Flowers in Interlaken
How delicious it is to wake up in a place where no one, no one in the world, guesses where you are. Rilke He takes time mounting the stairs. The years are heavy in his lungs. Peaking out of his small backpack, a bunch of three yellow roses, a gift for the woman he’s summiting. Over the last week, many middle aged and old men have rung our bell, asked for ‘Jason’, looked lost, mis- reading our confusion as confession. Then sigh with relief and head up. We joked about it being a brothel, not the home of an ‘American family’, as our holiday rental landlord told us. No American voices, just shuffling at night. Today unmistakably squeaky percussion. No joke anymore. Disgust mingled with awe that you could be so old and still desire minutes of conquest. Perhaps he goes there for the company, gives roses, talk lovingly of a dead wife. Time Traveller in Sion For the creative artist, there is no impoverishment and no worthless place. Rilke Outside the Grand Cafe in Sion he rests, a Victorian artist from a Vallais art school, just up - afternoon coffee and custard pastry crumbs in his jaundiced beard, scattering down into his pyjamas, greying slippers. Dressed in questions, he has pan-pipes strung around his neck, and a Peruvian woven bag from which he fishes a notebook and pen to write or sketch in a shaking veined hand. He debates with himself, waves his hands at invisible members of his retinue, mumbles. Suddenly summoned by Rilke’s angels, he gets up and leaves, stumbling back into the artwork he was trying to create out of his shadows. Not Forgotten Find perfect tiny blue alpine flowers forget-me-nots, Wald-Vergissmeinnicht I am reminded of being a little boy when flowers were everything beautiful and right about the world. We collected them, made chains, pressed and painted them. Plato would be smiling. But not the German knight who, wanting to pick the blue winks for his lady, falls into a river, drowned by the weight of affection, ‘Vergiss mein nicht!’ Forget me not! Remember, yes, but no loss can be recovered in flowers, however wished. Writer's Block at Murren Most experiences are unsayable; they come to fullness in a realm that words do not inhabit. Rilke. Words fail me. No, I fail words. Empty dictionary. All synonyms are cliches. Every time I pick an adjective to describe the mountains as they rise thousands of metres above the unparalleled U-shape valley of Lauterbrunnen my dumb pen is left sterile. I am not the poet, the mountains are. Monch, Eiger, Jungfrau - your names are words enough. No stanza here can capture this vista of monumental stone and glaciers, pristine alpine meadows, tiny towns perched at drunken angles. I keep following the line of the cliffs, plunging down with the waterfalls, and all I can is fall and accept the inadequacy of flesh and ink. Published in Ginosko Literary Journal, #28, June 2022.
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The Tree Swallows Return
I awaken from the nucleus of meditation and find the space filled with electrons, fired up in flight, defined in moments of white, that scoop and slide and slip through all levels of being down the river’s potential. That night, through a valley in the tops of the pine trees, they wink past in wrinkles under the waxing eye of the moon. The next day, the air clots with eddying particles rejoicing the return to the river. They pirouette sharper than waves, faster than currents. They are both feather and water until observed. They rise up like a ballerina's circling hands. The Zen of a Garden Sprinkler I saw my doppelganger walking down a flight of steps and suddenly cry out as ten foot high sprinklers blasted the bank, soaking one entire side of his body. In the cold April morning, sun yawning over the Cascades, I expected shouts and curses. instead, he shook his head, laughed, thanked the spray for teaching humility, how to find a rainbow in rain. Published in the spring/summer 2022 edition of The Oregon English Journal. Calculating The Cost
I want to say to the student stressing about the next math test, worrying her score with never reflect her best, the trauma adding up, she fears the rest, that stupid tests are not the real math. It's just the system of keeping account, creating a product that can have skill enough to add up spending amounts. Math is a bee's hexagon honeycomb, the minutes since you last saw your love the distance the sun's hopes to roam, the fractal divisions of the trees above, the sum of all our warming actions, the urgent need of healing subtractions. Cape Lookout We look but don't see any whales. Instead we see the Pacific as an upturned offering bowl from the heavens. Comets current white lines that pass close to the yellow start of infinity. Dark matter pools in random places, the invisible energy of tug and tear. Pelicans shoot through the net of blue, constellations of action and hunger. Islands eject from the coast like still comets, the sandy tail trailing south. Tree sparrows star the cliff top with their pointed wings. We look but don't see any whales. Cheated Outside a Safeway, Starbucks in hand wondering if there exists places devoid of the poetic. Car park tarmac. Gloomy January evening. Almost evidence only there is an irregular puddle of water into which falls tampering rain drops as if it was its own private cloud. Published in June 2022 by Shot Glass Journal A travel tradition:
