Rants

Paella

Paella

A bullfrog lives in my computer.
He eats all the full stops and I can’t
type a period to end my sentences.

I imagine he thinks they are tadpoles,
though the commas, with their short,
twisted tails, would be visually better.

I could live without commas, I can’t face
an endless future with no periods in sight
and www-comma-com just isn’t right.

I guess I could survive a future without
frogs, though cuisses de grenouille appear
each summer at my local super market.

I ate a paella québécoise in a Spanish café
in Montreal once. It was full of frogs’ legs
and was very, very tasty. I wonder if I can
catch that bullfrog and put him in a paella.

Commentary:
Almost a true story. Something did go wrong with my new laptop. When I brought it home, I couldn’t access the [ . ] – not great for working on the web or for writing normal sentences, with punctuation. The man in the computer shop who sold me the computer, didn’t believe me when I took the computer back and told him about the problem. I asked him to send me an e-mail. He tried and – guess what? – no period [ . ] for the .com – most frustrating. Never mind, I got a new new computer out of the deal, and a much better one.

Water

Water

Here, in Island View, my lawn’s parched grass
longs for water, long-promised but never drawing near.
Do my flowers remember when the earth slept without form
and darkness lay upon the face of the deep?

The waters under heaven gathered into one place.
When they separated, the firmament appeared.
Light sprang apart from darkness
and with the beginning of light came the word,
more words, and then the world …

… my own world of water in which my mother
carried me until her waters broke
and the life sustaining substance drained away
throwing me from dark to light.

In Oaxaca, water was born free, yet everywhere
lies imprisoned in bottles, in jars, in frozen cubes,
its captive essence staring out with grief-filled eyes.

A young boy on a tricycle pedals the streets
with a dozen prison cells, each with forty captives:
forty fresh clean litres of drinkable water. He holds
out his hand for money and invites the villagers
to pay a ransom, to set these prisoners free.

Real water yearns to be released, to be spontaneous,
to trickle out of the corner of your mouth,
to drip from your chin, and fall to the ground.

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.

Commentary:

This year, spring came with lots of rain. At one stage it looked like the waterlogged plants in our flower beds would all drown. Then, just before summer came, the rain went away and we suffered day after day of unbearable heat followed by nights during which the temperatures scarcely dropped.

As a result, the woods dried up and dry lightning strikes started fires. At one stage close to forty wild fires burned, many out of control. Entry to the woods was forbidden by law. Gradually, the fire-fighters fought back, extinguished the fires, one by one, and reclaimed control. I hope everyone realizes the enormous debt we owe to those brave men and women who risk their lives to save not only our lives, but our houses and our properties.

The fires have gone now. We had a day’s rain, 11 mms fell, but it’s not enough. We need more, a great deal more. We need to soak the trees, the grass, and to feed the streams and rivers. We also need to refill the aquifers on which life on earth, as we know it, depends. We need deep ends in our pools, not the shallow ends of depends, when it depends on whether or not the skies open and the heavenly waters fall.

CBC radio last night – farmers say they have lost their winter hay. How will the animals survive our winters with the hay fields burned and dry? One farmer said that, having no hay himself, it would cost him a minimum of $55,000 to bring in hay – if he could find anyone to sell it to him. Unfortunately, the same is true across the Maritimes – drought, forest fires, and a lack of winter hay. Spare a thought (and a prayer or two) for all those poor creatures, born to die, who will suffer this winter on account of this summer’s heat.

Things

 

Things

I fumble in my mind for things
long lost in an upper attic.
I can no longer read the words
I wrote. What does this mean?

At night I dream of things
beyond my reach. My fingers
clutch but cannot clasp
those clouds that clutter.

Who, oh who, the owl cries,
can free the mice that nibble
through my mind and set me
gnawing at my own soul?

Once upon a time, a long
time ago, I thought I saw light
at the end of the tunnel.
I travelled on a ghost train.

The light I saw was a gaslight
ghosting my mind with fictional
fantasies of an illusive kingdom
that would never be mine.

Elusive, these memories of things
that never were, but might have been.
Will o’ the wisps dancing shadows
on the salt-marsh of my unknown life.

Commentary:
Memory loss. I guess it happens to all of us at one time or another. One of my long-lost friends visited yesterday and between us we could hardly put two consecutive memories together. Every other sentence was punctuated with a pause – ‘Now, when did that happen?’ ‘What was his name? I can’t remember now.’ ‘Me neither.’

