photography

Blood from Stones

Car tire over a pothole containing small monster figurines with aggressive faces — A car tire hovers above a pothole filled with snarling monster sculptures.
Image AI generated.

Blood from Stones

The road ahead a bandage
leaking grey blood from stones.
The snow plow brutal,
carelessly lifting scabbed edges
until the gore overflows.

Spring always promises renewal,
but freeze and thaw also open
old wounds making them bleed.

A merry, mazy life we lead,
threading the car’s needle through
holes torn in the asphalt’s fabric.

Some holes are so large they have
lives of their own, and names –
Grand Canyon, Yawning Gap,
Patty’s Peril, Big Bertha, each one
well-known to neighbors.

Others are pornographic,
their open orifices painted,
laughing in scorn, dentated
vaginas ready for anything.

Such decorated potholes
are soon filled, their crude
messages swiftly erased.

Comment:

Three flat tires in the last month and spring’s potholes still out there, waiting to trap me. Apparently, one neighborhood on the North Side of the river decided to decorate their potholes with pornographic drawings. These were swiftly filled and their messages totally erased. Alas, we on the South Side are not so daring. We don’t go out and paint our potholes. Personally, I wish we did. July – and many potholes are still there.

Not only that, the road into town is being repaired. Hooray! However, the tarmac was stripped off two weeks ago and has yet to be replaced. Boo! More than that, at the end of our street, just before the highway, one or two enormous potholes still gape. They lead directly to a dip that rises abruptly when it meets with the now stripped highway. A champion clunker that – a genuine tank-trap. I think at least two of my flat tires occurred after going over that one.

It reminds me of my grandfather’s stories about WWI and ‘going over the top’. Now, each time I approach it in the car, I call out loudly, “Look out, grandpa, here I come.” I call that particular pothole Grandpa’s Revenge. My own personal name. I don’t know what the neighbors call it. And I don’t know why grandpa is seeking revenge! But below the tires, the pothole awaits, gnashing its teeth.

Starry Night

Starry Night
(1889 & 2019 & 2026)

last night I saw stars
never thought to see them again
first time in years
a riot of bright lights
no dark spots floating
no black holes barring
vision’s edge

just layer upon layer
star fields like buttercups
littering the sky
I had forgotten their names
forgotten how many existed
smiling frowning down
immortalized in myth
celebrated in song

daylight broke waves
an ocean of sunshine
untying dreams’ night-knots
sharp black and white memories
shifting to corkscrews of color

two refreshing rain drops
four times a day
a never-to-be-forgotten face
seen once again in close up

Fundy fogs clearing
mist un-threading between
salt-laden pine roots gripping
splitting fragile rocks

complicated emotions
woven into a simple
carpet bag of words

Commentary:

I wrote this some time ago, after a simple eye operation that scraped clean the new lenses that the doctor had placed in my eyes. Distorted vision – it happens in so many ways. Kennel blindness – at the doggy shows, the owners and breeders blind to the faults of their own dogs while eagle-eyed for the slightest fault in another owner’s woof! Cat shows the same. Incidentally, tell me if you can, why a cat show has a catalog, as does a dog show. But why shouldn’t a dog show have a dog-a-log? I wanted to print one foe them when I was working with the kennel club, but their own kennel blindness made them insist on a catalog for dogs.

Think of the joy and beauty of sight. Sunrise. A thunder storm, dark clouds building. The slash of rain. Those first flakes of winter snow. That snow snake hissing down the road before you whipped by the wind.

Now I am back with new glasses and new eye drops and the world has come back into focus yet again. My beloved is, as she always was, and as I will always remember her. Yet, with my new glasses, I see and sense the subtle changes that have taken place.

And words. That magic carpet of letters that turn an army of ants into a Jackpine sonnet or a song about the sixpence that vanished so long ago. Oral poetry, yes. You can listen to it. But the written word, going letter by letter onto the page – you need vision to see that.

Vision and Revision – we are not writers, we are re-writers. Indeed we are, but without vision, without sight, we would be lost, so lost. Unthinkable a world without words. Unthinkable that night sky without its stars. Ah, to feel the warmth of the sun – but alas not to be able to see sun and shadow, the butterfly upon the flower, the stork returning to its nest.

Sight, touch, taste, sound, smell – deprived of one sense, we are left with four – but oh what a chunk of world goes missing when we lose just one sense.

Rage, Rage 43

Rage, Rage
43

The truth,
unwelcome as it is,
is that the day I was born
I took my first steps
on the path to death,
my own death.

Death –
an inescapable law
that tells me that
body and spirit
will be forced apart.

My flesh will wither
and perish,
and the person
that the world and I
know as me
will no longer be able
to hold together.

Commentary:

“The day I was born I took my first steps on the path to death.” An echo of a line from Francisco de Quevedo, of course.

And the photo above? It is the old Roman road that ascends the Puerto del Pico in the Province of Avila. Hard to believe it was laid down nearly 2,000 years ago and still carries the transhumance cattle and sheep from the valleys in winter to the hills in summer. It is also a part of the Camino de la Plata, the silver road that brought precious metals from Spanish America to Madrid after the discovery and conquest of the Incan Empire.