a haircut to honour the new place. We still talk about how bad the cut was in Reykjavik. Passing through Coos Bay, OR, my hair long and visibly grey, we see ‘Empire Barbers.’ My always-right wife insists. Muffled by mask, my barber is from northern Vietnam. 19 years in the US. Regularly returns home, well, that was pre-COVID. So very hot and humid in the summer. We swap stories about living in south China. Guangzhou - the factory of the world. He knows all about that. People take cheap stuff back to sell in Vietnam. Has a sister in Germany. Our old home, Dresden. Florence of the Elbe. Dresden? Been three times. You lived there? Stops razoring often to guffaw in amazement. He follows Man City football club from Vietnam to Oregon. We briefly watch a World Cup qualifier. England beating San Marina 4-0. I leave with better hair and an improved soul, my wife smiling like a Buddha. Published in #66 of The Journal, May 2022 The Mole Crab
Bandon beach. An elderly woman caged in a pink coat pokes exposed soft shells and mechanical innards. She calls out to ask what it all is. We stand around hypothesizing: prehistoric crab? Armored shrimp? Feathery hems confuses us all. She asks us to find out, tell her. Her husband rolls his eyes. The internet says: mole crab. They live in the frothy surf, flying little filament flags to catch the drifting winds of plankton. We see the woman on the way back. Despite deafness, we inform her. A few waves of gratitude and she wanders off with husband to bury herself back into our unknowing. Route 22 Memorial On Route 22 to Bend we pass Mill City and the blasted heaths of last summer’s fires, so bad they closed Portland, millions muffled. The road passes through blackened brigades of Santiam Forest trees and piles of the fallen, heaped up in snow stained charnel clearances. In vacated lots the rubble of homes linger, indiscriminately chosen by the concentration, a few ironic fireplaces and chimneys still standing. Skeletal cars lay scattered like shells. Trailers have multiplied. Blink and you might think tourists. A few pristine houses escaped the fist of the fire. The burnt skin of the hills with charcoaled trees like my grandfather whose hair fell out during World War Two’s shock and North African heat. The Santiam river slips past guiltily. We climb towards the Willamette National Forest, soothing rain becoming concerning snow. At Detroit Lake, we find a European battlefield, blackened stumps memorialising the mud. The dead cleared to create a buffer zone. On one side of Detroit, a motel sign hangs by the stony scar of itself. On the other side the grocery store is still surviving. More rubble piles, more sudden trailer living and lonely fireplaces. Leaving we smell woodsmoke and see smoldering signals that in the earth not all is forgotten, people trying to live and not worry about next summer. Published in Sparks of Calliope, April 2022. Boy Again
It hangs in the air on a string of suddenness, tiny bat-like wings beating gasps of evolution. This Rufous Hummingbird is beyond any British bird I know. A whipping, yo-yoing puppet, fooling the flower, following invisible air streams owned by dragonflies. Impossible imposter beating butterflies with its fairy act. Its tongue unfurls from blurry imagination, its body becomes a puff of fantasy and thankfulness. I religiously wait hours for the resident miracle to reappear in magical blinks and bolts. This morning a Black-chinned Hummingbird is lighting just beyond arm's length, bobbing into yellow buds then bulleting back to the orange flowers. A few days later and my eye is tuned. I can spot them just from frantic twitters. Every time I see a hummingbird I am drinking nectar, blessed, a little boy again. The Time of Owls For many years of my flighty childhood, Dad’s owls flocked on shelves and bookcases, guarded the back garden, hung on the walls, became the dominant animal in the bungalow. Owls of all sizes, shapes and interpretations from Realistic to the Surreal, Classical to Cubist. Christmas and birthday presents were easy, welcoming new members of the Parliament. Even on our two foreign holidays: bleached white porcelain in Spanish Medieval old towns, and Yugoslav Communist owls on stickers found near dumpsters where homeless families foraged. I fledged the nest and returned to find the forest quieter. Dad had started packing up the owls. When asked why, just a shrug and “downsizing”. Each time I returned, fewer owls winked at me. Only the favoured remained in their roosts, the rest were retired to boxes. Then one day, the trees were empty. Cupboards closed. Extinction. The days of collecting were over. Suggestions for presents, to resurrect the old Naturist, were waved away. No explanation, no shared wisdom, just the watchful silence of owls. Published in Qutub Minar Review, April 2022. Today I want to be like you
wearing the sun on my head and bars of gold in sudden wings. I want to shatter the moment flittering from branch to branch, pausing to become a tiny Buddha before being busy again. Seeing me you curve so sharply away like a meteor avoiding the Earth. You always know what’s best for you. Published in Oddity 23, March 2022. Something was missing from Creation.
