POEM: IN THE WOODS

In the Woods    

I caught a glimpse the other day

between these trees whose sylvan stand

holds bright clouds and birds in their sway,

as if such things were meant to stay

(as if there were no other way

for light to soar across the land.)

 

These woods, no different than a scar,

with day not different from the night,

and sky just cloud or drossed in star,

and near not distant from afar,

till Time becomes a door ajar,

but from the which there is no flight.

 

Yet now same Time, who some will blame

for fruits made of a stranger kind,

sets signs beyond the still trees’ frame,

some shaped with purpose, judgment’s claim,

forged by moments that once held name.

(Though most too distant to remind,

nor less to bargain, gain or show

we ghosts of much beyond our glade.)

Yet still (the why I cannot know),

the woods now turn a path, and sow

new grass in place that’s meant to grow 

by sun which gleams beneath their shade.

 

Now dawn and dusk bring stars to string

bright beads along the distant hills;

and days—new clouds and birds that sing!

between great branches, hovering,

while tenured leaves change colouring

to dress the trees in ardent frills.

 

The last remits are all but paid,

and paths from here to there will soon

within these woods be all but laid

for souls to walk who once had stayed,

and souls to leave who once had strayed

beyond star’s light and dawn’s shy moon.

 

Driving: Leaving the City and All That Jazz Behind

OKAY. SO I WAS RE-READING AN ESSAY I WROTE on Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and got to wondering on the perspective of things from inside the wood. Well, who hasn’t wondered that? Big deal.  Still, what’s going on in there? Anything?This poem, ho-hum as it is, comes from musing on that subject. I won’t say too much about it, just that if you find yourself in a similar place and can’t seem to find your way out—eventually, when you least expect it, a path will come along, and then it will be entirely up to you to decide which way to go.

Before writing “In the Woods”, I’d read an Agatha Christie story, “The Last Séance”, where the well-intentioned medium, Simone Daubreuil, dies during a séance because of her client’s actions. In communing with the dead, Simone allows some of her own ‘essence’, her life-force, her “ectoplasm” to be used temporarily by the spirit of a dead girl to manifest itself before the grieving mother who, against protocol, seizes her dead child, now apparently alive and corporeal, and flees the room, leaving Simone dead, with her body shrunken to “half her usual size,” (175) and her shocked fiancé screaming her name over and over again.

My takeaway is that ghosts are real and can be encouraged to have an interest in the living.  Though, what kind of life a child will have after being returned from the dead is anyone’s guess. Also, I was reminded that interactions between the living and the spirit world come with dangers as well as costs that must be paid. Simone, though she did not plan to, gave her life so that a child could live*. She’d  had premonitions of danger before the séance, but went ahead anyway at the urgings of her fiancé Raoul, who was more interested in how much money they’ll make from the rich and grieving Madame Exe. We don’t actually see the transformation of the ghost into a living, breathing child. Nor do we witness Simone’s inexplicable death. And we don’t know what Madame Exe has clutched in her arms as she rushes from the room. For the reader, death remains a mystery.

  

Another short story, I think by the English writer M. John Harrison, has an ending which scared the beejezus out of me! A soul (or consciousness or whatever) of an unpleasant, unloved man (think Scrooge) was floating around in the ether until eventually settling down (somewhere) to end up facing the spirit of someone who hated him in life; both were doomed to an eternity of the other’s presence, with only their mutual loathing to unite them. (Though, you’d think they'd come to some sort of accommodation, given all the time they have to work things out.) The man's fate seems like pure agony to me! (One well deserved, nevertheless.)

 

Ghosts?

And (my ‘stream-of-consciousness’ continuing) the man’s predicament  reminded me of a Star Trek episode, “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield” in which the only survivors of a war that devastated their world, two men, polar opposites—one sane, the other mad after their planet’s destruction—are locked in an eternal death struggle. I forget the plot, but somehow they had opened a rift in the space-time continuum or whatever (how untidy of them!), and both had to remain in the gap in order to seal it off (and save the universe from destruction, of course.)

Lazarus, the sane one, sacrifices himself for the rest of us. He will battle his unhinged foe forever, until the end of time. The show ends with Captain Kirk asking, plaintively, “But, what of Lazarus? What of Lazarus?”

In general, the idea of my non-corporeal self being awake and aware forever seems like a nightmare to me, a Hell that comes with the warning: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap. The show creeped me out, man! Still more unpleasant images come to mind from when I worked at a nursing home. Time was different there, and for some residents I think it must have seemed like an eternity. That was my impression, anyway.

 

My apologies for rambling. In this new age of Covid, such thoughts sometimes hover around the room like ghosts. I hope any I’ve left with you are friendly.

Cheers, Jake

 

*Seems more or less like the natural order of things: Life-Death-Birth (or Rebirth); the past gives way to the future, that sort of thing. Except, if we all keep getting re-born, can there ever be a past? Without a past, how can there ever be a future? Finally, we never intend to die, even when we choose to. (I know that doesn't make sense, even when it does.)

 

 

Agatha Christie, Double Sin and Other short Stories, G.P. Putnum and Sons, 1961, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 2012.

 

"Cum On, Baby! Don't Light my fie-uhrr! Try not to set the night on fie-uhrrrr!"