The treasures of the Empire – what joy. Yet what weight around the neck of the Spanish nation. Wealth so abundant, spending so rife, money-lenders always lending, filling in the gaps between the arrival of the treasure convoys from the Colonies. And yet that borrowing became a millstone around the borrowers’ necks. So much money borrowed that there came a moment when each convoy only served to pay off the loan debt of the last set of borrowings.

The cattle and sheep struggle to climb to those heights. Yet it is not difficult to imagine how much easier it was to walk downhill, beside the creaking wagons that held the gold and silver to pay off the monarch’s debts, en route to the king and his court.

Think also of the squeals of anguish heard when the treasure fleet did not arrive. Captured by the English pirates, or hurricane battered and lost in the Caribbean or closer to home. This meant even more borrowing on the back of earlier borrowing and always the cost of living and the lending rates rising higher and higher.

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.

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.

Daffodils

Daffodils

Winter’s chill lingers well into spring.
I buy daffodils to encourage the sun
to return and shine in the kitchen.
Tight-clenched fists their buds,
they sit on the table and I wait
for them to open.

For ten long days the daffodils
endured, bringing to vase and breakfast-
table stored up sunshine and the silky
softness of their golden gift.

Their scent grew stronger as they
gathered strength from the sugar
we placed in their water, but now
they have withered and their day is done.

Dry and shriveled they stand paper-
thin and brown, crisp to the touch.
They hang their heads as their time
runs out and death weighs them down.

Commentary:

A sad poem, really, for a wet, damp, dark, chilly day that begs for some light and warmth. And what warmth and light daffodils bring. Not to mention their delicate scent that lingers long in the nostril, faint, but intoxicating. For ten long days the daffodils endured. This was a joy in itself. Sometimes cut flowers wither so quickly. But ten days … wow! And they do indeed bring to vase and breakfast-table stored up sunshine and the silky softness of their golden gift.

Their scent grew stronger as they gathered strength from the sugar we placed in their water. Indeed it did. And the sugar itself enhanced their ability to linger on. A little Somerset trick that, all the way from Zummer Zet where the cider apples grow. And no, you can’t have real cider without real cider apples from real cider apple trees. But never forget Sally the Sozzled Sow – she got into the storage shed and drank about five gallons of the stuff. It was all over the newspapers. She got loose and knocked the milk churns over and rolled them in the clover. The corn was half cut at the time, and so was she.

Dry and shriveled they stand paper-thin and brown, crisp to the touch. So sad when this starts to happen. Then one day, they just fade away. And then they hang their heads as their time runs out and death weighs them down. Sad, really, as I said at the start – but we must never forget the joy and light and happiness they bring us when they are in their prime.

Clepsydra 27

Clepsydra 27

… the museum closes its doors
inside the clepsydra murmurs
on and on

evening falls from the sky
in great cataracts of light
stars flare like candles

who will see
     that last drop of water
          trembling at
               the clepsydra’s edge,

who will snuff out
     that last flickering
          flame of my life
               as the final verses
                    of the children’s song
                         loom closer

… Here comes a candle
     to light you to bed.
          And here comes a chopper
               to chop of your head…

Commentary:

Moo got it right this time – “evening falls from the sky in great cataracts of light, stars flare like candles …” Lovely painting of a star ‘flaring like a candle’ against the evening sky. I think he called the painting Affirmation. Yup, he’s nodding his head, and he has his eyes wide open. He’s not dropping off into one of those drowsy moments of old age. Too early in the morning to do ‘noddy’ I say. Oh-oh, there he goes. It’s Billy Cotton Band Show Time … “Wakey-wakey!” Now how many of you remember the Billy Cotton Band Show on BBC Radio on Sunday afternoons, just as people are dropping off to sleep after the enormous Sunday dinner and dessert? Hands up if you’re over eighty and remember that. Oh dear. Not a good idea. Moo’s hand’s gone up and he’s still got his eyes shut. Ah well, appearances aren’t everything.

And look at that comma after – the clepsydra’s edge, (line 10) -. The one that got away. There’s always one that gets away, no matter how hard we try – and try we do. Clepsydra is meant to be a single sentence, with no punctuation other than an ellipsis at the beginning and end of each sequence. And what have we here? A common or garden comma, growing like a large, spring dent-de-lion / dandelion in the middle of a patch of flowery images and metaphors. Out, out fowl spot! What bird was that? A Flying MacBeth just dropped something on my windshield. ‘What a foul fowl was that fellow,’ said the soccer referee pointing to the penalty spot. A round spot with a whale of a tail.

“Any questions?” I asked my students at the end of class one day. A brave young lad raised his hand. “I have a question, sir?” [I liked it when they called me, sir. It happened about once or twice a year. I always knew something drastic was about to happen when I received a knighthood.] “Ask away,” I replied. “What the heck are you on? I’d love to have some of that. Can you give me some, sir!” Two knighthoods in one day. I’ll be a KG next, instead of an RG. I bet you don’t get that joke! Answers by snail mail and dog sled, please!

What was the last thing you did for play or fun?

