Light, going

or is it

coming

and when it does,

will it

consume

everywhere, books

a friend's little library

in the tiny watercloset in the basement

six shelves in all

plus posters and framed prints,

mini-sculptures ... and masks

and of course,

the toilet and sink,

almost as an

afterthought

It's not that one spends all that much time reading there.  It's that every other possible space in the house is already filled, from floor to ceiling--basement included--with books.  So shelves were added here.  One of my most favorite houses in all the universe, hundreds of miles away, its kitchen high up with the trees, huge windows looking out on squirrels and birds and leafy branches.  The sun squinting through, and the quiet that only such hidden-away cul-de-sacs can provide.  I'm to have breakfast there again in the coming weeks.  Yay!

Apparition

From misty heights, the air gone thin, with
frozen hands
     climb higher still
enveloped in white
fog.

I thought I was alone.

They come from nowhere, pass in silence,
holding hands, then disappear, the only sound
a sweep of wind,
     their footsteps fade
below.

You don't belong here,
better "There" where when
they sing you know the words.
     And yet ...

I can't not go, they beckon, see.
Too long away, they find you, call.
They hold your silence, live inside you
like the snow--as anchors when
the reaching
     reaching,
     reaching causes you to
leave behind the circle known,
to wander in the wonder of
the fog of

else.



________________________
* in the mountains, outside Oslo, another lifetime

And Then There Were Two

Three old men, walking together, hands clasped behind their back, European style. Every evening, during the summer, they'd pass by the house; then, ten minutes later, they'd pass by again, on their way back. As they walked, they'd be conversing, in a language I recognized but did not understand. No one I knew walked in that particular way, holding their hands behind their back. Nor did women, unless it was with your mother or an elderly aunt, walk arm in arm together down a sidewalk--except the Europeans. That may have changed now but it was an anomaly back then in that particular time and place.

Sitting on the front porch steps, ruminating on how people walk. Andor Czompo, a dance instructor, once told us that Hungarians walk differently from everyone else in the world, which he then proceeded to demonstrate. The difference had to do with the position and coordination of the feet and simultaneous swinging of the arms as one strode forward. That little example, one of those peculiar things you hear or see and always remember. Like the elderly Greek gentlemen who passed by on their evening stroll all those years ago when we lived there on Elm Street.

They were always impeccably dressed, as if going to an event. One of them wore a hat. Their talk would be punctuated with lively gestures; one would be speaking and the other two would nod in agreement or interrupt with a counterthought. Sometimes we heard them before they arrived, the sound carrying down to precede them.

They always walked three in a line close beside one another, neither slightly ahead nor behind each other, so that when traffic came towards them on the sidewalk, the little column of three suddenly had to de-link, separate, and move aside to let someone pass.

All four seasons, there they were, walking their walk, like clockwork. In the winter, they'd be dressed in heavy coats, bundled up in scarves, with boots and gloves. When they talked, you could see the frozen air coming out of their mouths as their feet crunched along the snow-packed sidewalk. If one slipped, the other two were there to help him get back up again.

Came Spring one year ... and there were only two. "Look, Mom," my daughter said, looking out the window of our second-floor apartment one evening as they passed, "One of them is missing." Something else was different, too. They weren't talking. The two remaining walkers walked as usual, hands clasped behind the back, but at a slower pace than I'd remembered. Still side by side, the little column, now shortened, continued the evening tradition. They looked straight ahead, or down, and walked in complete silence. It was that thundering silence that told me the third one's absence had taken place fairly recently. I had no idea who they were or what part of the neighborhood they came from, but it was like a large cloud had drifted by and emptied out a deep and sudden sadness.

This was years ago, and the other two have probably, by now, joined their old companion in that realm wherever it is that people go to when they die, but I like to think they live on somehow. They do, at least, in my and my children's memories, those "three old Greek guys" back on Elm Street, whose friendship with one another was as solid as a rock. They didn't just simply walk together. They were, it seemed, glued together, and totally in sync.

Whoever you were, guys, thanks for the memory. It is one I replay often and with pleasure, like a well-loved film, the three of you passing by, season after season, talking and laughing. Sto kalo, gentlemen.

