Sublimated

She is as firmly fixed in her physical
routine as her extraordinary size
demands, incapable of venturing any
distance bipedally, a hostage to the
restrictions few could contemplate.
Not even a vestige of the pretty face
that once topped her body as dewlaps
hang monstrously over her once-smooth
flesh, yet she can still muster a wry
smile if occasion demands. With a
body as rotund as the very Earth
itself and seemingly as ponderous
any exertion amplifies her bulk's
inability to venture beyond her porch
as she sits there, immobile, a mound
of super-abundant adipose fat, binoculars
at the ready, and one great fleshy hand
busy with a retractable leash at the
end of which is a tiny kitten, its
substance exquisitely small and fluffy
which she occasionally crushes to her
ample bosom in an excess of affection
careful the while to ensure that its range
is as limited as hers in its freedom to
explore its environment, venturing no
further than the leash will permit.

Looking Out

Stay indoors and fume jeered
the rain flipping and hurling
itself against my windows and
front door. And I did, wistfully
hoping it would desist, but it
chose not to for an entire day
of relentless downpours under a
sky so thick with dark clouds 
daylight hours were twilight-lit.
Come out and play! invited the sun
illuminating all the rooms of my
home, sending its bright fingers
of light everywhere, brightening
my garden glowing luminous
with warmth. And so I did
just that. Out I went with trowel
in hand and indulged in happy
hours of a gardener's conceit
that it is her loving and gentle
touch which motivates plants
to burst into showy flower and
not, after all, spring rain and sun.

The Endless Cycle

The fresh green shield of
newly-leafed trees
speak to spring's timeless
mission entrusted to return
life to a sere landscape
reeling into its awakened
state recovering from
winter's blasts of ice
and wind and relentless
cold. Even as dusk falls
and that rich green glows
like a vast emerald jewel
the pace of reawakening
intensifies with conifers
and deciduous sending
their seeds on the willing
warm wind to scatter on
the forest floor, nestling
deep within the warm moist
humus to germinate, the 
cycle to be repeated endlessly.

 

Lord of the Compost

He is in his element
his movements languid
his attitude self-assured
taking his time ambling
about in the familiarity
of backyards whose
gardeners value the use of
composters for kitchen waste
to be turned into the black
gold that growing things
flourish in. This is his
territory, free and wild
as a creature of nature
not like the hysterical
pampered little dogs
living in those houses
whose frantic barking
when they sight him
almost brings them to
collapse as he ignores
their presumption
that it is they
not he whose business
is conducted in the
richness of the compost
with its freshly-deposited
wealth of edible cast-offs.
The dogs will soon slink
back into the houses
and he will emerge
from under the garden shed
to claim what's his.

The Fabulist

You, mystical fabulist
that you always have been
told endless tales of the
future and I believed them
all, every one. For
you were my knight
and I was your lady
even though we were
only children. And as
children we were
captivated by stories, so
you told them and I
listened, enraptured. And
nor can I nor would I now
claim that none of those
tales transformed
from the hope of belief
to the presence of reality
for each of them was
a pledge, embroidered by
passion and love. And,
my dear, I thank you
for each one you entrusted
to me and I trusted of you
was realized and lived
and has kept us
enmeshed in that
web of fantasy that
managed to become reality.

Garden of Secret Desires

A cared-for garden
is a social community
a gathering of living creation
lovingly designed, carefully crafted
and nurtured year after year after year
to become a garden of secret desires
satisfying the gardener
with the success of an apparition
of Eden. Its cohesion and
tidy obedience to the wishes
of its maker requiring merely
a nip here, a tuck there
with the serious business of
fashioning the garden 
to appear as natural as though
nature herself languidly
ordered her creatures to align
themselves according to her
desires. The garden, a prized
facsimile of an original
poses as an authentic creation in 
deference to the tender conceit
of the gardener who never
ever thinks of the enterprise 
as but a franchise. On loan
till that time when the gardener
no longer exists and it can
wistfully return to its maker.

Dilemma/Prognosis?

