POEM: HOW TO AVOID FACE-PLANTING: A POETIC AID

 

 

Three Small Lies in Spring                               

In the park, a father leads his daughter

into a garden. Her name is Alice.

By the path, a shy man plays an accordion

under a tree.

In a arbour, a girl laughs as she tap dances

for her grandparents.

Later, a coyote pads across

the old golf-course lane

like a hole-in-one.

 

Lenses

At the edge of a frame, a flash

from some antique event is captured

on a photographic plate:

A blur, a passing,  a ghostly presence.

Then with chemical alchemy

photons are transformed

into light and dark,

and ghosts walk past a wedding tent.

They appear to be waving.

 

Later, light through the iris

of an unhuman lens

reveals a blur on the surface

of another plate:

A  starry  pyre

passing through the galaxy long ago,

made from another alchemy

when light and matter

became one in an instant.

It, too, appears to be waving.

 

Red Sky

I know this feeling,

I know it well.

I feel it often

this side of hell.

 

I know this feeling.

It’s there when  I lie.

It’s at the beginning

and under red sky.

 

I know what I’m feeling,

so never you mind!

It’s the kind of feeling

no one should find.

 

I know when it started

and where it will end.

It’s somewhere between

a foe and a friend

 

I know this thing,

awake or asleep.

It’s mine alone—

and mine to keep!

 

I’ll tell you clearly,

once and for all,

between a rock and a hard place,

you surely will fall,

if, when judging what’s best,

feeling born or bred,

the first you ignore

while the other you dread.

 

Lament

In these former lands,

strange farmers till the soil.

With sharp sticks they scratch earth

too ancient to recall.

In the orchards and gardens

harsh fruit falls untaken from the trees,

and seeds ripen mostly wayward grasses.

In the marketplace, traders curse and spit

as they bargain dirt for coin.

Their teeth grind like pestles.

 

O me woes th’ day! O me woes th’ night!

O me woes, my dally dame sal!

O me woes, me woes!

 

This is a sunset land,

dry and forgiven now by time’s passing,

and changed beyond recognizing.

Weariness hangs in the air

like desperate crows,

and I fear there is but one season left

to conjure in.

In this nameless land,

sorrow roosts on scoured limbs.

It lines the faces of red-cheeked lovers:

Young men dowse dusty vaults

searching for yesterday’s treasures.

Young women, their once bright eyes

now red-rimmed and clouded,

look to distant skies for memories

unremembered.

 

Wet were the hillsides. Wet was the land.

Wet was the graveyard

where the weeping willow stands.

 

I remember how it began—well enough,

and on fair plains. Wise children grew

like sweet grass between the dogwood.

Their laughter camped along river banks,

and fires burned without sacrifice.

All was as it could be—was all it could be.

Until that terrible day when the gates opened

and I was forced to ride.

After me came the winds and time.

They blew over the newly-trod paths

choking the air with footprints

that stamped a different seal upon the land.

And so, in this graveyard land,

with kings and queens long gone or passing,

priests busy themselves in dusty fields,

and all the signposts have been torn away.

 

Wet were the hillsides. Wet was the land.

Wet was the graveyard

where the weeping willow stands.

 

Jeopardy

Drinking blood

with a Latin tag,

this antique creature

is decidedly modern.

 

 

 

For me, poems are like guideposts or markers of thoughts, feelings, sensations or unexpected discoveries I run across in my comings and goings. I note them as I’m experiencing them, then generally face-plant trying to find words to express them so that the reader might have a similar reaction. These words, that are mere marks on paper—signifiers, communications, placements, recordings of life-events, are often vague and the devil to pin down; they are like dreams fading from your conscious mind as you wake.

I re-read poems I’ve written years ago, and at least with some of them, I still take pleasure in their composition and imbedded questions and (maybe?) answers. They’re kind of like cogs in a machine I’m building; they have a place in my life is what I’m trying to say, and I hope some of them will have a place in the life of anyone reading them as they go about building their own machines.

THREE SMALL—I was out for a walk in my favourite park one day and happened on these three (or four?) events. With a bit of literary embellishment I’m asking how we determine the true facts of things. Is there a “complete” truth—to anything? Currently, I’m reading an Agatha Christie* and the storyline concerns a retired couple, recently moved to a small town on the coast. It’s idyllic and cozy for their autumn years, and they set about to fix it up. By happenstance they run across a cryptic message in an old book stored in the attic. Gradually they begin to unearth the truth around a decades-old mystery. Through archives and found letters, documents and photographs, as well as conducting several interviews, they slowly dig down to the truth surrounding a young woman’s disappearance in the years leading up to World War One. Who was she? There’s some evidence she was a spy working for England. If so, what was her role? When and how did she die? And where is she buried? And why is a decades-old mystery ringing alarm bells in the present? An old man who knew something of the matter, and who did some gardening for our inquisitive couple is found murdered in their backyard! Why was he killed? Was his death related to their search? Who killed Old Isaac? Have Tommy and Tuppance got more than they bargained for when they moved into The Laurels, their new home in the not-so-peaceful English countryside?