Happy Belated Birthday, Aung San Suu Kyi

In 1990, in Burma (now called Mynmar), Aung San Suu Kyi overwhelmingly won the election to be president. Burma's ruling junta, however, would not allow her to take office. Instead, they imprisoned her. She has been in confinement, mostly under house arrest now, for 14 of the last 20 years, forbidden visitors or contact with anyone outside her living quarters.

A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, she is the world's only peace recipient to be imprisoned. Yesterday, she turned 65.

Suu Kyi, for me, is a giant. Her personal sacrifices, to stand up for what she believes, to fight for the rights of her people, were and are enormous. The cowardly generals of Mynmar are terrified of the influence of this small, thin, soft-spoken woman. They think by locking her up and depriving her of liberty that she will be marginalized, ignored, forgotten.

Think again, generals.

Happy Belated Birthday Daw Suu Kyi!!

We have not forgotten you.


_________________________

*photo from Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's pages.

Kitchen Art Gallery

A few weekends ago we happened to be downtown and stopped by a small Asian grocery shop, looking for gram flour.   This is the special flour, made from a certain kind of chickpeas, that you use to make pakoras. The store did not have any and we ended up having to go all the way down to Montreal to get some--but what a delightful surprise in discovering this marvelous little épicerie.

This is Hermencita, its owner:

She sells jasmin tea in bulk, ghee, garam masala, and any number of other foods and spices difficult to find in general supermarkets or local health food stores.  She also gives cooking classes in the kitchen at the back of the shop. 

She invited us to look--and that's where I discovered these marvelous murals, painted the entire length of the wall opposite the sink and oven.  Her brother, Herman Unso,  painted them a few years ago during a visit from the Phillipines, their native country.

This is Hermencita's grandmother.

 What better scenes for a kitchen mural
than highlighting where the food comes from?  

Carrot, anyone?

 Joy, in the everyday work of life

Riding in the rice fields

What a pleasant surprise that hot, busy afternoon -- to have stumbled onto and been invited into a private, hidden art gallery in someone's downtown kitchen. 

Hermencita has kindly given me permission to show these paintings here on my Jottings blog.  If you are ever in Trois-Rivières, the name of her épicerie d'Asiatique is "Feng Shui".

Pain Basket

pain, in French, means "bread"

My bread basket here is bi-lingual --

the other side says BREAD

So ... this is not a basket to collect your pain

but why not have a basket to collect one's pain?

You empty a bread basket by eating the bread.

Can you be emptied of pain, though

merely by learning how to
swallow it?

Fun with Harmony #1

Thanks to William over at Recently Banned Literature for the reference to this great little drawing program called Harmony. I've been having fun playing around with the various sketch modes.  These are my first attempts at, er, making art.  I didn't pick the subjects; they kind of just ... happened. I start out with one thing in mind but a mistake here, a misplaced line there, and all of a sudden it becomes something entirely else.

The creature at the top, for example. That started out to be a face looking into the distance. Something went screwy when I tried to draw his hair. It became horn-like. As there is no erase mechanism coded into this drawing program, I was forced to leave the "horns".  Then the nose wouldn't cooperate--the one I started to draw decided to switch species, to match the horns. Now it looks more like a deer--kind of. My "Man Looking into the Distance" suddenly became a shy creature unsure yet of its bearings. "Please don't delete me," it pleaded. That it's not identifiable as any known animal doesn't mean it can't be kept. All things are possible in art. At least that is my rationale du jour.

Drawing with a cursor is difficult, especially in the simple sketch mode. The slightest wiggle of the line and your drawing's ruined. You can't go back and correct it. Am still working at getting the hang of it. 

All these faces and the creature seem to have wanted to arrive through the lines and squiggles--so I let them.  I made a weird-shaped nose, for example, in Drawing #3 and the character that was emerging complained: "Where'd you ever learn to draw noses? I hate the hairdo you gave me. At least compensate by making me more elegant elsewise!" (So I added a pipe, ha ha.)

