". . .ON THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE. . ."

The War? I was so
glad to get out of it alive
even if it was as someone else

who...I was...died
it was the only way to survive
I became a stranger to my self

I had been so scared
I was going to die
now I'm scared of being alive

I watched better men than
me...die so...easily
I hated me for surviving

I still hear their laughter
how real they were
more realer now than I

the dead stare at me
silently
envying me this life

"Here: have it...take it!"
I scream at them
they stare at me silently

i feel as if I've cheated them
out of their future
"I got...lucky...that's all!"

when I get to
the bottom of
the bottle I

put the ***** top back on
trap them inside
the bottle's emptiness

the passing midnight cars
light up the ***** yellow walls
wallpaper roses blossom out of the dark

I reach for the next bottle
they stare at me silently
"I got lucky...that's...all!"

*

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

George Eliot ~  MIDDLEMARCH"

THROUGH CENTURIES OF JUNE
(  for Pinakini Naik )

The stone
stood its ground.

And waited
for me to run

after it. . .

it had flown through the sky
attached to my cry.

Now it was asleep
in the sun

wrapped in its own
silence.

I grasped it
in a fist.

Let my warmth
enter it.

Then spoke to the stone
in the littlest of sound.

"Stone.?" I addressed it
"Do you want to fly

again into the blue
of summer?"

The stone gave a little shadow
of a smile.

I took that
for its: "yeSSSS!"

My hand flung it
to the far away.

Then: raced after
its parabola.

Time chased me
to a tree with a bird

trapped inside
its song.

My stone lay
at the tree's feet

awaiting the next
throw. .

This world
of two

when friend stone
and I

played
with forever.

The great big blue
smiling with all of its summer.

I DREAMPT THAT I DWELT

"I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls
With vassals and serfs at my side"

my father would hum or sing
or da da dah'd as he sawed.

"And of all who assembled within those walls
That I was the hope and the pride."

A shining smile of nails
as he hammered the tune home.

Carpentry was for me
songs and words and stories.

Tall tales and wood shavings
from my father's "reminiscings'".

Saw dust floating in a summer
were to me atoms made visible.

I played with wood instead
of planning it.

The various tools transformed
with one imaginative leap.

Hand drill and spirit level
became Star Trek ships

attacked by a fleet
of tape measures.

Hacksaws...jigsaws were
all the one to me really.

And yes I knew that tooth spacing
and tooth shape were important in a saw.

A wavy set and milled teeth for plastic and metals.
A side set and ground tooth for a fast clean cut with wood.

But to me they were merely the teeth
of various pterodactyls in my Harryhausen mood.

And yes I planed wood
but only to release the genie of the pine.

The scent a magic
carpet ride.

And I planed and planed
until there was nothing left

but the graceful curl of
a sea of wood shavings.

Later he would laugh
when I brought him Carroll's parody.

"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
went wobble-wobble on the walls..."

Or an Orwell even...

"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"

Or auld Jimmy the Joist
and his warping words

"When you dreamt that you'd wealth
in marble arch do you ever think of pool beg slowe."

Cracking up when
Finnegans Wake'd

"... at this passing moment
by localoption in the birds' lodging,

me pheasants among,
where I'll dreamt that I'll dwealth

mid warblers' walls when throstles and choughs
to my sigh hiehied,..."

"Ahhh Dónall lad yer a great one
for the books but

ya never took to the wood
it was always words words words!"

"But I also dreamt, which charmed me most
That you loved me still the same
That you loved me, you loved me still the same
That you loved me, you loved me still the same"

THROUGH VERY SHORT TIMES OF SPACE.

The red door of No.16
North Frederick Street

slams behind him as he
enters into this newly minted

morning
sunshine so thick

one feels like a fish
swimming through it.

Sunlight spangles
a tiny puddle

turning it into a jewel
that only the eye can cherish.

Ahhhh "...the ineluctable
modality of the visible."

He turns right into Upper
Dorset Street

pulling an "Ahhh...howya!"
out of the man who makes the false

teeth!

Then turning left into
Eccles Street

giving the nod to No. 7
Bloom's house in ULYSSES.

Here in its run down state
though still shining in his fictionality.

Soon they will knock it
down and what will the tourists

do then
poor things.

Sure some bright spark
will rescue it from its rubble

and the door will live again
some streets away again.

Ahhh...." the ineluctable
modality of the visible."

I go to Quinn's gym
to get my Molly

(  Philomena her name is )

a cottage cheese with pineapple
on a Weetabix base.

It is a 16th of June
somewhere in the 80's

as I retrace my own earlier
Joycean footsteps.

Rat-a-tat-tat on Bloom's door.
"Are ya there Leopold?"

But the bold Leopold
doesn't answer.

The 16th of
forever I am

"...walking through it
howsomever."

The sun smirks
as such Joyceisms.

"I am, a stride of  a time.

A very short space of time
through very short times of space."

A horse and cart as if
from the past

saunters by
timelessly.

Ah "...the ineluctable
modality of the audible."

My Molly who is really
a Philomena

spoons the deliciousness
of the creamy dessert

into her
and yes she says

mmmm...yes....mmmm

Yes.  


*

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”— James Joyce, “Ulysses”

MEISJE MET DE PAREL

only now
many years later
the missing pearl earring

finally turns up
the last part
of the jigsaw

the rest of it
thrown away
when it couldn't be

found
now the pearl earring
the only piece left

she frames it
in a large gold frame
the girl now to be imagined

the pearl earring
itself and
itself only

A WOMAN IS CRYING

in the next room
a woman
is crying

a moon
perches upon an hotel sign
unmoved

as a new millennium
dawns
as bright as neon

the woman
still crying
her unknown

despair
shifting silently
from one century to another

human grief
unchanged
from age

to age
a woman is
crying


*


An hotel in the Big Apple as the town blinked blue and painted itself red before mellowing into yellow and began the whole sequence again and again. The woman next door was sobbing her heart out for hours and did not cease when the 20th became the 21st century. She seemed to be crying for the whole world...what had gone before...what was to come. Grief and sadness one of the things that makes us human.

"BE DE HOKEY!"

uncle taps me
on the head
"How are you in there?"

the only one who
could walk into my mind
to see how I was

he'd take my grief
tear it into pieces
scatter it to the wind

then he'd take me
by my hand
"Let's see where the happiness is!"

and always he'd find
where the happiness
was hiding

whether it be
in a wildflower
or a nest of blue eggs

or how he
showed me how
to see the world in words

and wonder always
flew to him
perched upon his shoulder

and oh his lovely laughter
and his catch phrase
"Be the hokey!

*

This was the man who kept me alive when my sister died....he reached inside me and filled me with his wonder of words and his love of the world. Always the same old question: "How are you in there?"  He is the reason that I try to put the world in words. I owe him everything. And so it was wonderful to bring him and his words to the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford and say "See what ya made me?"

And of course he said as he always said or still says in my mind. . ."BE DE HOKEY!"