Comment:
Original manuscript (black and white photo and handwritten poem) from 1966. My first attempt at multi-media. Gorran Haven, Cornwall. Clare and I on holiday waiting for the results from my finals. Hard to believe that was 53 years ago. Where have all the flowers gone?
The day I met bpnichol
I picked him up at Freddy airport,
drove him home for lunch, Clare’s
home made Lasagna, discussed
on the phone. He wasn’t Vegan
Tousled, tangled hair, mangled maps,
Toronto streets and squares drummed
up with coded words wrapped in magic,
he signed my copy of his Martyrology.
His saintly street speech spoke like
grid-locked gears grinding on downtown
city streets, one step at a time, where no
apocalyptic horsemen ever rode.
Oh, the root, toot, hoot, flurry, scurry,
sounds simmering, spurring them on.
After lunch, we drove to the Beaver
Pond in Mactaquac. Swallows dipped
and dived, wetting their beaks. Crows
perched on barren ship mast tree-trunks
stripped of all foliage, coughing warnings.
Strong wing-pulse of the flying osprey
homing to the nest. A great blue heron
walked silent, stilting its grey way through
cool, green shade and shallow waters.
A wordy wilderness tumbled wild from
our questing minds. Images grew starry
flowers. Magic metaphors mushroomed
along tangled New Brunswick trails. No
trace of tarmac and Toronto, the big city.
Comment:
bp was a Toronto poet, still is in my books.
Hence the blue jay.
A good friend.
I miss him.
Wind on Water
Aneurin & Taliesen
The beaver pond, surface wind-ruffled, sparking
sunlight’s flint off grey, shaded edges of cresting waves,
silent ships, white clouds sailing in a sea-blue sky,
repeated below in mercurial waters, islands
the lily-pads, yellow with the clenched fists of flowers,
closed, screening themselves from this incessant sunshine.
Chirps of anonymous birds, hidden beneath branches,
no motes, no flies, the breeze too strong to tempt them,
fly-catchers in hiding, kingfishers cached away.
Only the great blue heron, regal, always hungry,
surveys his watery domain, patiently waiting,
yet ever-ready, disturbed, to launch into flight.
My fingers strain to capture this peace, to distill it
into words, to kidnap time, motion, scent, the gentle
touch of the wind’s paintbrush, delicate over cheeks.
Where now are the great men, Aneurin, Taliesin,
those bards who called up the salmon’s wisdom,
turning it into words, deep as ponds, subtle as streams?
They are the voices of the wilderness that once was Wales.
I am the distant echo of their song, distanced, estranged,
lost in New Brunswick’s woods, forgotten on Canadian trails.
Rolling Stones
I have counted down the days, hours, minutes,
one by one, each tock of my grandfather clock
linked in pen and ink chains of endless words.
From arrival to departure, time’s fickle finger has
pointed me onwards into my future or backwards
into a delusional past that never was as I recall it.
Packed bags, backpacks crammed full of snacks,
ammunition against the hunger wars soon to be
upon them, they commence their long journey home.
Grown ups, some in their second childhood, bemoan
ties that bind, tides that rip us apart, tearing hearts,
swinging us in and out as, cockle-shell heroes, we man
our coracles and consult wide-ranging horoscopes that
never fail to comfort, the future’s wild words, written
in pitiless skies to guide and inspire all earthly creatures
born into sadness and death. No heroes in this house.
Just two old people, grey-haired, broken, contemplating
this soon to be silent home, knowing the Rolling Stones
were right, that rocks in motion don’t gather no moss,
that each lost moment is a finger-nail torn from flesh,
that today of all days could verily be ‘the last time’.
Commentary: Here for such a little while and gone already. Two years since they were here and two more years before they come back again. The silence is overwhelming. Only CNN with its endless cacophony breaks into the conscious mind, though that mind is unconscious now of words and their meanings. Images of emptiness, empty nests, this empty nest, these empty nests fill the vacancy of space. The heart is a black hole in the chest, sucking everything out of the light and into that dark, vacant space.
Westbury
White Horse
Winter in Somerset. No trains from Frome.
They sit in the engine sheds, boilers frozen.
Clare drives me to Westbury, in Wiltshire,
the neighboring county. She leaves me there
and I stand on a platform as white with snow
as Westbury White Horse towering above.
People arrive, flapping their arms, stamping
their feet, walking around trying to stay warm.
Finally, to shouts, cheers, and laughter, a train
arrives, its boiler successfully thawed. People
rush forward, open doors, claim their seats.
It’s a corridor, not a compartment train.
“Is this the eight-fifteen to Temple Meads?”
I ask the porter. “Nope,” he says. “That wll
be arriving later.” “When?” “About ten
or eleven, I expect.” “What train is this?”
“Ah, now this is the six-thirty to Bristol.
Running about two hours late. Better be quick.
The guard’s waving his flag. She’s about to leave.”
I open a door, climb on the train. All
the seats are taken. I stand in the corridor,
shivering, all the way to Temple Meads.
Gower
To be Welsh in Gower is to spell it funny
and pronounce it worse: Gwyr.
It’s to know how to say Pwll Ddu.
It’s meeting the cows in the lane to Brandy Cove
and knowing them all by name and reputation,
which one kicks, which one gores,
when to walk in the middle of the lane,
and when to jump for the safety of the hedge.
It’s to know the difference between the twin farmers
Upper and Lower Jones.
It’s to recognize their sheepdogs, Floss and Jess,
and to call them with their different whistles.