Or, I create a face with no ears [Drawing #5] and when I begin to add them, the face whispers: "Leave it. Ears are not necessary. I can hear without them." And while I'm pondering how that can be, they all now begin bugging me to tell their story.  WHAT story? I ask.  There are FIVE of you!! 

It is so strange, though.  When I look at their faces, stories start coming...

The Place Who We Are

Is home a place?  Places change.  We change.  What is it about particular places, though, that inhabit us (not, as is usually the case, we them)?  Last autumn I revisited a town in which I'd lived for 13 years and barely recognized it.  The memory of it, over the years, was far stronger, and much more real.  I no longer feel "at home" there, though in some sense I never left. 

Ruminating this morning on the idea of satisfaction with the whatness of now, of acceptance, of the embracing of where you are and what your life has become (in light of a friend's complaint that five-plus years and still stuck in the "same 'ol, same 'ol").  And then I came across this little poem:

New day. Same sun.
What you get is

what you've got, and
it is enough.

[Posted three days ago, at 4:37 A.M., by Tom Montag over at The Middlewesterner]

For those readers not familiar with poet Tom Montag, he's from the midwest and a number of years ago he became an intentional vagabond, driving from town to town, trying to grasp what exactly makes people "middle western".  But this poet's attempt to understand "who we are and of what are we made", I think,  transcends geographical boundaries:

~ ~ I saw the shadow of crow fly into me.

~ ~ Why am I so moved by this landscape, these scenes, that old farmhouse with windows boarded up? What previous life did I live that I have this intense connection? All the old cottonwoods talked to me like friends. Was I a cottonwood once?

~ ~ Why have I had to come so far to be home? All day the land spoke to me as I drove, this land of which I'd write. Every grove of trees wanted to whisper its story, every old house invited me inside to meet its ghosts.

~ ~  The symbols of ourselves rise above the line of earth - the windbreak, the water tower, the elevator, the church steeple. We are mere mortals yet we would be little gods of the earth, each with his own habitation, his own local place. We set our markers on the earth as if they would be shrines, places to pray for rain, to give thanks for good harvest. Places of refuge. Markers that say: "Mine." Yet as earth-bound as these symbols are, how they reach for the sky! How they fashion the light that swaddles them.

[From Vagabond in the Middle", #5 and #6]

 Long after the original journey has ended, Tom Montag continues to look, to listen, and to wait with patience, reporting, on his blog, on what he finds as true.

I want to share his poem with my friend:  "New day/same sun"  (in reverse:  same 'ol, same 'ol, but it's a new day!), and "what you get/is what you've got."  It is "enough."

And if it's not--then a different journey must begin.  Within or without, we all arrive there eventually--though, absurdly, may not yet realize we're already there.

Thanks for the insightful little poem, Tom.

______________________
*photo by awyn, "on the road" last weekend.

Little wolf song

Montian Gilruth of FunkyFreddy Republic, performing at the Montreal Musicians Meetup in July, 2009. The name of the song is 'Ti-Loup, by Ian Gray.

There's a place where you can go
and your dreams will live and flow.
In my arms I'll rock you, slow.
Close your eyes, 'ti loup.

'Ti-loup is a common French nickname for Petit Loup (Little Wolf), pronounced "Tee-LOO".

A lullaby to save to sing to little Calix when  he arrives in August.

Used Poems for Sale

__________________________

YARD SALE

USED POEMS

Saturday, June 5, 2010

10 AM to 4 PM

Corner of Lafayette & Grisham

NO EARLY BIRDS!!

___________________________

I had gone out for a newspaper and was driving home when I saw it.  The sign intrigued me.  It didn't say "Used Poetry Books" -- it said "Used Poems."  What's a used poem?  Used how?  Hmmm.  Perhaps it is the seller's own private collection.  He's used up the words and now wants to get rid of them.  There's a poet who lives in my neighborhood?  At any rate, it piqued my curiosity enough to make me veer off and follow the sign pointing the way to Lafayette and Grisham.

