Hiraeth

Raven

Raven

When Raven flies through his trap door in the sky, a light bulb clicks off in my head and I fall into darkness. Is there some safety net before oblivion? Raven’s claws scar crow’s feet on a fingernail moon. His bleak black beak widens the hole in my head and the Easter egg of my skull shows thin blue cracks. Outside my window, the river moves backwards and forwards with the tide. Raven shrugs at cancerous creatures, promising nothing. He soars into clear skies in search of his private exit and extinguishes sun, moon, and stars, plunging our world into blackness. The light on the point picks out a heron, mobbed by a clacking ring of gulls. The sea mist wraps the real world tight in its cloak. Now sea and lighthouse, heron and gulls, are distant things of memory. Raven, shoulders hunched, stands like a stone, an anthracite block hacked out from the coal seam in my mind, hand carved from feathers and my forefathers’ blood.

Commentary:

I had forgotten all about this poem in prose. It comes from Fundy Lines, if I remember correctly. Photo credit (below) to one of my former students, an excellent poet herself, who took the trouble to locate the correct rock and then take a photo of book and rock together.


Moo thought his painting of a dark shape that looks a little bit like a bird of ill-omen would be just what this prose poem needed. Maybe he’s right. I trust him with his choice of paintings. Well, most of the time anyway. He can be a bit ‘off’ from time to time, but mostly we form a good team, especially where Surrealism is concerned.

I guess Raven formed part of my Surreal sequences. I really do enjoy Surrealism. The mixing of metaphors, for example, the unexpected meeting of a sewing machine with a carving knife and an umbrella on an operating table. And look what Raven’s up to. He discovers a trap door in the sky. Well, that would be very useful, if we had wings and could fly. Then he turns off the light bulb in my head. I didn’t even know I had one in there. I guess Raven, like coyote and zopilote is a bit of a Trickster. Next he changes into a woodpecker and widens the hole in my skull. Poor old me – avian trepanning – no wonder I have problems! My head becomes an Easter Egg and has cracks in it giving birth to what? Some mad ideas, I guess, pecking their way out into the wonderful world in which Moo and I live in perfect harmony with my beloved and our cat. And look at all those Welsh mining memories – lignite, house coal, steam coal, anthracite, jet – and remember, when the coal comes from the Rhondda down the Merthyr – Taff Vale line, I’ll be there.

It will be a long way from Canada to Taff’s Well. Maybe Raven will be kind and fly me there, through his Island View trap door that has direct access to the trap door just above Castell Coch, the Fairy Castle of my childhood. That would be faster, and easier, than my old two-wheeler Raleigh bicycle with it’s Sturmey-Archer three gear click on the handlebars. I bet Raven can fly faster than I can pedal. And if I could have pedaled as fast as Raven flies, downhill and uphill, I would have been King of the Mountains and an all time winner of the Tour de France. Now that would have been surrealistically surreal, seeing me as a cereal winner, with my snap, crackle, and pop! Not that my dad would have been happy. He never was happy with anything I did!

Loss

Loss of …

By the time I remembered your name
I had forgotten your face,
and then I couldn’t recall
why I wanted to talk to you
in the first place.

Words and phrases bounce,
water off a duck’s back.

They sparkle like a high tide
rejected by the retriever
as he shakes his coat dry
on emerging from the sea.

This book I read is a word parcel,
a clepsydra of droplets
a rainbow strung with colored beads
each scoring a bull’s eye
on the world’s taut literary hide.

Mapa mundi of forgotten lands,
I trace dark landmarks
on the back of scarred hands
and wonder why I have never visited
faraway places with names
I cannot even pronounce.

Tourist guide to a failing memory,
I track the trails of drifting ships
as their white sails vanish,
blank butterflies from a distant summer,
floating over a darkening horizon.