I am not particularly worried by such happenings. I am a poet and a story-teller. Sometimes, I forget the truth – so what? – I just go ahead and reinvent it, tickling it here, sticking a spot of paint there, adding a word or two, or a magic moment. I often remind myself of Oscar Wilde when he created a magic moment of verbal ingenuity – “I wish I had said that, Oscar.” “You will, Roger, you will.”

Best of all, even in those moments when personal memories fail me, literary magic returns. I think of Dylan Thomas and his words spring to my mind – ‘time has ticked a heaven round the stars’. Wonderful. Or Francisco de Quevedo ‘soy un fué, y un será, y un es cansado.’ / ‘Tired I was, tired I am, tired I always will be.’ My own translation from the summer of 1963 when José Manuel Blecua introduced me to the poem, or rather Blecua introduced the poem to me, in that summer’s courses of the UIMP.

So, according to this theory, even when you feel lost, you are never really lost, because there are an enormous number of people living inside your head, who who will step out from the shadows, when needed, and give your memory a little boost. But don’t get too carried away. Think too of José María Valverde and his poetic premonition: ‘Pobres poetas de hoy, destinados a ser polvo seco de tesis doctoral.’ / ‘Poor poets of today, destined to be the dry dust of doctoral theses.’ (My translation).

Dust to dust and ashes to ashes – ‘Serán ceniza, pero tendrá sentido. Polvo serán, pero polvo enamorado.’ Quevedo, of course. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. You might need me to help you with the translation, though – ‘Ashes they’ll be, but ashes with feeling. They will be dust, but dust that burns with love.’ (My translation, with a little bit of exaggeration [sorry, don Francisco!] just at the end.)

This Vessel in which I Sail

This Vessel in which I Sail

Trapped in this fragile vessel, with the pandemic
a passenger waiting to board, I drift from port to port,
looking for a haven, safe, to have and to hold me.

No harbour will let me dock. “No room at this inn,”
they say. “No haven here.” They wave me away.

Now I have no destination. Aimless, I float and every
where I go the message is: “No vacancy: no room at all.”

Unwanted, abandoned, I wander with wind and waves,
my only friends seals, porpoises, and whales.
I walk the whale road, leaving a frail, white wake behind.

This vessel has become a gulag now, a prison
camp where I exist just to survive. Each hour of each day
endless, boundless, like this shadowy, haunted sea.

Today there is no motion, no goal. What is there to achieve
but survival? Each day’s journey is sufficient unto itself.

Commentary:

Moo’s cartoon, Naval Gazing, dates from 2015. That year I spent eight weeks in Moncton at the Georges Dumont, gazing at my navel while waiting for my anti-cancer radiation treatment. Naval gazing / navel gazing, indeed. Good one, guys. You make a great pairing.

The poem dates from 2020 when Covid stalked the streets and we wore masks when we were not confined to our houses. I thought of the tour ships, wandering the seas, with the disease on board, and no port wanting them. It was a strange time.

Golden Oldies, then, both poem and painting. There are signs, small at present, but still visible, that such days are on their way back. We must each ask the question – What is there to achieve but survival? Hopefully we will come up with a similar answer – Each day’s journey is sufficient unto itself. Journey well and journey safely, my friends.

Apocalypse when?

Apocalypse When?

A strange, milk-cloud sky, skimpy, with the sun
a pale, dimly-glowing disc and my pen scarce
casting a shadow as the nib limps over the page.

Out on the west coast, fires still range free and this
is the result, these high, thin clouds casting a spider
web cloak over the sun face and darkening the day.

The west coast: five or six hours by plane and three
whole days to get there by train, even longer by bus,
all chop and change with multiple stops.

The wind blew and the clouds came widdershins,
backwards across the continent. Today they reached
across the ocean to claw the sun from European skies.

It is indeed a small world after all. Isostasy:
you push the balloon in here, and it bulges out
over there in the place you least expected.

Now we are all interconnected in an intricate network
of a thousand ways and means. What does it all mean?
Ripples ruffle the beaver pond’s dark mirror.

The forest mutters wind-words, devious and cruel,
that I sense, but cannot understand. High in the sky
clouds turn into horsemen on plunging steeds.

Fear, fire, flood, foe, poverty, pandemic, crops destroyed,
unemployment, and, waiting in the wings, the threat of civil
unrest, leading to the apocalypse and the war to end all wars.


Hello again – our old friend is back!

Hello again – our old friend is back!