It’s knowing the time of day by sun and shadow;
it’s knowing the tide is in or out
by the salt smell in the air
without ever needing to see the sea;
and now, in this far away land called Canada,
it’s hearing your stomach growl for crempog or teisen lap
whilst memory’s fish‑hook tugs at your heart
in the same way your father hauled in salmon bass
at Rhossili, Brandy Cove, Pennard, Oxwich, and Three Cliffs.
Commentary: I was checking Gwyr, the Welsh for Gower, where I was born, and found this interpretation of the name. <<G is for generous, your giving nature. W is for wise, more tomorrow than today. Y is for young, the years never show. R is for rapport, friends seek you.>> I don’t know if that’s me, but it certainly wouldn’t be a bad set of descriptors to live up to.
Growing Up
in Brynmill
They drag the kids kicking and squealing
from childhood’s universe into an older
world of smoking and drinking, forbidden
fruits stolen after Christmas dinner when
drowsy grown-ups’ eyes are turned away.
Why do bigger boys follow smaller ones,
buying their sisters’ kisses then thrusting
their fingers into little girls’ knickers, or
invading Woolworth’s and tucking stolen
goods in shirts with their buttons undone?
The games they play: offering a little girl
a cigarette or a sweet while two boys
wait behind the garden gate with a sharp
knife to press against the victim’s throat.
Time-Spirits
Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist is a concept from 18th- to 19th-century German philosophy, translated as “spirit of the age” or “spirit of the times”. It refers to an invisible agent or force dominating the characteristics of a given epoch.
Wikipedia
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Poems for troubled times.
Introduction
Our world finds itself in an incredible mess right now. Somehow, we have to sort it out. Images and metaphors tie past, present, and future together. We must pick our ways through the difficulties of these troubled times, as you must pick your way through the intricacies of these poems. Many of you will give up. Some of you, the chosen few, will make your way to the heart of each poem.
These poems are deliberately cryptic. Each one is a mind game I am playing with you. I do not underestimate you. I have placed clues throughout each poem and if you follow the clues you will arrive at many of the poem’s hidden meanings. Some poems are more difficult than others, their meaning more recondite. Others seem very straightforward, yet still contain secrets.
This style of poetry has a long history going back to Anglo-Saxon riddles and way beyond, back into the mists of time. Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) specialized in similar forms of recondite poetry, often based on metaphor and the juego alusivo-elusivo, the game of alluding to something while eluding the act of saying what it is. Jorge Guillén (1893-1984) and Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) also played this game, as did Octavio Paz (1914-1998). In the works of all of these poets, the clues may rest in the poem or they may be found in a generic knowledge of the mythology of the poem’s exterior world.
Always remember that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” (George Santayana). Otherwise expressed, in the words of T. S. Eliot: “Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future / and time future contained in time past” (Burnt Norton). The seeming anachronisms in these poems suggest that all time is ever-present and that each new day presents us with events that have already occurred on many occasions.
Commentary: The idea for Time-Spirits aka Zeitgeist was born around the kitchen table in Island View on Saturday, 22 December 2018, during a literary conversation between Gwen, Victor, and Roger. A poem at a time, one after another, grew from that table top chat. The result: 70 poems, not easy to read, deliberately difficult, that reflect our troubled times. My thanks to Geoff Slater, line-painter, who drew the cover picture: Robin Red in Claw and Breast, a symbol of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. So are we in the words of Albert Camus who writes ‘nous sommes ou les meurtriers ou les victimes’ . Is it the early bird that catches the worm? Or is it the late worm that gets caught by the bird? Whichever: it’s the worm that gets eaten, until the robin bites the dust, when he is eaten in his turn. Just think of it as nature doing its regular recycling …
Tracks
McAdam Railway Station #12
“Put your fingertips on the rail,
see if you can feel its pulsing beat.
No heart rail rhythm now. No tremble.
Put your ear on cold metal:
nothing but silence. No murmur,
however distant. Black fly whine.
No-see-ums flit. The train track’s
buzz of harmony is lost and gone,
replaced by careless nature. Listen
to the wind whistling in the woods,
hark to spring sounds, so subtle,
grass growing, rust accumulating,
sleepers turning over in their graves,
silent, rotting beneath forgotten rails.”
Comment: Nothing so lonely as an abandoned railway track, rusting beneath snow and rain, the wooden sleepers rotting into oblivion. That said, the Southern New Brunswick Railway still carries freight trains through McAdam, and it is the railway station that suffered, with the loss of passenger traffic, rather than the rails themselves. What a pleasure, incidentally, to hear the hoot of the approaching diesel, to count the wagons as the train came to a halt outside the station. Then came the joy of watching the engine separate wagons from the main train, shunt them into sidings, return, and take the freight train, slow at first, but rapidly gathering speed, out of the station and away into the distance. Such memories. So many ghost trains riding those rails. So many ghosts bewitching the windmills of the child’s mind that still inhabits the ageing brain.
Elevator Pitch
Jean Chrétien
His enormous presence filled that tiny
space. His corkscrew smile, well-known tic,
semi-frozen face, that trick of wild speech
butchering language, misunderstood in
both English and French. “Bonjour,” he said. “Good
day.” I nodded, didn’t know what to say,
just shuffled my feet. I remember he
talked on the radio about our land,
how, in winter, with car stuck in snow,
we spin our wheels, forward and back, a bit
at a time until we emerge, content,
victorious. Time and the floors slipped by.
I thought of the elevator pitches
I had written for my films. Should I pitch
him about my latest film or should I
just keep quiet. The elevator stopped.
Jean Chrétien got out. “You’ll be back,” I
said. “Damn right,” he grinned, lop-sided.
Renaissance Hotel. Toronto. Nine-teen
eighty-five. Tongue-tied I had stood there.
Later I thought of all I might have said.
rogermoorepoet 