Category Archives: Uncategorized

A farewell to a life

In one of the back bedrooms of your emptied house,
you sit for a moment on the stepstool you were using
to dust out the vintage cobwebs.
The others are out by the front porch,
having a celebratory coffee.

The last thing now to do, before the painters and cleaners arrive,
is to take down the faded pictures.
And, one by one, you lay them in bubble wrapped boxes.
Geez, you know, the floors are quite a bit of a different colour
where things used to sit in the years.
Vivid squares and rectangles left by absent pictures.
The bunnies of dust, forgotten gum wrappers from the kids,
lost cat toys. It’s so hard to comprehend them, to look at them,
and you think that they seem to have absorbed all of the living,
all of the emotions, from this life of yours now.

Whoever said a house is not a home surely did not live here.
Sometime, more than once, yes more than once,
the fine bones of your heart were broken,
and then mended at oddly changed angles.
Fit for the flight of a fairy’s fancy? No.
But well enough to see you to this day.
It’s the first time you ever hired a Mover to do the gruntwork.
A realization that you, your friends, and even your “kids”,
are a little unsuited for it now.

In this early summer heat, you look down at spindly arms and legs,
amazed by the smoothness of the hairless skin, by the blue tattoos
that have formed underneath, unerasable.
By the freckled speckles of liver spots,
which you imagine denote the locations of towns and villages
along your rivers of pain.

What now, when I get up from this stool? you think.
Put a damper on the coffee crowd out front?
No.
Pull your hat down a bit, wear something of a smile, grab a coffee.
Jump into the pickup with son and grandson.
Off into the unknown.
May just be….the flight of a fairy’s fancy.

number fifteen

A green caterpillar, stripy, with soft padded sticky feet.
It twirls and caresses the finger, then drops thirty storeys.
A shattered shard of mirror, six inches from point to base.
Tempted am I to challenge its edge.
A fish net, made of basket-woven reeds, with a long greasy handle.
It holds water too long. Stupid. Where is fish?
(a slimy smile, coin-eyed, with tendrils, hovers just below the ripples)
A tiny tiny nematode, directionless, inchworming under my microscoptic eyes.
How many have I, down, down in the warm bottom of the bowel?
Children of the tape worm.

All of these have come to me
in the wild eyed apprehension of semiconscious sleep.
The sweetest of dreams to thee.

 

My precious

This morning, I cried.
Over foggy coffee, fiddling with my phone,
I watched a woman in her hospital bed wake up with new lungs.
How long she bore the breathing mask I do not know.
There were doctors and family gathered ’round.
They took off her mask and said “breathe”.
Her eyes.  Her eyes as she looked from one to another.
She looked as if she would cry from joy.

I cried because she made me realize how precious our time is.
She had surely looked death in the face, and was reborn.

All of my aches, pains, complaints, all of my worldly sins,
I can bear perhaps a little more easily now,
after seeing this angelic scene.

Someone once said Go, and sin no more.
Our lives are worth so much more.

Pierce my heart with cast iron arrows

Fifty years on,
in my sad unpacking,
this time of letting go,
I find,
pressed between panes,
a polaroid.
A face is fuzzily framed
in one angled corner, and
I think it’s you.
A blur of bouncy ponytail,
laughing eyes and bunny teeth.
Looking up,
waving goodbye
to balloons released,
bound for a section of cloud
on some other tangent.
Nothing between but blue.

Was it the day
we went downslope
into the forbidden ravine,
inventing a tent out of bedrolls and branches?
Jelly sandwiches.
Red rolls of caps for fun.
The contraband camera,
the stolen tarot deck and decoder book.

My life.
My love.
There was no other.

How will I find that cloud tangent now?

The picture that bothers me

On my desktop, I’ve been in the habit of saving thousands of pictures from the internet.  I have loaded them into a screensaver so that each one dissolves into the next, after a few seconds.  Most of them have been collected because they elicit some kind of emotional response from the viewer, or at least from me.

They may be beautiful, awe inspiring, humorous, sexy, cute, etc.