Co-[vidi]-s
17 March 2020

I saw time change with the clocks
and my body clock
is no longer in sync
with the tick-tock chime
that denounces each hour.

Hours that used to wound
now threaten to kill.
They used to limp along,
but now they just rush by
and I, who used to run
from point to point,
now shuffle a step at a time.

Around us, the Covidis
thrives and flowers.
Wallflowers, violets,
we shrink into our homes,
board up the windows,
refuse to open doors.
We communicate by phone,
e-mail, messenger, Skype.

Give us enough rope
and we’ll survive a little while,
fearful, full of anguish,
yet also filled with hope.

Comment:

A Golden Oldie, written on 17 March 2020, St. Patrick’s Day.

Only yesterday, I read that Covid is back once more, in a new and mutated shape. Masking is once again demanded in the local Horizon hospitals especially in areas where patients and the public gather. I lost a couple of good friends to Covid last time round. I hope I don’t lose any in this new session. Guess I’ll be continuing to get my vaccinations and keep them up to date.

Whoever is reading this, I wish you all the best. May you stay Covid and illness free. May you also enjoy a long and happy life with sunshine days – and enough rain to keep the forests cool, the trees happy, the flowers flourish, and the wildfires at bay.

Clepsydra 14-15 – Clowns clowning around

Clepsydra 14-15
Clowns clowning around

14

… walking life’s walk
     grey jays in the ash tree
          fresh snow on the ground

at night
     deer track out of the woods
          moon’s dead skull
               chalking its slow path
                    westwards

snow falls
     white upon white
          whirling our world
               back to its cratered life

nothing needed
     other than moonlight on snow
          to ignite us

a white wall of water cascades
     earthwards from the moon
          waters of renewal
               waters of life
                    waters that restore us
and save us
     from the moonbeam’s slicing knife
          that amputates all life …


15

… it is scary tonight
     inside the topsy-turvy
          big-top of my circus world

carnival time
     clowns clowning around
          turning my life
               upside down

is my mind
     a spider-web
          spun by worry and doubt

I remember how
     they pushed me around
          kicked me out
               always the anonymous they

they abandoned me
     told me I was unwanted
          surplus to purpose
               forced me to exit

they told me to forget
     those amniotic waters
          that water world of comfort
               that illusion of reality
                     they had created
                          then threw me onto the street

    I left behind
          their stultified personalities
               with all their stupid rules
                    and blinkered minds
                         that stopped them
                              from seeing straight …

Clepsydra 12 & 13 – Pilgrim in this barren land …

Clepsydra 12 & 13 –
Pilgrim in this barren land …

12

… pilgrim in this barren land
     lost in my wanderings
          the wander-lust still tugging at me

in my back-pack
               dusty with memories
                    photos that only I have seen
                         sepia
                              spotted in places

only I know names and faces
     recall relationships
          a mystery to me, an outsider,
               such images haunt me
                    move me in ways
                         I do not understand

the irregular heart-beat
     of my life walks inside me
          down new corridors of time
               fresh music
                    strums my heart-strings

a heart
     a bridge a time too far
          lost I wander the woods
               searching for things
                    I know I must find
                         my lost self among them …


13

… but to find myself
     I must first lose myself,
          not in a barren land
               nor in the inner depths
                    of my suffering mind
                         nor the deeper depths
                              of another’s body

am I nothing more
     than an offering on the altar
          where nothing alters more
               than this interchange
                    eye to eye
                         mind to mind
                              body to body

will the I ever transform
     into the power of us
          together
               both of us

and are we much more
     than one plus one
          with three or four or more
               conjured from the word
                    that was from the beginning

or is all of this
     nothing more than
          the woven magic of pillow-talk …

Butterflies

Butterflies
Miguel de Unamuno

… butterflies … temporal forms … fluttering …
existing for one sweet day … they perch … spread
their wings … fan us with their beauty … flourish …
catch our attention … then caught by a gust
tear their wings on a thorn … and perish … blink
your eye and they are gone … yet reborn … they
cluster and gather in dusty ditches …
congregate on bees’ balm … smother Black-Eyed
Susan and Cape Daisy … shimmer in shade …
butterflies by day … fireflies by night …
terrestrial stars floating in their forest
firmament … dark tamarack … black oak … bird’s
eye maple … silver birch … impermanence
surrounds us … dances beneath stars … sings with
robins … echoes the owl’s haunting cry …
eternity held briefly in our hands …
then escaping like water or sand … black
words on white paper capturing nothing …
… my dialog … my time … my place … butterflies …

