Poems

Monkey’s Clockwork Universe

Monkey’s Clockwork Universe

Some days, monkey winds himself up
like a clockwork mouse.
Other days he rolls over and over
with a key in his back like a clockwork cat.

Monkey is growing old and forgetful.
He forgets where he has hidden the key,
pats his pockets, and slows right down
before he eventually finds it
and winds himself up again.

One day, monkey leaves the key
between his shoulder blades
in the middle of his back.

All day long, the temple monkeys
play with the key, turning it round and round,
and winding monkey’s clockwork,
tighter and tighter, until suddenly
the mainspring breaks

and monkey slumps at the table
no energy, no strength,
no stars, no planets, no moon at night,
the sun broken fatally down,
the clockwork of his universe sapped,
and snapped.

Comment: a big thank you to all who have reminded that yes, I did write this book, and yes, it is one of my favorites. Oh those naughty little monkeys. For those of you who have read the book or heard me reading poems from Monkey Temple, all is well in Monkey Land and the King of Harlem, with a wooden spoon, still gouges out the crocodile’s eyeballs and beats the monkeys on their backsides, with a wooden spoon. I thank my old friend, Federico Garcia Lorca, for that wonderful vision from his own book, Poet in New York.

Friends

Friends
for Sarah
09-09-2023

What do we say when friends have birthdays,
what can we say? The conventional Happy
Birthday seems so inadequate.

It is even less satisfying to send a meme
of cake with candles, or gift-wrapped boxes
in colored packages tied with balloons.

How, in this age of instant communication,
do we reach out with sincerity and grasp
the importance of passing time when
electronic time and distance are meaningless?

I sit here at my computer contemplating
what words of joy and comfort I can send
to an online friend, that I have never met,
to help her celebrate her special day.

My mind is blank. My screen is blank.
I have so many questions, so few answers,
but I will reach out anyway and hope
she understands my tongue-tied silence.

Are you holding a grudge? About?

Daily writing prompt
Are you holding a grudge? About?
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Are you holding a grudge? About?

I have reached the stage in life when grudges belong to a distant past. Some of that past I still regret, but I have come to accept most of it as the normal rites of passage through which human beings must pass, if they are to grow and develop. This acceptance also comes from the understanding that the steps that led me to my current life and situation, were beneficial, even when I didn’t think they were at the time.

Garcilaso de la Vega once wrote: Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado / y a ver los pasos por do me ha traído, hallo, según por do anduve perdido, que a mayor mal pudiera haber llegado. The Wikipedia translation offers us this – When I stop to contemplate my state and see the steps through which they have brought me, I find, according to where I was lost, that it could have come to a greater evil.

That said, I have learned to see the lesser evil in things that actually happened and the greater evils into which I might have fallen. I remember bearing grudges, but I feel that I have now set them aside. Reading John O’Donohue’s book Anam Cara, for the fourth or fifth time, has helped me to achieve that state of mind.

Some things do annoy me though. Speed reading is one of them. Well, not speed reading but the application of speed reading to any and all situations. In today’s Guardian, for example, I read that – “A lot of people, myself included, complain that they don’t have time to read but everyone has time to read a poem. You can read Ozymandias, for example, in just 17 seconds.”

One of the first things that I did in Grad School at U of T was to take a speed reading course. I found it absolutely essential in order to read and process the quantity of new material that was thrown at me by my profs. In my undergraduate education (Bristol University) I was told that “It is better to read one poem a hundred times than to read a hundred poems once.” As a poet, and a student of poetry, I prefer to dwell on a poem, to absorb its essence, its meaning, its subtleties, its associative fields, rather than to gulp it down in 17 seconds, for example, and then move on to something else. The poet and dreamer who live within me need that time to re-create, poeticize, and dream.

“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare, no time to stand beneath the boughs and stare as long as sheep or cows,” wrote W. H. Davies, author of Autobiography of a Super Tramp.

I realize just how much our lives have speeded up, how we are inundated by information, how we drown in sound-bytes, memes, and mini-clips. I also know that, however fast we read, we will never take it all in, not in one lifetime. Sometimes, less is more, slower is faster, we need to take time, to make time, to stand and stare. Seamus Heaney expresses it well – “Some time, take the time…” I don’t hold a grudge against those who can’t, or won’t, make and take that time. But I truly believe that many, many people would benefit by doing so. I also believe that a benevolent society would allow many more people to do just that.

Meanwhile, I will agree with the Guardian columnist that reading a poem in 17 seconds is much better than reading no poetry at all. So, some time, take the time….

King Canute

King Canute

I imagine King Canute, sitting on his throne,
at the seaside, surrounded by his court
as he tries to turn back the rising tide.
Or is he just proving that it can’t be done?

In vain we struggle against the rising waves.
We piss into the wind and try to drown
the thunder with our pitiful, impoverished farts.

Some preachers preach that we are immortal,
but mortal we are, facing such adversaries
as wind, rain, thunder, and the rising tide.

Who nailed us to this cross of cloudy doubt?
I hear crass crows cawing for tomorrow, but
it never comes, and if it does, it becomes today.

Today we must count the cost of every footstep
that leads us again into the Darkest Ages,
and back to the Stone Age, sent there by a rain
of unstoppable destruction, unleashed in our pride.

September Song

September Song

In the gathering autumn shadows
summer flares as bright as the berries
adorning the Mountain Ash.

Beads of blood,
they hold late evening light,
as do the Black-eyed Susans
growing wild beneath my window.

Rain wet, wind swept some nights,
yet still they glow
with their bottled sunshine.

Fairy lights, Christmas garlands,
ash rosaries will circle another tree,
enlightening wrapped presents,
lighting up the vacant crib
waiting for that little child,
soon to be still-born.