One is particularly horrific, but for some reason I saved it, and have left it on there.  Out of the thousands of images in this screensaver, it seems to show up like a bad penny when I have left the computer running for any length of time.

It is apparently from World War Two, and I remember reading some of the background behind it.

Fuzzy, and in black & white, we are shown a large pit piled with dozens of dead bodies.  On the rim of the pit kneels a man in a shabby overcoat, hands tied behind his back.  An SS Officer stands over him and holds a gun to his head.  The most disturbing things for me about this image?  The man’s face at the moment of his death.  You would expect a countenance contorted with fear, but what you see is him looking at the camera with a blank expression, seeming to ask “Why?” Then there is the cold and sneering face of his executioner that reminds us of what we, as a species, are capable of.

Someone had to have taken that picture, and that leads to another disturbing thought.  Why was it taken?  As a trophy?  As a proof of body count?  As a warning?  In those days, there were no cellphones, so it couldn’t have been taken covertly.

Why have I kept it?  If it was through prurience, please forgive me.  But, I do not think so.  I was not searching for something of this nature, and it shocked me on first viewing.  I keep it as a reminder of our baser instincts, and of the need to be personally more kind to those around us.  I have seen a soul about to be lost, and the emptiness within its eyes.

Amanda

We were out celebrating a friend’s birthday at a little tavern in town.  The waitress I had been used to seeing was no longer there, and I asked the owner Chris what had happened.  “Oh well, you know, she just up and left.  Took the kids and went out west.  Family problems.”  And so, we were served by Amanda, an odd sort of girl who apparently was in for just her second night.  I could see Chris watching her closely whenever he had the chance.  She was painfully conscious of it too.  Very thin she was, almost emaciated.  Tattooed here and there, with obvious sores on her arms and face.
In guilty hindsight, my first thought was Chris, why would you hire her?  She’s in pretty rough shape.  I saw that she was desperately trying to keep up on this busy night, and it so happened that one of the other waitresses had called in sick, adding to the confusion.  She came to our table, penciling down the dinner orders from our party, and getting a little flustered by some of the guests who either couldn’t make up their minds or kept changing them.  When she came to my wife and I, I just said “two meat loaf, please, and we’re good for drinks.”  She made brief eye contact with me, and gave the slightest smile.

In a face that was not used to a smile.  I knew her eyes.  She was, or had been, a user.  The furtive glances.  The jerky movements.  Tough as nails underneath. I know this assumes a lot, but, as the evening wore on, she gave me a brief searching look more than once, as if something had passed between us.  I have known two people in my life who went down that frightening rabbit hole of hard drug use.  One is dead, and the other in custody.  It is something that you feel utterly helpless to deal with, no matter your compassion.
As we got ready to take our leave, Chris came to me and asked “What do you think of Amanda?”  She’ll work out, Chris.  Give her a chance, eh?  She’s trying.

Live ones today

I posted an ad on Facebook (what a fool).

I done dood it all wrong, I think……

Ad said “I have 3 old bicycles, free to a good home”

“They have been stored outdoors in a shed, and are a little rusty here and there”

“One has a broken seat.  We no longer need them.  They are adult size.  May need tires,

or maybe just some air.  First pickup at (my address)

***

The following are some of the responses:

Pictures, please!  (NO)

What are their measurements?  (unknown)

Are they functional?  (perhaps)

Will you deliver to Collingwood?  (30 miles away)  (NO)

Can you hold them until Monday, and I will come and get them for sure.  (NO)

I just want one.  Show me a picture of the best one. (NO)

Can you just take the brakes off one of them, and sell them to me?  Mine are broken.  (NO)

Show me some pictures of the rust.  I don’t wanna waste my time.  (excuse me.  you are wasting MY time)

What size are they?  (Please read ad)

I’m coming in half an hour!   (someone else said they were coming in 20 minutes)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CHANGED AD TO READ:  THREE BIKES AT CURB.  PLEASE STEAL.

“It’s just Colin”

We had been looking for a place to rent near town because our landlord gave us notice to vacate.  His kids wanted the house to live in.