A small brown cottage with a mossy green lawn badly in need of a trim.  A row of identical cardboard boxes set up alongside the driveway.  A man in an emerald green shirt rearranging the contents of one of the boxes.  He must be the seller.  I pull to a stop and park in front of the house.  The man in the green shirt frowns and meets my gaze.  "The sign said no early birds," he shouts from the driveway.  I glance at my watch.  It's only twenty minutes past nine.

I was just curious as to your--er--books," I say.  "What kind of poetry ..."  but before I have a chance to finish, he comes over to the car window, puts his hands on the roof, and leans in to address me.  "They're not books," he says.  "They're manuscripts."  And indeed, on closer look, I can see no books in any of the ten or so boxes--only what looks like piles and piles of sheets of paper.

"Whose are they?" I ask.  "Who wrote them?"

"You can't look at them now," Green Shirt replies.  You're too early.  You have to come back at ten, like the sign says."   He turns around and goes back to arranging the boxes.

Not much arouses my curiosity these days.  Truth be told, I've been in a rut, but this man and his boxes of "used poems" got me wondering.  I used to write poetry, way back "when".  Nowadays I barely have time to read the newspaper, and the only writing I do is work-related.  The curse of middle age:  you start reflecting on resuscitating the best part of yourself while observing the rest of you start declining, one year at a time.  For some reason, I'm wanting to read poetry today.  Maybe try writing some again. It was that sign that did it.

And so after lunch I head over again to Lafayette and Grisham to check out this most mysterious yard sale.  A woman with a child in a stroller is bending over examining a manuscript in one of the boxes.  She flips a few pages, laughs, then tosses it back into the box.  "You got any toys for sale?" she asks the man in the green shirt.

"Nope.  Just poems."

The woman shrugs and walks away.  A few cars slow down in front of the house but no one stops.

"Hi again," I say to Green Shirt, as I turn off the ignition and get out of my car.  He's sitting on the porch steps smoking a cigarette.   He stares straight back at me, doesn't respond. 

I stoop to look inside the first box and pick up the manuscript the woman had been thumbing through.  At first glance it appears to be a group of untitled poems having to do with nature.  Strings of words such as "black trees in mist", "shadowy midnight moon" and "undulating waves that grab at hollow shores", etc. sail off the page in neatly typed lines seemingly unconnected to one another.  Although formatted as poems they are not poems at all, just line after line of random phrases, puzzling metaphors and ...  rambling nonsense.  This particular manuscript has 37 pages.

I put it down and pick up the paper directly underneath it.  This one is short--only four pages, neatly stapled in the upper left-hand corner.  As with its predecessor, it is undated, untitled, and the author's name is nowhere to be found.  The first poem begins:

Ephemerality transgressed

each crack in the stark formican table remembered

the distant bloat of wasted tears

cat food, toil paper he at the turn
turn off the light

"Turn off the light?"  I must have raised an eyebrow.  The man in the green shirt is watching me.

"Whose, uh, poems are these?" I ask.   "Did you write them?" 

He makes a grimace, the kind that announces you are sick to your stomach, and turns to look at a passing car.  I take that as a No.

"Let me take a wild guess," I smile.  "You're the former editor of a now defunct literary journal and these are rejected submissions that ..."

Green Shirt abruptly cuts me off.  "Nope."   He strikes me as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly, or pompous pretenders either, and for some reason I'm suddenly embarrassed.  His demeanor quickly changes, as if he can read my thoughts.  "They're actually my brother's stuff," he says, stubbing out his cigarette on the concrete step.  He gets up from the stoop and walks over toward me.

"Your brother's a ... poet?" I ask, not quite daring to ask what has happened to him and why are you selling his papers?

Green Shirt the mind reader slowly explains:  "My brother's ill, you see.  It became necessary to ..."  He does not finish his sentence.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"These are his writings," he explains.  "They're all drafts, works in progress.  He's never finished them.  Just sits in front of his typewriter and whatever comes into his mind, he types it out, puts it in a drawer and never looks at it again.  It just got to be too much, is all."

I nod, as if that makes perfect sense, though it doesn't.  Shouldn't the disposal of one's entire life's work be up to the person who owns it?  Perhaps the brother's too far gone, as they say.  I wonder if he knows—that all his stuff is sitting out here in the driveway, up for sale.