She remains yet the impulsive, bubbly
personality she always was, socially
reactive, the ultimate extrovert.
He is now what he always has been,
socially awkward, reclusive, sullen.
This is not a match, intones the wag,
made in heaven. Physically attractive
and a professional with a good solid
standing, she simply panicked when at
age 35 she remained single. Two
offspring later, themselves now adult
she feels locked into a marriage that
she desperately meant to continue
struggling with, taking as little notice
of his hostile attitude to life as she
possibly could, casually attributing
it to a gentle shyness he inherited from
his father whose own wife was a
veritable harridan. Now he's retired
she no longer mows the grass. The
children who when infants he never
failed to remind her needed their
diapers changed no longer live at home. 
Yesterday he deliberately plowed the
electric mower through her bed of
prized lilies. Today, grim-faced, she
drove the van downtown, something
she has been expressly forbidden to do.

Neutralized

He's the fellow from up the street.
Up, up the street. The street on which
live mostly retirees, though they've
known their neighbours for decades
while all were gainfully employed.
Age has mellowed some, emphasized
social awkwardness in others, incited
even others to crankiness. All now
have the leisure time to potter about
with this and that, and some prefer to
remain idle considering that idyllic
after a long working life. That fellow
the one you take care to compliment
on his pitiful little garden that he so
dotes upon imagines himself an arbiter
of good taste, a person whose interest
lingers on self. When he stopped
briefly to appraise the garden you
were working in to comment that if
the Icelandic poppy on the verge of
bloom were in his garden he'd haul it
out only verifies he cannot tell a weed
from a cultivated plant so don't take it
to heart. Only gardeners are aware that
such clueless statements strike the
heart much like a mother reacting 
when someone observes what a pity
it is that her child is cross-eyed.


 

Twilight Ramble

Have you ever responded to nature's
irresistible invitation to venture
out into the woods after one of her
non-stop rainfalls to walk along
the forest trails, foliage sodden
and quietly dripping, the cardinal
singing its last trill of the day and
mist rising before you lending an
air of mystery to the landscape
itself a vibrant melange of early
spring greens, colour fading in and
out with the mist and the incoming
shade of dusk. On the forest floor
parade newly-emerged woodland
wildflowers, shy and lovely in their
pastel hues. An utterly bewitching
arras in miniature echoing the larger
landscape in which all sits; the
forest, its dense canopy, its understory
of dogwood and spirea, the bracken
seated below, inviting a photograph
to capture the vision your memory
will fail to accurately etch, and you
bend your attention to framing the
photo, realizing all too late the
sinister company of tiny winged
bloodsuckers crowding your face.


 

 

Peerless, Formidable

She is, in her sublime glory as much
as in her indifferent moods the
supreme guardian, cavalier as she
seems so often, of our well-being.
When she is moodily glum it is we
who pay the price in misery as she
sloughs off parts of her realm in
volcanic ash, tornadoes, wildfires
and cyclones and downpours scouring
the Earth. When calm overtakes her
we are swift to pay homage to her
sublime being, permitting our very
existence. We, her audience, her
offspring, her faithful, both dread
her terrible servants who do no more
than her bidding as they wreak havoc
in the atmosphere and upon the land
and the seas. Our apprehension of
her wrathful destruction mitigated at
those times when her mood shifts
allowing us to revel in placid and
life-affirming alternatives in time and
place. Temporarily setting aside our fear
we marvel at her utter control of all that
has meaning to existence, and in that
moment bask in complacence, set aside
angst and applaud the mother of existence.

A Man, A Dog

They know one another well as
companions whose mutual regard and
interest links them in a tandem of
dependence and reliability. Each is
concerned with the welfare of the
other. Thoughts transmitted with no
need for verbal or tactile contact as
though the man and the dog share
mind and compulsion. It is not that
touch and the spoken word of their
long vocabulary of intimacy is not
required, just that habit and affection
has fused their sensory attributes with
their need of one another. They are 
each, the man and the dog, visually
extraordinary for each represents a
breed apart, the man's proportions
far in excess of the average and the
dog's presence echoes the man's so
neither fail to stand out in a crowd
yet they are not to be found in a crowd
but rather by preference avoid the
presence of an excess of both dogs
and men. Both were robust specimens
of their type, and each now falters
slightly, as time and age takes the
toll it invariably will, irrespective
of the specimens whose haleness 
is invaded. Now, they lean together.