Commentary:

I notice how my memory fails a little bit, day by day. I mis-spell a word. Forget a telephone number. Have to check a recipe three or four times – was it twenty minutes at 400F or 30 at 350F? Then I wonder how many spoons of sugar I put in my coffee. Worse, I forget whether I have taken all my tablets or not. I line them up in order, take them one by one, and still forget whether I took the last one or not. Oh dear.

I make shopping lists and check each item off as I put it in the cart. Then I check the cart to see if I did put the items in. Impulse buying. I haven’t seen Marmite on the shelves for some time now. So, every time I see it I buy it. Now I have four pots of Marmite in the cupboard. Animal Farm – Marmite good, Vegemite bad. And I can even say that in an Australian accent.

I forget words in English, but suddenly remember them in Welsh, French or Spanish. Then I forget them in the other languages as well. Last night I remembered callos in Spanish but forgot what they were in English. I had to ask my beloved and she reminded me that callos meant tripe. Great. I now knew what they were but I couldn’t remember why I wanted to know what they were in the first place.

This afternoon I looked everywhere for my glasses and then I remembered that I was wearing them. I have a little name tag that I wear when I go out. That way I will at least remember who I am. Now, I have just changed my coat – so where’s my name tag? As for my cell phone, I never call myself on it, so why should I remember the number anyway? I guess that’s it for now. I am sure I had something else I wanted to say, but I can’t remember what it was. Oh dear!

Gaia

Santo Domingo
Worshipping Gaia before the great altar
in Santo Domingo

If the goddess is not carried in your heart
like a warm loaf in a paper bag beneath your shirt
you will never discover her hiding place

she does not sip ambrosia from these golden flowers
nor does she climb this vine to her heavenly throne
nor does she sit on this ceiling frowning down

in spite of the sunshine trapped in all this gold
the church is cold and overwhelming
tourists come with cameras not the people with their prayers

my only warmth and comfort
not in this god who bids the lily gilded
but in that quieter voice that speaks within me

and brings me light amidst all this darkness
and brings me poverty amidst all this wealth

Commentary:

A Golden Oldie from Sun and Moon – Poems from Oaxaca. The Church of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca, Mexico, contains approximately six tons of gold and gold leaf. Incredible. I visited it regularly, but rarely saw anyone else in there. The local people seemed to avoid it and tourists with cameras were the main visitors. I refuse to take pictures inside churches, for several reasons.

It has always amazed me that the Spaniards built their churches on the sites of previous places of religious worship. This is partly because the indigenous appreciated the sacredness of certain sites, and partly because it was to these sites that the indigenous had traveled prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. Interesting, too, that the Spaniards call their arrival the Discovery while the indigenous call it the Conquest. History – a coin with two different sides – and it is sometimes difficult to look at both sides at once. Malinche – heroine or traitress? Cortes – hero or murderer? And, as they used to say in Northern Ireland, during the troubles, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

Spin the coin of history, by all means. But beware of seeing only ‘heads’ and forgetting that there are ‘tails’. And never reduce those ‘tails’ to mere ‘tales’. Neither the written tradition nor the oral tradition is infallible. Many people, quiet and secretive as they may be, have long memories. And remember too that all that glitters is not necessarily gold.

The Screws

The Screws

There is no science to sciatica,
just a series of sensations
most of them involving pain.

I don’t know how or when it comes,
but one day, it knocks on your door
and makes you clutch back and buttock.

It’s like a hawk at the bird feeder,
flown in from nowhere to shriek
and shred, unawares, one small bird.

Was it the flannel I dropped yesterday
when showering?  I stooped to pick it up,
lunged forward and, was that it?

The pain came later. It kept me awake
all night, my worst nightmare.
No comfort anywhere. An endless

wriggling and every movement a knife
blade stabbing at my buttock and groping
its slow, painful way down my leg.

The screws, my grandfather called it,
a metal screw screwed into his leg,
leaving him limp and limping.

I googled it today, sciatica, and they
suggested an ice pad for twenty minutes,
repeated twenty minutes later.