Almost all extremes had been explored, but imagination still conjured tricks. So the Creator left a niche for Being to fill, frantically on the edge of starvation, needing to feed every two hours or die, so much sugar to keep impossible wings beating, cells racing on the edge of atomic function. There needed to be just less than enough flowers for desperate tongues to find liquid sun. The Creator added aggression so that not even miracles were spared. For there to be diversity despite the mix of impossible ingredients is the miracle. Published in The Trouvaille Review, March 8th 2022 Midwinter Scenes, Pacific City, OR
My wife runs off down the beach, a declining figure becoming a near future worry. She runs southwards where an arcing white whale marks the Nestucca river fleeing into sea. The waves cry out white manes toppled by the charging of the high tide breaching the lip of the beach. A few seconds of ferocity flattened out into a frothing line in the sand. I stand by a fossilised spine spearing the sand, darkened by a forgotten forest, the storm-stripped trunk too big to roll in the surf like other logs, so lays a slowly rotting memorial. Sanderlings play chase with the surf, stabbing the just-wet sand until new waves flurry them up the beach. They scuttle back through fear, robotic legs blur under white bellies. A tired calligrapher paints drooping lines of geese spelling northward. White commas punctuate the space around Cape Kiwanda’s prehistoric painted cliff. Clouds begin to clear. The sun promises to dismiss cynics. Midwinter exclaims another year. The crescendoing percussion of waves and surf sucking back on the sand. The relief of my wife’s returning line. Let There Be Baked White Bread After three failed attempts with my wife, My father-in-law takes the mantle of teacher. With the patience of a Biblical Father, He teaches me to measure and mix the dough, as precisely as a desperate prayer. The mixture made, we must leave it overnight to be blessed by warmth and the invisible. The next day we inspect my first creation. Bloated with the hot air of virgin hope, we flour our hands and He guides me to roll, prod, fold and form the mound. The veined globe is ready for the fires, so we reverentially prepare the oven and place inside, closing with new psalms. Thirty minutes later, there was light and a lightly browned white bread loaf. A sacrament of salt and olive oil to harden the crust. Ten minutes later, the bread was truly born and I held it aloft in mittens, as proud as any Abraham. Knife in hand, I’m ready to sacrifice all for my people. The Bandon Labyrinth We wander the heavenly golf course following stone stained trails, searching for the famous dunes. Appearing lost, we were granted lifts by golfing gods. A northwestern salamander stutters across a damp woodland trail, a toddling monster dazzled by its lumbering limbs. We lose ourselves in the wood. March beckons with mulch, winking gorse flowers, dripping lichen and snatches of sunlight between moistly rotting trees, collapsing haphazardly on route to becoming soil. We find a labyrinth modeled on Chartres. Follow it around and around - no choices, just patience and arriving at the centre. that’s the meditative point only realised when we leave. Kingfisher Gift Elevated on a trunk of petrified grey wood near the bank of Deschutes river is the belted kingfisher. I watch from behind a pine tree. The wind ruffles its accumulating crest. It looks left and right, scanning the shallow waters for any hint or flick or wink. I felt fortunate for a few minutes of wings and pen, so unfamiliar it felt tropical - an Amazonian moment in Oregon. I shuffled and shot the kingfisher upstream on clangorous wings. I was left bereft, my blank page swirling. Joy in Others I wish I was more like my in-laws. They delight in people’s company. They set aside time like a forgotten currency and spend it listening to old friends, family, newly met people. They listen and engulf the other, applauding stories, rolling laughter, making the other feel like their world. The older they become, the more they do this, the more I wish I could make the other feel that vital, sacred. But then I would have no time to think words to express what is missing, poems to offer in place of apologies. Published in The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, February 2022. A Few Sprinkled Words