The Tardy Burn

Didn't see it coming, did you? Of all
people that smug little creep you've
always been considerate of.
But there you go, even a mouse
sometimes roars. People like him
spend their time in the shadows
and when they venture out
and the light of the sun stuns them
they preen, thinking it's the world
shining a spotlight on them so
they react; kind of a Napoleonic
complex. You've just experienced
a drive-by slander. It's what made
you uncharacteristically speechless
until you reverted to type, felt
sorry for the little turd and just
let it pass. Good show that; don't 
take it personally and move on.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Sic Transit Gloria

Yes, of course I know all that. All
that exists has its time and place in
the sun and then expires. Or its molecules
transformed into some other form of
life, for such is the nature of all
existence, a formula that has not yet
expired itself. To all things there is a
season, and all winter long I watched
my garden languish under a thickly
unrelenting comforter of snow and
ice that brought no comfort to me. I
looked upward toward that tree beside
my front door with its naked branches
tipped with buds and thought how
vulnerable, tentative and hopeful we
all are in life; the tree symbolic of
assurance that the time would come
for those buds to swell with warmth
and gentle breezes, spring rain and
the life-enhancing sun returning to its
peak. Spring is here, those buds did
swell and they became beautiful
large flowers, the petals reaching for
the sky as though the tree had in its
grasp innumerable hands begging to
be forever free to ornament that tree.
Yet the breeze became a wind and rain
shredded those petals and they swooned
falling one by one from the tree. That
too-brief presence of a glorious vision
gone, gone, gone. Bitterly, I complain
to my garden muse and she in her
vast wisdom reprimanded me that
this is the way of all living things by
nature's decree: Sic Transit Gloria.

Hurtling Reality

It was all too wonderful, the promise
of the future, the end of plodding along;
a gateway to tomorrow, the ultimate
dependency that would never disappoint;
our legacy to those who follow, the
webbedwideworld of the Internet as we
hastened to computerize our lives
fully reliant on the conviction that nothing
could possibly go awry, we  had acquired
the last word in efficiency. And no one
of course thought to look at the best
before date with the thought that at some
point might come the time to pull that 
electrical cord and begin anew, calling
in the warranty and starting over. How?
well how about back-to-basics, that
tried-and-true method of laborious
scribbling, note-taking, personal hands-on
efforts sometimes disparagingly given the
nomenclature of analogue, hardly the
least bit comparable to the perfection of
digital. Who might have prophesied the
appearance of ambitious entrepreneurs
who viewed that perfection as their
very own fishing grounds collecting
data and threatening security as an
enterprising business of the Internet?
Those among us who grow nostalgic at
the memory of in-the-flesh socialization
and recollections of their physician
gently probing and questioning skilfully
as opposed to rote queries, attention 
fully on a monitor and keyboard may
wish a return to those halcyon days of
human interaction. It's all right, we won't
mind, go ahead, call us Luddites!

 

Gardener's Lament

To each their own and mine is the
warm delight of accomplishment in the
creation of a melange of texture, fragrance
shape and colour with the endless challenge
of mimicking nature's sublime canvas.
Each new season of each new year
brings its own tantalizing opportunities
to apprentice myself to that inimitable
creator's palette and blueprint in a
never-ending effort to persuade her
green creations that I have the privilege
of acting as her protege and as such
there is a protocol that I practise as I
emulate what nature has decreed and
they too must do their part acceding to
the very same guidelines genetically 
infused in their code of existence in a
borrowed allegiance to the arrogant
gardener whose aspirations to define
authentic and stunning new garden 
features and designs only borrow in a
relatively insipid pattern that which nature
has exquisitely perfected. Narcissism
becomes those who imagine themselves
capable of challenging perfection. We
humbly request permission of our auteur
muse to direct our efforts to success. 