“Yes,” I muttered, “yes” and found
in the fridge the ice pack we used
to use in our Coleman’s cooler.

My beloved helped me undo my pants.
“This,” she said, “will be icing on the cake.”
“No,” I said, “it will be icing on the ache.”

Tomorrow, I will call the pyro-quack-tor.
She will bend me to her will, straighten
my back, cure the pain, set me right again,
provided she doesn’t read this post
and will permit me to enter her domain.

Commentary:

Moo doesn’t paint pain, even though it occasionally emerges in his paintings. This painting of his is called Grey Day and I guess a Grey Day is rather like a Blue, Blue Day, something to be avoided, because you feel like running away. And that’s the problem with “The Screws” – it’s hard to face the pain when it’s behind you, unless you are a contortionist and can twist and twirl and see yourself in the mirror. I suppose another solution is to have eyes in the back of your head, but not everyone is that gifted.

As for the pyro-quack-tor, my apologies, Chiropractor, mine is excellent. I limp into her office, crawl onto the medical bed, and then, thirty minutes later, I hop off it like a man reborn, and skip down the corridor, waving my sticks and grinning as if I were a Gorilla in heat. Oh dear, not the sort of condition in which one should drive the zoo bus!

As for my joke – “This,” she said, “will be icing on the cake.” “No,” I said, “it will be icing on the ache!” This takes me back to my old school days – Aix-les-Bains / Aches and Pains. I remember one of my school friends going to Baden-Baden for his summer holiday. A double-barreled name, wow, very foreign. He asked me where I had been and I replied “Cardiff-Cardiff – this is Cardiff.” They used the English version back in those days, not the Welsh one – “Caer Dydd – Caer Dydd.” Doesn’t sound quite the same in Welsh. And how about Cas Newydd – Cas Newydd [Newport] or Pen y Bont – Pen y Bont [Bridgend]. And let’s not get into Llanfair.p.g – Lanfair.p.g – [Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch – Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch].

Try saying that one twice in quick succession. You’ll be sitting in the railway station a long time, just waiting to find out where you are. That, of course, is if trains still run to Llanfair p. g. “Gentlemen will please refrain from …. ” and if you can finish that little ditty off, in public, you have more courage than I do! Besides which, my voice broke long ago, and I haven’t mended it yet!

Clepsydra 23 & 24

23

… gulls on the wharf-side roof
     fishing boats
          returning to port
               white wakes trailing,
                    pointing to where they’ve been

where have I been
     all my life         

where is the wake
     that tracked me to and from
          so many unimportant places

so often have I waited
     for that moment of reunion
          port station airport

birds leaving nest
     only to return
          then leave again
               are not more faithful

sweet brevity of life
     a stone memorial
          on the harbour wall
               raised to all
                    who went to sea
                         and never returned
                              dying in the waves’ embrace …

24

… a watery grave
     no church no candles
          just cold waters sliding shut
               as down to the depths they go
                    

sinking from level to level
     never to rise again
          not till seas run dry
               burnt up by the sun’s candle

even then they’ll walk no more
          with their beloveds
               hand in hand
                    on diminishing land
                         or sea-licked sand …

Commentary:

“Birds leaving nest, only to return, then leave again, are not more faithful.” A lovely photo, from Avila, of storks, bouncing on their nests, waiting for the wind to lift them up aloft. I thought of using sea side photo from PEI, but this image caught my eye, and my words. A verbal – visual link. Not easy to spot, but there, in the sky above them, a parent waits. As soon as one chick takes flight, the watching parent will drop, fly under the fledgling’s wings, and tutor the young bird in the art of soaring and flying. I have spent many a happy hour, just sitting there, watching them.

And here’s the photo from PEI. An osprey, returning to the nest, after a fishing expedition. One hopes for such moments. Then, suddenly, one day, the magic happens, and verbal and visual joining hands in a single moment of magic. And listen to that baby bird, beak open, shrieking, waiting for the parent to arrive. I can still hear the screeching, although we are in the age of silent, but colorful, pictures.