In the end, all is well in the village of Hollowquay. Through Tommy’s contacts in the intelligence service, the goings-on at The Laurels are revealed and the murderer captured. It seems the village was once a centre for proto-fascist activities of the “Mussolini-type” before WWI, and British authorities long had it and its residents under surveillance. In the end, we don’t learn the truth surrounding the long-ago death of “Mary Jordan”, nor do we learn much about the current threat posed from Hollowquay, which housed a decades-old fascist cadre, composed “particularly [of] young people”, that was given to violent activity. (Christie was concerned with the rising social unrest of the 60s and 70s in her later years. See my review of Passenger to Frankfurt.) The authorities move in, and in a very circumspect and polite manner (so English!) eliminated the threat to Tuppance and her husband. By the end we learn—or don’t learn is more like it—what the head of the counter-espionage force tells the couple: that there are some secrets they will never know. It seems we, like Tuppance and Tommy, are supposed to trust those in charge that everything is under control and being taken care of. And the couple, far from being disturbed by the secret activity of both the new generation of fascists and of their own government's extensive spy network, are instead relieved. Let others deal with such knowledge, they say, and let us get back to tending our garden.

Secrets, and secrets within secrets. You’d think in a secure and open society, groups like the one found in Hollowquay would be exposed and their philosophy vigorously rebutted in the court of public opinion, not kept hidden in the files of “Special Branch” to be “dealt with” from time to time. Even Christie doesn’t give us the whole truth in the end.

My digression through Christie (and this was the final book she wrote, incidentally) suggests to me that “truth” isn’t simple or straightforward, black or white. It requires digging and soul-searching, and it may not always please us, or benefit us, when it is revealed.

And while not everything may come up into the light of day, we all know where we may need to dig someday. 

 

LENSES—I was watching a show on TV about a family of nineteenth century photographers and it was kind of fun. They took pictures of dead people—“post-mortem photography”—that strange (by our standards), Victorian custom in which the recently departed were photographed, posed and dressed as if they were still alive. (Presumably those who’d had a peaceful passing, and not mangled or disfigured in some giant, steam-belching infernal contraption of the Industrial Age.) They took singles, as well as group portraits and the dead relative, poor Uncle Fairfax or whoever, is propped up, stiff as a board and rapidly cooling, surrounded by his family and friends.

At one point one of the photographers starts a discussion on how they could capture pictures of souls or spirits of the recently dead, and was this not something that practitioners of the new art of photography might achieve? We’ve all seen old photographs with those ghostly figures that are inexplicably found on the developed print with no rational explanation for their appearance.

Maybe the new technology of photography, back then, working as it did to capture moments of Time and freeze them, somehow acted as a bridge or doorway to another dimension? They say there are other dimensions all around us. Who’s to say that nineteenth century photography, then a new, almost magical technology, didn’t somehow brush against a barrier between our dimension and another, and that sometimes, something would come across.

The magical, almost mystical discipline of photography, with its not-yet fully explored range of possibilities, lasted until our modern times (when even a Polaroid Instamatic gave us that moment of anticipation and drama while the film we held in our hands slowly developed an image). Today, everyone and their dead Uncle Fairfax captures Time with their “smart” phone cameras, catching one moment after another, on and on at an insane pace. If you pull an elastic-band too far, it either snaps, or snaps back. Perhaps Time does not like being captured so much and is starting to fight back—who knows? Could it be there is a reckoning ‘a comin' from the Space-Time Continuum?

So, in the poem there are two sets of lenses and eyes, and two brains (presumably), and great swaths of Time and Space between them. Maybe they are connected by more than the processes their machines allow them to see?

RED SKY—is pretty bleak and angry. The speaker seems ready to pounce on the reader and assumes the worst in them. But it’s a truism that hectoring and preaching are not the best ways to bring anyone around to your way of thinking. Of course the speaker may be venting all this bile because they are angry at themselves. There is the sense that the speaker is burdened by the choice they made—perhaps not the specific choice but rather how they arrived at it. They also say ignoring one and dreading the other has consequences. Why?

LAMENT—is a fun romp through a land that is currently under a red sun, but the sun is also an angry one. It’s a time of endurance and pain. What comes after is unclear. What’s come before is soon lost in the blowing sands.

JEOPARDY—for Jeopardy fans: No matter how we label things, no matter how far back those labels go, there will always be demons among our angels.

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

* Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1973. [Title taken from a poem “Gates of Damascus”, by James Elroy Flecker.]