Self-Portrait

Whether it is that of a Patriarchal
god who thunders in jealous
disposition over the querulous
insubordination of the creatures he
has made in his own image, or the
indifferent fate awaiting mortals
having displeased the Matriarchal
supreme creatrix, we are all born
of the blueprint of survival fashioned
by an omnipresence wishing to
perpetuate its persona and passion
timelessly and forever after as
the creator pays homage to itself
instilling in its countless human 
replications the pride of self and
the propensity to teeter from good
will to ill temper, the verisimilitude
dependent on infinite variables none
predictable as the human race 
forges its way into the future
in a timeless, endless cycle of
repetition, producing countless
self-images, programmed by the
ultimate arbiter of existence.

Spring Rain

Mist rises like a tender silver
blush from the forest stream tucked
into the valley below as an aura of
mystery pervades the atmosphere
everything viewed through the 
silver sheen as it rises fading the
brightness of the evergreens and
the sweet pale green of new foliage
stippling maples, oaks and beech
camouflaged as the mist merges
with the gently descending showers
varnishing the forest with a gleam
of light that owes no gratitude to the
sun, banished for days on end from
its high chariot, screened from the
landscape below by a marching
bruised succession of rain-laden
clouds dispatched to wash away
all remnants of winter before spring
in her hauteur will deign to finally
commence her seasonal reign.

He Loves Me

We hear our old favourites 
streaming out of the past into
our home and because it is
Saturday night, we are dancing.
He holds me tight and firmly
and I feel his body hard
against mine. We are young
not again, but forever young
for he has loved me for a
lifetime creating the exquisite
beauty for me of being cherished
as I do him. Any other lifetime
would have been inconceivable
for the one we have lived has
always been what we planned
and we bow to Dame Fortune
for acquiescing to our need.
We are forever young, the music
of the '50s reminding us that
this is so as we hear plaints of
disbelief that young love could
last, and invitations to indulge
in a never-ending love that
mattered, in the voices long
gone yet so familiar to us
from the past, and so we did.

The Thespian

Shock and awe is her aim
and she excels at the game for
clearly she is gripped with some
deep-seated need to be noticed.
Truth told, it is beyond difficult
not to notice this woman whose
provocative poses draw the eye
however reluctantly to her
constant archly suggestive bits
of theatre, skilled in the art of
body language with a fairly
clear message of availability.
From her mouth issues an
unending stream of messages
meant for the gullible and naive
whose instinct is to trust what
they are exposed to as her
descriptions of dreadful events
have their desired effect in the
shock they convey and the trust
in human nature she so deftly
and capably loves to betray.

Hello

The warmth of a kindness
from one person
to another
whether by an intimate
or a stranger
has the candle-power
of illuminating the soul
grateful to be noticed
eager to respond
in an exchange
of humanity's most
needed emotion realized
in a declaration that we are
as one with far more in
common than the
idiosyncrasies and
experiences that set us
apart, when the need to
view one another
unconstrained by
suspicion sets us free
to recognize ourselves
in that other.

 

Piscine Survival

This is not their natural habitat though
they are to be found everywhere in the
world as aquarium pets in any child's
bedroom. From the East, they have found
diverse homes in the West, common and
popular, beautiful little creatures which
in Japan adorn every Temple pond, swim
in priceless porcelain koi bowls, their
presence treasured and admired, sleekly
full bodies glistening gold and silver as
they splurge in the clean, clear ponds
even inhabiting creeks and natural ponds
in rural villages, their very presence a
muscular ornament of aquatic life. It
seems that someone decided to vacate the
goldfish inventory of a pet store into a
local woodland creek, allowing these tiny
creatures the luxury of freedom simply
by ridding the shop of their unsaleable
presence. Perhaps with the knowledge that
over-wintering in a Northern climate would
be the end of them. Two winters later there
they are, robust now, growing larger with
each month, adapting, evading threats
foraging for zooplankton, bug larvae, and
managing determinedly their survival.