In the picture below, the Grande Réunion – you can see the White Geese gathered at Bic. They return every year, so beautiful. The first time I saw them, I thought they were a drift of late snow. Then they rose from the field, and flew up, into the air. I have often seen snow falling but that was the first time I saw snow actually rising, after it had settled. A memorable moment.

Moments of magic, as I said, and each of them linked – verbal to visual. Silent dialogs with my time and my place, now shared with whoever has ears to hear and eyes to see and an imagination to reconstruct the alternate realities.

Books

Books
… they fornicate at night
double in size and numbers
fall off the shelves
copulate in piles on the floor

… origami
I guess it’s what books do
when they wrap themselves
in their own pages
and enfold their stories
mingling their tales

… synaesthesia
the critics call it
that mixing of senses
taste with touch
and the lingering
smell of fresh print
tingling in the nostrils

… intertextuality
books talking to books
they start off with one word
and cling to each other …

… and you know
what happens next …

Commentary:

No comment!

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. 

Clepsydra 22

22

… winds kiss words from lips
      sand creaks
           squeaks underfoot
                    creeps between dry toes

the sand cleanses
     purges
          brings closure
               each magnificent moment
                    lighting a candle

is this beach an altar
     under the rocks’
         shadow church
              it doesn’t matter

mindfulness
     holding each memory
          each piece of colored glass

wave after wave
     climbing ashore
          washing footprints
               memories away
                    closing
                         door after door …

Commentary:

“Wave after wave climbing ashore, washing footprints, memories away, closing door after door.” Everything turns out in black-and-white – here a crow, there a seagull. What does each say to each, when they meet upon the beach? Silence and stillness. No sound of wind or wave, no sign of the tide rising or falling, and what do the birds say to each other, when they meet like this? Two solitudes, mine and thine, and somehow the silence must be broken, or in our separate solitudes we will remain. What if I open my solitude and show it to you? Will you then open yours and spread it willingly before me? Or will you turn away, crow spurning seagull and there’s no going back.

And did my feet, in ancient time, walk upon the beach in Santander? Did they wander over the cliffs at Cabo Mayor? What did I say to the sands in Swansea Bay when, sitting on the steps by the railway station, I dusted the sand from between my toes, placed socks upon my feet, and did up my sandals? Private places, private memories, private conversations live on in the privacy of my head.

A dozen heads, all crowded onto the computer screen, zoomed in so they can be together for an hour or two, repeating their memories to each other – how much did they really share? 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? Tell me, if you can, what the crow thought of the gull when they met, that morning on the sand.

Clepsydra 21

Clepsydra 21

… she left me
          at the lighthouse
               rising tide
                    beach diminishing

and grew smaller
     as she walked away

I search the sand for sea-gems
     sand-dollars
          cerulean sea-glass
               rarest of all the reds

ground down
     polished
          sanded to perfection

so many worlds
     in a grain of sand
          their words going unspoken
               carried away by the sea-wind

the wind that haunts
     caves and cliffs
          hooting like a ghost train
               in a forlorn
                    tunnel of love

love lost
     love found
          an old love
               rediscovered
                    only to be lost anew

what is this thing
     called love …

Commentary:

Listen! “Can you hear the music?” “No, but I hear singing even though there’s no one there.” I know, I know, we have had this conversation before. Moo didn’t have a painting along the lines of ‘what is this thing called love’, so he dug out this one – Walking on Air – the painting, not Moo. But then, Moo’s a silly old romantic and verses and songs settle in his mind. All too often, when he walks he finds he’s ‘walking on air’! The two of us, Moo and me, have always loved that song. Great to work it into a commentary on a poem (again).