'How far is between the stars, how much farther is what’s right here.' Rilke Late August evening, light pollution a pastel scum fronging the pre-Alps around Lugano. I watch stars spell themselves. The Big Dipper points its paw to Polaris. Under Cassiopeia, the tail end of the Perseid meteor show, the dusty trail of the Swift-Tuttle comet on its 34 year love loop of the sun. I see only the last sparks as small as grains of sand, spluttering kisses of the final flares. I’m not putting words in a god’s gaping mouth; no sprung mechanisms in mysterious workings. I only have, as Einstein said, a vague idea about that highest truth, the radiant beauty of the unsearchable and a sudden awareness at how fantastically miniscule my part is. A few sprinkled words. Hurry On Drifting the promenade of Desenzano Del Garda, admiring freshly fallen snow on the mountains that crown the pointed head of the Alpine lake. A building north wind promises in waves. Here is October tightening its chilling dress. We look down at the orange rock under our feet. Spun in the dark matter web of irregular lines a curling ammonite galaxy with ghostly white shell, a reminder of time flattened in plain sight. The shell spins and I hear the clocks ticking trillions of divisions, turning rock into sand, caterpillars into butterflies, the first hydrogen atoms into atomic bombs, my young parents into elderly people remembering their own parents this age, and me a once immortal boy now a middle-aged facsimile, puzzled at how quickly the sand runs. Now back on the promenade, marvelling at the fossil, pointing it out to friends who want to hurry on - aperitivo calling, snow falling, wine to be drunk, the absolute-zero of it all. The Trout I see you sliding over the muddy gold bed of the shallow river as it slips into Lake Lugano. You follow a flittering shoal of hope, gliding the thin layers between the different forms of air. I’m surprised by your size as you snuggle into the sheets of river and light. Lord of the muddier moments, king-sized in a peasant course, you draw me down the line of the green-grey water until merging with the unseen. Published in Borderless Journal, February 2022. |
Poetry Biography:I have had over 70 poems published in the following worldwide magazines and literary journals: A Handful of Stones, Acta Victoriana (Canada), All the Sins (UK), The Amethyst Review (USA), Amsterdam Quarterly (NL) The Blue Nib (Ireland), Bolts of Silk, Borderless Journal, The Brasilia Review (Brazil), Bushfire Literature & Arts Review (US), Cadenza, Cake Magazine, Carillon, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), DASH (USA), Clackamas Literary Review (USA), Cooch Behar Anthology, Dawntreader, Dreamcatcher, The Dillydoun Review, Earth Love, The Ear (US), Eastlit (East Asia), Erbacce, Envoi, Finger Dance Festival, Ginosko, Gloom Cupboard, Hidden Channel, Inlandia Journal, IS&T (Ink, Sweat & Tears), Into the Void (Canada), The Journal, The Lakeview Journal (India), Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Lunch Ticket (USA) The New Writer, One Hand Clapping, Orbis, Oregon English Journal (USA), The Passage Between, Prole, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Sonic Boom (India), Third Wednesday (USA), Of Nepalese Clay (Nepal), New Contrast (South Africa), One Hand Clapping, Opportunity Publishing, The Oregon English Journal (USA) Origami Poems Project (USA), The Paddock Review (USA), Panoplyzine (USA), Paper Swan Press, The Passage Between, The Peacock Journal (USA), Pens on Fire, Poetry Salzburg (Austria), Potomac Review, (USA) Prole, Pulsar Poetry, Rear View Poetry, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Qutub Minar Review (India), Red Ink, Shiela-Na-Gig (USA), South Bank Poetry Magazine, Stand, Waterford Teachers Centre, (Ireland) We Are a Website New Literary Journal (Singapore), Weber - The Contemporary West Review (USA), Windfall (USA), Writing Magazine, Words for the Wild and Verbal Art (India). Archives
March 2024
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