowly turning
               writing out our lives

sun by day
     moon by night
               the sky alight
                    with shimmering fires

midnight curtains
     burning lights
          crazy curtains
               drawn in night’s sky

a lost dog hurls
     his coyote cry
          who on high
               now listens to his call

not the planets
     nor the Archer
          nor the dog star
               who never barks
                     anything
                          but summer’s flames

pity the poor dogs below
     bitches in heat
          waiting alone
               for their lover’s paws
                    their welcome snuffles

locked and bolted
    the door
          heightened
               the canicular heat …

Carved In Stone

Carved in Stone

Brief Introduction

“Poetry explains itself. If it doesn’t, it’s inexplicable.” Pedro Salinas.

I entered this collection of poems for the Alfred G. Bailey Awad (poetry manuscript), WFNB, 2025. Alas, it did not win an award, but the judge, Kathy Mac, made some excellent suggestions as to how I might improve the manuscript. I have followed her advice to the best of my ability.

Carved in Stone is the second dialog (Chronotopos II) in my Bakhtinian Dialogs with my time and my place. Clepsydra, Chronotopos I, won third place in the Bailey Award (2025) and has already been published. I have one, possibly two, more Dialogs planned.

Reception Theory – I write, you read. Any meaning that you extract from my poetry will depend on your own culture and background. Tolle, Lege – Take and read. Read slowly, and with care.

I am a poet, a dreamer, if you will. These are my dreams. When you enter my world, you mingle your dreams with mine. The result, I hope, will be an interesting intellectual blend of new creativity. Pax amorque.

1

Behold me here,
filled with a sort of shallow,
hollowed-out wisdom
accumulated over decades
while listening with my eyes
to the words and thoughts
of writers, long-dead.

Imprisoned in book pages,
do they bang their heads
against walls that bind,
or hammer with their fists
at the barred lines
of their printed cages?

These spirits long to break free,
but they choke on library dust
and pollen from verbal flowers
that bloom unseen.

Those old ones avoided
the traps of temporal power,
or, once trapped,
gnawed off a precious limb
to limp into freedom.

Comment:
The cover painting, painted for me by my friend Moo when he read the manuscript of this book, is called Coal Face. It refers to the young Welsh boys in the Rhondda coal fields, aged 8-12 years old, who went down the mines to work at the coal face. This happened when the coal seams grew thin and only small children had the ability to work at the coal face and carve and mine the coal. Here are the relevant verses (44 – 45).

44

The old man, withered,
last house on the left,
leaning on his garden wall,
coughing, spitting up
coal dust and blood.

He’s not old, when you get close,
just grown old, underground,
where emphysema
and pneumoconiosis
devour men and boys.

He spits on the side walk.
Mining souvenirs,
Max Boyce calls them,
and they appear
every time the young man,
turned suddenly old,
starts to cough.

He can’t walk far,
wearing carpet slippers,
soft and furry,
just leans on the wall.

He fell, or was pushed,
into the trap at an early age,
when the coal seams
had grown so thin,
that only a small boy
could kneel at the coal face
before the black altar
of the underground god.

There, with a pick and shovel
he learned to carve and shape
those seams.

45

No candles burned at that altar.
A single match, let alone
a candle flame,
would spell the end,
if gas leaked from the seam.

Only the canaries,
confined in their cages,
sang songs.

Doomed,
like the blind pit ponies,
never to see the light of day,
they lived out their lives
down there.

So many died underground,
unable to get out,
buried alive,
before they were even dead.