Love – what is this thing called love? And how many types of love are there? We use the word so frequently, or infrequently, if we are Mr. Grinch. But what does it mean? Love of self, love of other? And how many others can we love – I know that Minnie had a heart as big as a whale, but how many loves can fit into it? Love of father, mother, daughters , sons, brothers, sisters, cousins – how far do we go? Winning sports teams – everybody loves everyone on the team when they win they cup. That love is so much harder if they lose it – especially if there is a goat on the team, and I don’t mean greatest of all time! I mean sacrificial.

I love you with all my heart! Does that include the pacemaker and the stent? What does atrial fibrillation mean in that situation? Good questions. Neither me nor Moo have the answers. Write your answers on a postcard and send it to – where? With Canada Post on strike, you will need a team of real snails. Hitch your postcards to them. Threaten them with the salt shaker. And off they go. Snail mail is back. Or you could place them on a dog sled, hitch up the huskies and Mush, Moo, mush! Away they all go hauling the mail. Why does it always be the mail? Why can’t it be the Femail? Mail – Femail. Oh, but I love that. There, you see. We’ve just added another meaning to love. Let’s hope none of the huskies lies down to rest. That’s called a Canadian flat tire. Oh, I love that one too.

I am running out of time, space, and ideas. And that’s only one word from the poem that we’ve looked at. Oh, shame and scandal in the letter-box.

Clepsydra 18-20

18

… as free as the birds
     a sky full at North Cape
          where shores retreat
               year after year
 
the big red mud diminishes
     under advancing waters
          sea-threatened cliffs
               undermined roads
                    houses
                         the lighthouse

gulls follow the fishing boats
     herring gulls
          blotting out
               sun and sky
                    above the reef

with its seals
     basking in sunshine
          knowing themselves
               being themselves
                    thinking themselves safe

kings and queens
     of their sealdom
          never questioning …

19

… an osprey
     sudden the swoop
          turned into a stoop

water shattered
     total immersion
          then emerging
               with lusty thrusts of wings

claws clasping
     imprisoned prey
          prised from the sea
               raised to the skies
                    up and away
                         murderer and victim

oblivious below
     the black horse
          with cart and farmer
               gathering seaweed

all of them
     having no doubts
          safe in the security
               of their roles …

20

… while lost in the labyrinth
      I searched for a thread
               on life’s loom

a thread woven
     by an unknown
          unseen hand
               a hand and thread
                    I could never control

yet one day
     that thread
          will lead me out
               from the dark

then shall I see
     the sun’s great candle
          beneath which red rocks
               wave and water battered
                    crumble

here at North Cape
     in a way that nobody
          can understand …

Commentary:

The osprey “emerging with lusty thrusts of wings, claws clasping, imprisoned prey prised from the sea, raised to the skies, up and away, murderer and victim.” The words are based on the photograph. A quiet day, somebody shouted, and pointed, and clickety-click, I was lucky enough to capture the whole thing on my digital camera. This one shot summarizes it all.

The stanzas (16 & 17) that precede this moment are available here. Clepsydra, the book, is one single poem, one single sentence, that rambles on and on. Each stanza stands alone, each poem (numbered) stands alone, and the whole book stands alone as a single sentence summarizing what I have seen and where I have been. Bakhtinian Chronotopos – my dialog with my time and my place. In this case, my many dialogs with my multiple times and multitudinous places.

Albert Camus lent me the phrase ‘murderer and victim’. ‘Nous sommes, ou meurtrier ou victime‘. Quoted from memory. I hope I am not too far wrong. My memory fades as I age. Louis Aragon suggested I borrow his line “rois tombés de leurs chariots” – that I found in his collection Il ne m’est Paris sans Elsa. Here, I have applied it to the seals at North Cape, PEI – “seals – basking in sunshine – kings and queens of their sealdom.” Intertextuality – texts talking to texts and recalling segments of texts within other texts.” Wonderful. Alas, I fear the coming days when the memory may no longer be so clear. ‘What will be, will be’ said the Osprey as he pulled the flounder from the sea and carried him too his nest in a nearby tree.