The Misunderstanding

We discern the character of those we
meet through social interface, like the
neighbour so often seen with whom brief
pleasantries are exchanged, a man who
walks a large shambolic dog and who
cannot resist the occasional quip and if
you stop long enough waxes philosophical
on any given topic. How can a man so
devoted to a dog, pleasant to come across
willing to be neighbourly be anything but
proverbially 'nice', so you take the measure
of the man in that category. Years of this
exposure may seem tedious when you've
been trapped by social convention to
stand there and listen to his compassionate
views on the conflicts tearing the world
apart, even if you share those convictions
that it is a travesty and a tragedy that
humankind is so blighted. A little closer
to home as it were, prodigious spring rain
events have brought catastrophic flooding
to the region, leaving communities under
flood conditions, people forced to vacate
their homes when sandbagging fails. A 
new topic of conversation in passing, for
those whom fortune has blessed not to be
living in flood-prone areas. Your pleasant
neighbour now rails against the stupidity
of those who fail to heed where they build
so why should tax money support them in
their hour of need? Perhaps forgetting that
no one builds without a permit and since his
tax-funded municipal offices issued those
permits, his taxes involved the current peril.

In Abeyance

My garden muse has scheduled a
meeting with me. I have a fairly good
idea what it is she wishes to discuss. We
both heard a rumour that spring has arrived
yet neither she nor I are convinced based
on all signs pointing otherwise; at the very
least that spring has spurned us this year.
Cold, ferocious winds, never-ending
rain events are bedevilling the garden
most unreasonably for a season expected
to herald in new life. Tentative shoots of
early risers out of the newly ice-bound
soil are confused to be confronted with
definite signals of winter conditions. And
nor is there much relief in sight, with
snow flurries circulating in the atmosphere
and spring continuing to hesitate on the
sidelines without the merest hint of any
contrition. She and I, me and the garden
muse will ruminate and console one
another on this predicament we now face
debating whether it is spring's decision to
cancel her appearance this year altogether
despite that all seats to her grand entrance
have been sold out. How do we break this
news to the breathlessly expectant garden?

Spring Analysis

Spring, it seems clear, is much, much
too hesitant, circumspect, deferential
obviously reluctant to assert its time
and space, vastly preferring to bide its
patience and in so doing, ours as well
though we have no influence in this
matter. We were witness to cranky
March leaving as it entered, like the
proverbial ill-tempered lion it prefers
to emulate. And April, despite its dainty
name and the expectations that evolve
around its entry, catered to the raw
elements of wind, cold and rain. It even
on occasion invited snow to revisit the
landscape alongside fog and freezing
rain. Ah, but then entered May, and we
are all familiar with that trite promise of
April rain bringing May flowers. So we
bade April adieu and embraced the month
that introduces warmth and breezes and
showers alternating with sun, teasing the
gardens to showcase their earliest flowers.
How were we to know that this version
of May is allergic to sun, warmth, wafting
breezes and the life-giving kiss of showers?
Without the sun and in the presence of
cold and unremitting rain turning once
again to snow, flowers will not be enticed
to return and we are left forsaken, adrift.
Hope springs eternal, we know, but the
hope we held in this spring has fled.

 

The Endless Rain

Didn't everyone, as a child, chant
convincingly to the rain that it had an
obligation to children to just go away
so they could do as children do, and play?
Rain, rain, go away, I urge, looking out
my front door at the unceasing downpour
from morning to night, and even as dusk
descends it continues to drench my spring
garden, the entire atmosphere, so that
the neighbourhood is warned of floods
and peoples' basements are afloat with
possessions, and a morose sense of dire
foreboding overtakes those whose
homes are located where premonition
and caution failed them. The sometimes
berserk nature of nature has declared a
time of concern for us, no longer children
no longer able to exert the magic of an
imploring, demanding, entitled child
threatening a tantrum should the rain not
deign to stop. As adults we know that
there is no hope to be had in persuading
that overpowering force to reconsider, that
we have no wish to be drowned in her
excess of elements storming our lives.