We’d never lived in the country before, but were attracted by an ad for a newly renovated farmhouse.  Met with the owner, signed a lease, and moved in.  It was a century old brick home that had been completely redone.  The property was beautiful, and he assured us we would only see him “the odd time” because he had some machinery stored in a barn there.  The main floor of the house was spacious, with a nice kitchen and carpeted living room, and there were two small bedrooms upstairs for my son and daughter, who were in their late teens.

After we had moved in, we heard through the grapevine that two elderly brothers had once owned the house, and they had lived there for most of their lives, never having married.

The story was that they had also adopted a young boy to extend their family, and he would eventually inherit the property.  His name was Colin, and it seems that he was a handsome young lad.  Among his reputed qualities was his penchant for being a snappy dresser.

It developed that his adoptive parents both eventually died within a short time of each other, and he was left with the farm.  There are some differing versions of what happened next, so I must go on hearsay, but the most likely one is that he had never married either and had stayed there until his death at a young age from misadventure.  How the house fell into the hands of our new landlord, I do not know. He was secretive, and not the type of man to suffer too many questions.

We had actually moved in during the spring, and enjoyed a beautiful summer and fall there.  In the middle of a winter’s night, my wife and I awoke to a series of terrifying screams coming from upstairs.  Dazed, confused, and frightened, we rushed up the steps to our daughter’s room.  Simultaneously, we saw headlights coming up the drive.  Our son had returned from a late shift at work, and he could hear the screams from outside.  He bounded up the stairs just behind us.

We switched on the lights, and found our daughter standing on her bed with her back against the wall, crying out “He’s gone!  He’s gone!  I held her closely, sat her down on the bed, trying to calm her, and kissed her on the forehead.  When I asked her what was wrong, she said there was a man in her room, sitting on the floor looking at her.  My instinct told me that she was a very impressionable girl, and had just had a bad nightmare.  She became distraught again, and said he was real, then proceeded to describe him in some detail, saying that he had freshly pressed pants on with cuffs, a crisp white shirt with golden studs, and raven black hair combed in a neat pompadour.  He had sat with his arms folded, and had just gazed at her with a smile.

As the days went forward, she would not go back to that room for some time, sleeping instead on the main floor with us.  Each time this event was mentioned, she became annoyed because we were treating her as a young impressionable child, and were dismissing her terror as a bad dream.

When spring arrived, my wife and I happened to be out shopping in town, when she ran into an acquaintance.  She and this woman got into a conversation about our time in the country, and how it was, etc.  It turned out that the woman knew something about the history of the place.   When the subject of the winter’s night visitation came up, she suddenly showed intense interest, and asked about the appearance of the apparition.

After we had related the story to her, she said, matter-of-factly, “It’s just Colin”.

photo credit….www.youtube.com

 

The Seventh stairway

Furtive and troubling, the rustling of things,
Imagined, perhaps, in the dark.
And close now, the flapping of leathery wings,
And the hounds are beginning to bark.

Some thing keeps them at bay, at least for the while,
As I gather my breath near the top
Of the seventh of stairways, to the narrowest aisle.
I dare not consider to stop.

I know not the agent that’s let me go free
From the poisonous pits down below.
Perhaps entertainment, for somebody’s glee-
Is the hope I’m beginning to know.

There was a faint glow on the steps further up,
But now it is bleeding away.
The guttural growls are without interrupt,
And the bats are denying the day.

How much life I have left in these limbs to go on
Is in doubt, as I climb once again.
To such dizzying heights, trying to make it to dawn,
And the Order of everyday men.

With a desperate run up the last of the stairs,
There’s a light I see glowing once more.
Through a portal there’s flowing the sweetest of airs,
But a Presence is guarding the door.

Its radiant blackness, its absence of eyes,
Its telepathy shrivels the spirit.
Its figure of nearly impossible size
Says that doom is upon those who near it.

“Ah, me!” did I cry, to a nebulous Savior
That I always had held in such doubt.
My faithlessness; all of my wretched behavior,
Had brought this misfortune about.

Wake me up!  Wake me up!  Let me out!

Image credit to:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/arthakker/8720100528