Daily writing prompt

What was the last thing you did for play or fun?

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What was the last thing you did for play or fun?

I guess it depends on how you define ‘play’ and ‘fun’. The first snow storm of the winter left us without power for 39.5 hours. That should have been horrible – the temperature outside dropped to -7C overnight, and the temperature inside fell to 58F. Rather than sit and suffer, we turned it into a fun time. A candlelight supper, a bright log fire burning in the grate, reading by torchlight and candlelight. The flames flickering across my beloved’s face and making her countenance softer and more beautiful than ever.

When we lose power, we lose everything, except our fireplace and our cell phones. Recharging them was fun. We have a portable charger, and we also recharged them in the car while driving around. The roads were good – and driving was warm – so that was fun as well.

When the power came back, we called the local tree company (Treecological) and they took down the trees, young, bendy birches, that had bent onto our power lines. When we lost power, a second time, exactly a week later, it was a much shorter power loss. While the first was a power out[r]age, the second was a power outage. Both times, when the power came back on, that first buzz of energy renewed really made us happy.

In between the two storms, we had some warmer, sunnier weather and cleaning the snow with our trusty snowblower was much easier than we expected. Mind you, it is always difficult the first time, when the body is unaccustomed to the machine and all the old tricks must be learned once more. Luckily, you can teach new tricks to an old dog, well, to this one anyway, and I managed to cut a few corners and had fun doing so.

After four consecutive days of snow blowing – one does it bit by bit when one is eighty years old – otherwise no, it isn’t much fun. But bit by bit, step by step, and the job gets done. So there we were, playing in the snow and having fun. Mind you – once in a while isn’t too bad. But for this to happen every day, over a series of years, that would not be fun. And doubly not in winter, with the cold outside and supplies inside running out or down.

Poppy Day

Poppy Day

Remembrance Day
11 November 2024

I wasn’t there
I never saw the gas clouds
            rolling over our positions
            never felt the barbed wire’s bite
            nor the bayonet’s jab

I never hung out my washing
            on the Siegfreid Line
            (“Have you any dirty washing, mother dear?”)
            never broke out of barracks
            never did spud bashing
            nor feasted on bread and water
            nor heard the rifle’s rapid rattle

I wasn’t there
            to see them carried away in carts
            coughing spluttering vomiting
            or bandages over their eyes
            walking slowly to triage a hand on
            the shoulder of the man ahead
            the sighted leading the blind

I wasn’t there
            but both my grandfathers were
            both decorated
            one mentioned in dispatches
            signed by Winston Churchill
            that one uninjured
            the other one gassed
            coughing up his lungs
            bit by bit for forty years

I am here now
to remember
and to honor them
though so much
has been lost

Comment:
My friend, the painter known as Moo, painted this poppy today. My generation, unless they served voluntarily, as many have done, was never conscripted. As a result, the horrors and tragedies of combat were never known to us, except as seen through they eyes of other people. I think of Wilfred Owen and his magnificent, heart-rending poems from WWI.
Today, I pay tribute to those members of my family who served in the armed forces by land, sea, and air. I also pay tribute to the veterans who survived, and to those who gave their lives in the defense of our country.

What could you do less of?

Daily writing prompt

What could you do less of?

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What could you do less of?
I shall deliberately misinterpret that prompt / question and answer it my way. I could do less of listening to stupid adverts, repeated ad nauseam, sometimes with gimmicky tunes – one to two lines maximum – again and again, all day, every day. Surf the channels to escape an ad, and what do you get? A synchronized set up where almost every channel is blasting out the same, or similar, ads at the same time. Have you noticed that when you leave the TV room, and retreat to the kitchen to get some limited peace, the ads follow you because the volume is turned up at ad time so you just can’t escape.

I remember my grandfather, back in the sixties, with the advent of ITV in Wales – the Independent TV channel that used ads – sitting before the TV set, his foot up before the screen and his fingers in his ears so he would not be able to see or hear those ads. Alas, once heard, seldom forgotten, and I can still sing most of those meaningless jingles heard back in my childhood. How it I hate when I go shopping in the supermarket and shoppers tunelessly whistle a TV ad as they shuffle along behind their carts. Alas, ad free programming, all too often, is either expensive or non-existent.

And what about those telephone calls when they put you on hold until the next agent is free to attend to you? I won’t mention names, because I don’t want to get sued, but I guess we have all had the same experience. I had a ninety minute online wait one day, with horrible music, an exhortation to stay on the line so I wouldn’t lose my place in the queue aka line-up, and a 90 second ad that glorified the joys of the company’s product, repeated once every five minutes. I suffered through that ad 18 times on that one call alone. Another local firm gave me the similar treatment, except that it was a one minute ad, repeated once every ninety seconds. I suffered through 10 repetitions in a wait of 15 minutes, got fed up, and hung up the phone.

Look at the peaceful scene above. That’s the view from my bedroom window in Island View. Even the crows are absent, and the early morning silence, like the sun, is golden. Two birds with one stone – a morning person or an evening person? A morning person with dawns like this, but an evening person when a sunset like this one miraculously occurs.