Note: “La poesía da permanencia a las formas temporales del ser / Poetry gives permanence to the temporal forms of the self.” Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)

The temporal forms of the self – and so much today is unsettled, changing, insubstantial. I have often wondered how one makes time stop. Is it even possible to do so? Time and tide wait for no man. And why should they? Fray Luis de León – “Con paso silencioso, el cielo vueltas dando, las horas del vivir le va hurtando.” / With silent step, the ever-turning sky, steals away life’s hours. Or Fancisco de Quevedo – “Que sin saber ni cómo, ni adónde, la edad y la salud se hayan huído. Falta la vida, asiste lo vivido, y no hay calamidad que no me ronde.” Without me knowing how or where, age and health have fled. Life is lacking, past life flew by, and there isn’t a calamity that doesn’t hound me.

Ars longa, vis brevis – art endures, life flies by. My translations are freer than usual today, but I too feel like being creative in my own language. So, if we can’t slow time down, what can we do? We can create – poems, paintings, photos. We can read – and translate from one language to another. We can, like butterflies, perch on flowers and enjoy our brief days in the sun. Mindfulness – we can make the most of each moment by living it thoroughly and well. Carpe diem – we can seize each moment of every day and live it to its full measure. And, above all, we can write and read poetry – because, as Unamuno says – Poetry gives permanence to the temporal forms of the self.

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

1. If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

That is a very hard question to answer. I think of all the material things that everyone else can think of, but I do not want to sell commonplace things – antique furniture, paintings, books, stamps, groceries – I could go on and on, but I will resist the temptation to do so.

When I lived in Santander, Spain, the local wines were sometimes called ‘sol embotellado’ / bottled sunshine. I wouldn’t want to open a wine shop, but I would love to bottle the essence of a warm sunny summer day and – why should I sell it? I wouldn’t. I would give it away, free of charge, to all the needy people, inner city boys and girls, the impoverished, those who live in the streets and sleep in doorways or under bridges at night. Oh, the joy and happiness that would come when they opened their bottle of summer sunshine and felt the warm fresh air gather around them so they could breathe it in.

But why stop there? I would also give away ‘essence of butterflies’, that special feeling that comes on the colored wings of a butterfly and combines with the joy of flowers and the gift of taking flight. How special that would be. But sell it? It is much too valuable to sell. Put a dollar, Euro, yen, rupee, or sterling price upon it, and all its powers would vanish, like fairy dreams fading away.

Among other things, I would also like to offer the gift of the joy of words. Colors, in the imagination of Blake, were ‘sky wounds’. What joy to take a normal word, add a second word to it and create a new verbal image – ‘sky wounds’. And what happens when the sky is wounded, you ask. Well, the wound opens, the blood pours out and ‘le soleil se couche dans son sang qui se fige’ – ‘the sun sets in its own congealing blood’. Baudelaire, if I remember correctly, from Les Fleurs du Mal. What beauty in those new images. What joy in remembering and recreating them. I would bottle such gifts and give them away in my shop.

Fairy dreams – yes, I would offer them as well to those who needed them. And not the sort that fade away, but those fairy dreams that suspend us in the wondrous beauty of their ethereal light. And I would bottle hope, and self-belief, and the power to change oneself from what one is to what one is destined to be. And I would add essence of self-knowledge and powder of Davey Lamp light that would enable the seekers to seek in the darkest corners of their souls and find that elusive inner self, and bring it out from the darkness. And I would stock fragrant filaments of firefly that would also allow my customers to enlighten that darkest of nights, the dark night of the soul. And a map of hidden foot paths that would allow the wanderer to wander and never get lost.

How about an elixir of happiness and joy? A quintessence of rainbows, perhaps? Or a magic lantern that would shine out from heart and eyes and enlighten the soul friends of those lucky souls who were able to locate and enter my shop of conditioners, vital vitamins, and soul magic for all those lost and lonely people. And there, that mirror on the wall – look in it, gaze deep into your own eyes, and maybe, just maybe, you will find my shop.

And “What will your shop be called?”, you ask. Look into your heart and you may find the answer engraved therein. It will be called The Gift Shop of Hope Restored. I look forward to welcoming you when you open the door and step in.

Comment
1. The number at the beginning of this post, refers to its position in The Book of Everything. In that book, I have included 100 blog prompts (The Book of Everything) and 11 more (and a little bit extra) to give a total of 111 responses to prompts. Each one is a little bit crazy, just as this one is. But what fun to read, and write, and think slightly differently.