I pick up another manuscript, a hefty tome of over a hundred pages.  Green Shirt recognizes it immediately and says, "That's his poem about the garden."  Poem, singular.  The whole hundred-plus pages are a single poem.  Green Shirt points to a small patch of dessicated flowers in a bed of weeds at a corner of the house, hardly what one would call a "garden"--certainly not enough to warrant writing a hundred-sheet declaration in verse about.  I open the manuscript at a random page:

vestiges of flotsam unrealized

shaded by benign neglect the roses

bloom crowding out the

don't forget to turn off the

light mud-clogged bird rot

everywhere

"Turn off the light" again?  This makes absolutely no sense to me.  I begin to suspect this brother of Green Shirt suffers from some mental disease.  "But why are you selling them?" I ask, thinking if you wanted to get rid of so much paper, why not just drop it in the recycle bin?  I can't imagine voluminous drafts of non-poems from an anonymous writer would generate much interest at a yard sale--in this neighborhood, anyhow--and I say so (more kindly stated and in less detail, of course) to Green Shirt.

"Because I'm tired of keeping them,” he says.  "He keeps writing and writing and writing and there's nowhere to put them anymore.  The basement is full.  The attic is full.  There are boxes and boxes of them in the garage.  He won't let me destroy them."

"Your brother is certainly prolific," I say, envious, trying to remember the last time the poetic muse deigned to visit me.  "Does he know you're, uh, selling them?"

"It was his idea,"says Green Shirt.  "It's the only way he'd let me move them out of the house.  He seems to think no one will realize their true value and at the end of the day they'll remain unsold.  Then he can bring them all back in.  I'm afraid it's starting to look like he's right.  You're the only one to show even the remotest interest."

Green Shirt suddenly blurts out:  "Look, I'll sell the lot of them to you for $15.00."

I am stunned.  What would I possibly do with a dozen boxes of someone's old personal draft manuscripts?

On second thought, there might be interesting material to be found in this collosal collection of poetic gibberish.  I begin recalling my increasing stuckness, hours facing a blank sheet of paper trying to write even the most mundane thing.  I can't even find words for habitual business reports.  And this fellow's brother simply explodes with words.   Where has all my creativity gone?  I stare at the reams of paper overflowing from the boxes.  I'm thinking I might borrow a metaphor here and there, re-use some of the words maybe, to inject into my own now-stalled writing.  But no sooner has the thought arrived than it is summarily dismissed.  What was I thinking?  Have I become so desperate for inspiration as to stoop to using someone else's words?

And yet ...  the prospect of acquiring this avalanche of newfound creativity no longer seems so preposterous.  Not at all.  It's all in how you look at a thing. 

"Okay," I say, surveying the line of boxes again, mentally calculating the space it would require to transport and relocate them.  I wonder what my wife would say.

"There's only one conditon," says Green Shirt.  Oh oh.  Here it comes.  There's always a catch.

"Once these boxes have been removed, I don't ever want to see them again.  Do you understand?" he says.  "Under no circumstances can they be returned here."  Which seems fine with me.  I mean, if this crazy project turns out to be a waste of time, I can just recycle them, right?.   I begin thinking about the process of going through each and every manuscript, one by one by one.  Maybe it's the look on my face that hints to Green Shirt that perhaps I may be reconsidering my impulsive decision because he suddenly becomes more friendly.

"Look. If you agree to take all of them, I won't charge you a dime,"  he says.  "In fact, I'll even PAY you to take them ALL."

"All?" I say, confused.  "You mean ...."

"Yes," he says.  "All.  These twelve, and all the boxes in the attic, in the basement and in the garage.  The complete collection.  I’ll give you $200 to remove them."

Whoa, wait a minute, that's a whole different ballpark, mister.  Not that I can't use a couple hundred bucks.  I'm already spending  the money in my mind. But wait.  "Er ... how many boxes are we talking about here?" I say, reluctantly coming to my senses.  By his count, 12 in the driveway, 17 in the attic, 26 in the basement and 14 in the garage--69 boxes in total.  Think about it.  That's thousands and thousands of pages, billions of words.  My head reels.

