Meditations on Machado and Mairena
In Love with Love
1
In a dream
I dream of you,
dream you into reality,
yearn for your name.
Now I’ll never be the same.
I dream you in a garden,
roses around you.
I stand there suffering,
my head crowned
with thorns.
Caught in the briers of your eyes,
I am trapped in the eye-
lash of your name.
Your presence taunts me.
Your absence haunts me.
My life
will never be the same,
oh Guiomar.
Sometime
with thanks to Seamus Heaney
Sometime, make the time to drive to Alberton
where the Great Blue Herons
stand thigh deep in the incoming tide.
Lobster boats spark stars from the waves.
They white-water surge through a gap
in the sandbank where the lighthouse
stands red and white, outlined against
blue sky, golden sand, sparkling bay.
Follow the fast-eroding coastline, a little
less each year, past Jacques Cartier Park
to Kildare Capes. Black-backed gulls ride
shotgun on the red sand beach. Piping
plovers charge up and down the wind-rush
of surf digging for treasure, the crustaceans
that will fill their bellies and enable them
to survive their long journey south.
Head north past Sea Cow Pond to North Cape.
Quixotic windmills wave their arms, like giants.
The sand and pebble reef stretches its low-tide
footpath out to the lazy seals basking in late
summer warmth. Sea-birds seethe in great
white clouds while fishing boats bob on wild
waves and a black horse hauls Irish Moss
off the beach to be sun-dried on the shore.
An osprey hovers, drops its lightning bolt
to spear a flapping flounder on sharp claws.
The magic of that great bird’s fall and rise will
drive a wedge through your heart and split it open.
Coal Face
My family never forced me underground.
Nobody ever made me kneel at the coal-
face altar and worship, on my knees,
that grimy god with its coal-black soul.
A child in body and heart, nobody ordered
me to squirm down diminishing seams,
much too narrow for men or machines
and fitting only for the smallest child.
Fitting indeed, an early coffin, made to
measure, lying in wait for the slightest
slip of the rocks above or below. Tight
fitting, indeed, no wiggle, wriggle room.
Billy Blake, my mate from Trinidad,
younger than me, saw the black faces
of miners emerge from the mine, enter
the pit-head baths and come out white.
He, too, wanted to be white. He dug
underground, grew even blacker, went
into the showers, gouged his black skin,
drew rivers of blood, never changed color.
He died when the roof above him fell
without warning. They pulled him out.
Brought him to the surface. Prepared
him for burial. Wrote on his tombstone:
“His body was as black as night,
but oh, his soul was white.”
Snow Geese
Snow geese falling, plummeting from the sky,
dropping like leaves, slowly and tumbling,
swiftly and twisting, spiralling down. Fresh
snow on the ground, their seasoned arrival.
Some land on water, others on the earth.
They gather in groups, snow banks of geese,
ghost-white, frightening, true sky lightning,
celestial, striking from its ancestral throne.
Always some sentries, necks stretched, eyes
open, alert, watching, guarding their needs
while the flock feeds. One honks “Who goes
there?” the flock looks up, watching him move.
Slowly, at first, they waddle from the walkers,
then faster and faster as the man unleashes his
hounds. An idiot woman, grinning like a death’s
head, points her cell phone and barks instructions.
The dogs run at them, barking and growling.
The snow geese panic, run ever faster, taking
to the air with a clap-wing chorus, honking
and hooting. The woman laughing, shouting
and shooting. “I’ve got them, I’ve shot them,”
she calls in her pleasure. Frustrated, the hounds
take to the water. Whistling, calling, the man
cannot catch them, not till they tire of the chase,
no match for geese, not in air, nor in water.
Joyous the couple, their videos made, hugging,
cuddling. They get back in the car, dogs shaking,
spraying them, baptismal water, cleansing all guilt.
Song without Words
I wanted to sing you a song
to keep you alive
but you slipped through my fingers
and fled from my sight
I still sense your presence
but no longer know
the shape of your face
your voice on the phone
unique unforgettable,
a voice without face
voiceless and faceless
fleshless yet graceful
just what you were
a presence a spirit
a force in my life
a grey fleshless shadow
a mist in my mind
I know I never knew you
two different worlds
a world without music
a song without words
my love song to you
however absurd
Water
Water: does it remember when the earth was without form
and darkness lay upon the face of the deep?