Comment: Poetry is where you find it. The inspiration for today’s poem came from the Poem of the Week in The Guardian. Inspiration, I found it in two places – 1. the photograph at the head of this blog and 2. in the analysis of the poem, not in the poem itself. The twilight of this autumn world is indeed wonderful.

Pilgrim

Pilgrim

“We think in eternity
but we move slowly through time.”

My daily duties nibble and gnaw.
I slowly shrink beneath their onslaught.
I feel myself diminishing, gradually,
hour by hour, disappearing into myself.

Even sunshine and silver-lined clouds
weigh heavily upon me, some days, when
my legs grow weak, my strength fails,
and my frail and feeble mind seeks out
a simpler way to continue my journey.

I favor those paths that gently slope,
downhill, preferably, and I avoid
rough, stony ground. Pilgrim through
this barren land, close to my journey’s
end, where footsteps are perilous,
stumbles lead to tumbles, I cannot risk
 a fall, for if I fall, like many who have gone
before, I may fall to rise no more.

Prophet and Loss

Prophet and Loss

I have sown so often on stony paths
and harsh roadside ways where thistles
bloom in purple patches and weeds choke
the fertile soils, closing flowers down.

Who knows what cold winds blow when
new seeds are shuffled, then cast, like bread
upon water, into the mind’s frustrated furrows?

Will flowers flourish, or will they perish,
still-born, in the depths of their stony graves?

I do not know for I cannot read the runes
the wind scatters across the sky when it shuffles
clouds and scrawls shadow-writing on the land.

Careless, I cast out word-seeds, knowing full well
that many will perish. But I also know that one
or two will put down roots. Eventually, developing
shoots will nourish my labor’s burgeoning fruits.

Comment: There is no profit in being a prophet.

Les croulants

Les croulants

That’s what they called the older
generations, in Paris, in 1963, when
I lived there, in St. Germain-des-Près.

Now, a member of that generation,
I remember those words and see myself
crumbling, failing, falling slowly down.

A façade, it’s all a façade. Here I am,
white-haired, wrinkled, watching time’s
oxen plowing furrows in my face as
winter’s snow layers a silvery thatch
of patchwork hair upon head and chin.

How much longer can I sustain my life,
exist in this metatheatre of give and take,
where each day takes its toll, and I give
away bits of myself, slowly, reluctantly,
sloughing them, snake-like, to dance,
then vanish, into the gathering dark.

Author’s Note
I used this painting as the cover for my novel People of the Mist.

People of the Mist
A Poet’s Day in Oaxaca
Click here to purchase this book.

Themes from this poem can be found in my poetry collection Poems for the End of Time. It is a series of metaphysical meditations written while listening to Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. It is followed by Lamentations for Holy Week, a sequence based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, as imitated by Francisco de Quevedo (1601 – 1613) in a series of poems composed during Holy Week. This poetry is written from the heart and expresses the authenticity of the poet’s being. Here, the poet indulges in a dialog with his time and place – much in the manner outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his theory of Chronotopos. This poetry is not written for the simple minded. Rather it invites the reader to explore the nature of the world, the philosophy of time and place, and the metaphysical exercises necessary to prepare for the inevitable end of time.

Poems for the End of Time
and
Lamentations for Holy Week

Click here to purchase this book.

Souvenirs

Souvenirs

Where have they gone,
the old days, the old folk,
the old ways of doing things?

I search for them, day after day,
but my cell phone isn’t
the old-fashioned circular dial,
nor the pick-up phone
with the shared party line,
when everybody listens in.

The garage is a mad hatter’s
maze of a workshop,
in which things grow legs
and walk this way, that way
every way to Sunday,
constantly getting lost.

I think I can hear them.
chittering, chattering.
but I cannot see them
nor hold them,
even though I would like
to clutch them tight.

Bats in the belfry,
and in the attic
mislaid items,
pens, ink, paints,
a tuck box, with keys,
a cricket bat,
cracked and yellow,
abandoned,
and forgotten.

Windmills

Windmills

Only the pendulum clock
disturbs the silence
as the slow stars circle
and the moon hides
its face beneath
seven excluding veils.

Tranquility finds me,
seated here, head in hands,
contemplating the complicated
dance steps of a terra-centric
universe where planets weave
an intricate back and forth
to justify the falsehoods
of misguided mistakes.

Men, confident in their wisdom,
know that all is well,
that their faith in the old gods,
the old books, the words
that were written, in stone,
before the modern world began,
need no rethinking.

Those whirling sails,
imprinted on the questing mind,
are a giant’s arms, those sheep
an enemy army cloaked
in dust, coats of arms visible
only to the far-sighted
whose eyes defy vision’s laws.

Right, they were then.
Right they are now.
Nothing changes. Nothing
can possibly change.
Sheep are the enemy
and windmills wait to invade
the unsuspecting mind.

Comment: The history of Don Quixote and its reception in Spain is quite interesting. I was very sorry to read that Cervantes’s language is now considered so antiquated that interpreters are needed. I actually have a cartoon version of his quests – a picture reader, so to speak, very brief, because each picture is worth a thousand words. I have not yet seen the simplified text, rewritten with today’s reader in mind.

Don Quixote still holds many lessons for this modern world of ours and is definitely worth re-reading for, as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1555) wrote: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Don Quixote, the character, threads a narrow path between those two extremes, as do many of the other supporting characters, some of whom use metatheatre for their smoke and mirror Wizard of Oz trickery. And remember, or forget at your peril, nihil sub sōle novum – there is nothing new under the sun. And yes, history does repeat itself, as you will see if you read (or re-read) Cervantes’s master piece.