Now, there is no way I can bring 69 boxes of anything onto our premises without my wife's knowledge or approval.  Green Shirt stands, his arms folded, an expectant, hopeful look on his face.  I imagine poring over the manuscripts page by page by page, looking for extractable items to fuel my dried up poetic wasteland. Be realistic, I tell myself. You can never hope to read them all. This will clearly take decades.  I would be dead before I got to even the fifth box.  Nevertheless ...

"Agreed," I find myself saying to Green Shirt, somewhat appalled at this newest bout of recklessness on my part.  And yet I haven't stopped myself.   He isn't smiling though.  Maybe he already knows it wouldn't work, that I'll suddenly realize what I'm getting myself into and change my mind, and he'll have to lug all dozen boxes back inside at the end of the afternoon, that the growing mountain of manuscripts will never end. But as it turns out, that doesn’t happen.  I may be compulsive but I've never renegged on a verbal agreement.

The rest of the day is somewhat of a blur.  I ask our next-door neighbor's son Chad to borrow his pick-up truck and help with the loading and unloading of the boxes.  It takes us, in all, three hours.  My wife is furious, isn’t speaking to me.  I don't know why she's so upset, we haven’t brought them here, to the house.  I’ve taken Green Shirt's suggestion and rented a storage bin at the edge of town--a whole large room actually--and put all the boxes there.

Well, as these things go, one does things on a whim and then regrets it.  A month has passed--my God, has it been that long?--and I've only gone through half of one box.  It is taking far longer than I'd anticipated.  There's so much there.   Some manuscripts are more incoherent than others.  Overall, I would say it's doing more harm than good, though, because now everytime I attempt to write anything, only his words come to mind.  Green Shirt's brother's words.   That was the whole point, though, wasn't it?  To find inspiration? But it's backfired, it's like catching a virus, now I can't rid myself of them, they crop up everywhere.

For example, last week at the supermarket when I consulted my grocery list I found some of Green Shirt's brother's words had infiltrated my pencilled notes:  "Bread, milk, bananas, urgency of malfaction, celery, neglect, coffeebeans, incommunicable with respite ...."    My wife has forbidden me to visit the storage bin but the words, alas, have taken root.

Then I'm out mowing the lawn today and all of a sudden who shows up, out of the blue, but Green Shirt.  Except now he has on a beige shirt with a soccer team emblem on the pocket.  He looks tired.  The man must have a difficult time of it, looking after his sick brother and all. I wonder if the brother ever noticed that all his drafted poems went missing and that they now belong to me.  I do not dare to ask.

"Hi Raymond," Beige Shirt says. Wow, he remembered my name.  And where I live. For the life of me I can't remember his name, though.  What's he doing here?

"You broke our agreement," he says.

"What agreement?" I ask, trying to remember what that might be.

"You left a box of manuscripts on the kitchen table yesterday," he says.

But that's impossible.  Why would I have done that?  I don't even go to the storage bin anymore.  Wife's orders.    How would I even have gotten a key to this guy's house?  This doesn't make any sense.  Beige Shirt looks at me, waiting for a reply.

"Perhaps it was my wife," I say, not sure why I've just implicated my wife as breaking into someone's house.

"Your wife is dead, remember?  Come on, we had a DEAL, Raymond."  Beige Shirt sounds miffed.

My wife is dead?!!  What is he talking about? I just talked to her.  And why is he calling me Raymond?  Who's Raymond?  Beige Shirt is clearly delusional.  I start to go inside the house, to get away from this man.  He's beginning to frighten me.  But he follows me!  I try to close the door so he can't get in but he's too quick and strong and pushes right in.  Then he gently closes the door.

"Go back to your room, Raymond," Beige Shirt says, turning and going into the kitchen.  MY kitchen.  The gall of the man, who does he think he is?!  Now he's lifting a cardboard box full of loose papers from the table, places it on the floor near the back door, muttering under his breath.

"Please.  You're not going to throw them OUT!!" I find myself begging.  "They're not ... finished."