Water gathered into one place and the firmament appeared.
Then light drifted apart from darkness and with light
came The Word, more words, and then the world …
… the world of water in which I was carried until
the waters broke and my life sustaining substance
drained away ejecting me from dark to light.
Here, in Oaxaca, the valley’s parched throat
longs for water, born free, yet everywhere imprisoned.
It languishes in bottles, tins, jars, and frozen cubes,
its captive essence staring out with grief filled eyes.
A young boy on a tricycle pedals past my apartment.
He carries a dozen prison cells, each with forty captives,
forty fresh clean bottles of warm water.
“¡Peragua!” he call out to me. “¡Super Agua!”
he holds out his hand and asks me to pay
a handsome ransom to set some of these captives free.
Real water yearns to be released, to be set free from its captivity,
to trickle out of the corner of your mouth, to drip from your chin,
to slip from your hand and seek sanctuary in dust and sand.
Real water slips through your hair and leaves you squeaky clean.
It is a mirage of palm trees upon burning sand. It is the hot sun
dragging its blood red tongue across the sky and panting for water
like a great big thirsty dog.
A Golden Oldie
Click on the link below for the earlier version.
https://rogermoorepoet.com/2016/04/28/water/
Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Water
Alebrijes
Are they half-grasped dreams
that wake, wide eyed, to a new day’s sun?
Or are they alive and thriving
when they fall from the tree?
Does the carver fish their color and shape
from his own interior sea,
or does he watch and wait for the spirit
to emerge from its wooden cocoon
to be reborn in a fiery block of color?
Daybreak:
in a secluded corner of my waking mind,
my neighbor’s dog greets the dawn with sparks
of bright colors born from his bark.
My waking dream: dark angels with butterfly bodies,
their inverted wings spread over my head to keep me warm.
In the town square, the local artist plucks dreams
from my head and paints them on carved wood.
A Golden Oldie
Click on this link for early version.
https://rogermoorepoet.com/2016/04/27/alebrijes/
Le mot juste
Searching for what exactly?
For the exact word, le mot juste,
the word that sums it all up,
catches the essence of the thing
and holds it in the mind forever.
Le mot juste? Think color.
Think color blind. Think blind.
Think of the world we see
reduced to grey scale.
Think of the seven colors
that stripe the rainbow sky,
each with a unique name:
it seems so easy, so simple.
But the world has changed.
Think now of the computer,
its screen more accurate
than the human eye and color
coordinated by a million or more
tiny little pixels that multiply
the seven rainbow colors
by a million or two and every
color numbered beyond
the recognition point
of the human eye: le mot juste
reduced to precision of number.
Think flowers. Think scent.
Think of the limited ways
we describe the smell of things.
I look across the breakfast table
and see my wife of fifty years,
a teenager reborn, walking into
the café where we first met.
I search my memory and my mind
for the words to describe that beauty,
that surge of excitement,
but I cannot find les mots justes.
Whitecaps
… white-capped the waves,
pushed inland by a strong,
warmth-bearing wind, and hazy
the crazy paving sky, with its
cloud figments floating,
lazy, the heat, with summer’s
heavy hand now sudden upon
sea and land, wave upon wave,
this heat wave, holding us now,
as wind tied, the tide, strives to flee
but cannot free itself from wind grip,
and bit between teeth, white horses
cap the waves, leave seaweed
stranded high and dry in fierce sun,
Irish Moss and Madcap Dulse,
their iodine tang fulfilled on chance
winds that blow us willy-nilly, this way,
that way, any way the wind blows …
Click below for Roger’ reading.
Words
Poems from the Sea Shore
Here, on the seashore,
the whisper of waves,
splashed with a flash of sun,
wind fingering the hair,
the light a delight,
and wordless this world
though its beauty be
configured in words.
The scything of the sea,
the land seized in snippets,
grey stones, red rocks,
gelatinous mudflats,
blue on white striations.
Seagull wings
snipping celestial ribbons,
salt caked keen on lips,
sea weed scents sensed
yet never seen.
Captivated we stand here,
unattached our single wings,
save to this singular beauty:
peregrine, the falcon soul,
so solitary as it soars.
Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.
rogermoorepoet 