A small panic overtakes me as I suddenly remember something.  I race upstairs, two steps at a time, to the attic.  Gone.  They're all gone!  I turn around and run down to the basement, sweating and out of breath.  They're all gone there as well.  "They're not in the garage, either," says Beige Shirt, waiting for me in the kitchen when I return.  "Don't you remember?  We put them all in storage."

"We?!!!??" I stammer, becoming wobbly in the knees.

"You and I, Raymond, don't you remember?  We drove them to the storage together."

"I can't drive!" I shout back, agitated that I remember no such thing.  "You know I can't drive.  And there is no way I would have removed my poems from this house.  No WAY!"  Beige Shirt ignores me.  "Who put you up to this?"  I demand.

I stagger back and lean against the refrigerator, trying to make sense of it all.  A face comes to mind.  It was that guy--the one who claimed he saw a sign for a yard sale and came looking to buy my used poems--he was the one who took them!  There was no yard sale.  Why would I SELL my poems?  We must go and find him. 

Beige Shirt sighs.  He's never understood poetry, he admits it, what people see in it, only that they go on and on about it, like Raymond does.   He's read Raymond's poems and finds them unintelligible, words without meaning.  He's shown Raymond's poems to other poets at the local Arts Center who tell him don't destroy them, you have no right.  But Raymond, he just keeps writing and writing and writing, vomiting words out of his brain into his fingers and tap tap tapping away all hours of the day and night on his keyboard and he never even looks at them again, like once they're out of his head, they're on their own.  Won't let anyone look at them either. He won't even show them to ME.  

I have to warn Raymond that Beige Shirt may not have his best interests at heart.  What kind of a person would sell his own brother's life's work?!!

  ~ ~ ~

It was the space, you see.  Beige Shirt looks out the window at the little non-garden.  It used to be a real garden but that was when he had time for such things.  Caretakers don't get a lot of time to themselves and anyway, Raymond would simply mow right over it, no flower was safe; it is only the imaginary ones, in his manuscripts, that get to live.

One more box, and so it starts again.  But he would deal with it. Hadn't he always?

Beige Shirt makes a mental note to take the box near the door off to the garage in the morning, before Raymond's awake.  

They just take up so much space, he says, to no one in particular.

 
-- Draft of a short story by Annie Wyndham

____________________________________________________

The inspiration for this strange little tale came from the words of a blogger friend, written in an entirely different context, namely:  "The already-used is exemplary” and “Poets take note."   I don't know why but it began writing itself immediately after my seeing those words.  That, and all the vente de garage signs I've been seeing in the neighborhood recently, and a film I watched last week called "Shutter's Island" combined to weave the tale, urging my fingers to Write it down, Hurry up and write it down Write it down Write it down, ha ha. 

And so I did.

No words

Birds, mired in oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island

along the Louisiana coast yesterday, Thursday, June 3, 2010.

AP Photographer Charlie Riedel has filed the above images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana's East Grand Terre Island.  To see all 8 photographs, click here.

Over 1,300 comments follow, expressing shock and sadness and outrage.

I can't find words today.  Only a kind of stunned, and horrifying ... numbness.  From looking at only two photographs.

It's been 46 days ... and the oil's still gushing.

Remembering D.

Then and now. Where'd all his hair go? Is he wearing .... hearing aids?! There's a knowing in his eyes that wasn't there in that first, earlier session all those years ago, where he had his head down, his long hair falling over his youthful face as he sang fire and rain into his guitar. That voice--it hasn't changed.

There was someone I always thought I'd see one day again too--like in the song--but never did.   And everytime I hear this song, I remember ... that some things remain unfinished, like our ongoing conversations with the dead. It's been five years, two months and three weeks already. I always thought I'd see you, somehow, somewhere, someday ... just one more time.

We never did actually get to say it, dancing around the fact in a feeble attempt to stop time.  We talked about other things: a film you had watched, the book you were reading: Brian Moore's A Burnt Out Case.  What kind of book is that to be reading on your deathbed?  We both laughed.  Stage IV got you before you had a chance to call back.

Fire and rain ... and eyes that smile.    You again.  Still  ... there.