Hello young lovers

"Oh get a room," I think crossly.

Love's Young Dream, hogging the Second Best Table at the coffeehouse -- a cute blond girl with a tousle-haired boy, clad in similar hoodies, huddled together at the same side of the large table, which they're using mainly for elbow-support and little else, as they compare cell-phone screens, leaning into each other and giggling.

"I think they're rather sweet," says The Famous Writer, who frequents the cafe at the same time I do most mornings.

Yeah, they're bloody adorable.  I recognise the hallmarks of a new semester romance.  I suspect they're postsecondary, judging by how late it's getting.  They probably have a 9:30 class.

It's not like I don't remember what it's like:  the losing track of time, the unawareness of other humans in the vicinity.  They could be doing this at a smaller table, preferably outside.
 

TFW knows I prefer the table he has, and graciously notifies me when it is free. I tell him that this table feels like a safe harbour, just like the last months of the year feel like a safe harbour to me.

TFW takes this as a cue to recite: "Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulne--"

"Oh gawd!" I cry.  "My husband intones that at me every damn October!"

TFW retreats smartly.  

"Keats was a genius," I call after him, futilely.

Afterwards, I set out on foot, having just missed the bus, which was, of course, five minutes early, as the returning bus rolls by, being, of course, five minutes late.  It's fine, I have plenty of time, and the morning is cool and pleasant.

The horse chestnut trees that line Cook Street are festooned with light green baubles.  From a distance, you'd think the leaves were sun-dappled, but it's an overcast day.  Close up, the spiky fruit looks mace-like and menacing.  Within a week or two, they will begin to plummet: hard knocks to the head; the glossy brown chestnuts encased within the prickly projectiles will be like marbles underfoot, rolling, slippery..  

Rather like falling in love.

Poetry in animation

About three years ago, our beloved Pic a Flic closed forever, and sold off a lot of its ecletic collection. We were able to secure a number of our favourites, about 30 DVDs. 

Younger daughter got to work in their animation section, and chose, among other things, a couple of National Film Board of Canada collections. I think she finds them soothing, like a cocktail before dinner.

It occurred to me, while she was re-watching them recently, that I pay precious little attention to the soundtrack of animated shorts, the images are too distracting, I guess. 

In the 1993 Academy-Award-winning Bob's Birthday, for example, there are several arresting images. And I should warn you, this cartoon got censored in the United States. (Nothing enough to get it censored in Canada, but you'll see what I mean.) It was only when younger daughter had this on a few weeks ago, that I realised that Bob recites excerpts of two poems.  You hear him murmur "There is a garden in her face" (written by Thomas Campion and published in 1617), as he gazes out at his dental assistant, who is losing the war against aphids. 

At the very end, blissfully unaware of the social havoc he has wrought, he recites the final three lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's sonnet "The Poets", while waiting for his wife in their car.

All of which seems to indicate the importance of revisiting books, movies, poems, and animated shorts, if you want to catch the details you missed.  Or am I just as oblivious as Bob?

Braced

 These Sundays, I'm almost too scared to watch John Oliver...

(Warsan Shire was born in Nairobi in 1988 to Somali parents, grew up in London, and now, I think, lives in Los Angeles, so she must be having quite a nightmarish year.  I believe she wrote the full poem "What They Did Yesterday Afternoon" in 2015.)

Am I a child?

It's a melancholy sort of day. I stepped out into a cold clear morning and noticed the grass, so green from the excess moisture from a run of atmospheric rivers, was now white with frost, crunchy beneath my feet.

A killing frost. 

It put me in mind of ephemeral things. Like the voice of a treble. 

Cai Thomas is, the last I checked, thirteen, and his voice is changing. Luckily, his particularly pure and sweet treble voice has been recorded for posterity, on a recent album entitled Seren, which is a popular wish list of most classical or folk piece you'd like to hear a gifted treble sing.  (His rendition of Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de confessore is stunning.)

The song I keep returning to, however, is a new one to me:   Ēriks Ešenvalds' setting of "Only in Sleep", a 1920 poem by American Sara Teasdale, which puts us in the rather odd position of listening to a pre-adolescent boy sing the words of a thirty-something woman looking back to the playmates of her childhood.  The recording, of course, is better, and if you'd rather listen to the perfection, follow the link.

However, it's rather fun to see Cai Thomas, by this time, shooting up into a gangly and fidgety adolescent, sing, still very beautifully and professionally, captured by an amateur camera, as he sings the fancy fade-out:  "Am I a child?"

Not for long, evidently.

  Only in sleep I see their faces,

Children I played with when I was a child,

Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,

Annie with ringlets warm and wild

Only in sleep Time is forgotten --

What may have come to them, who can know?

Yet we played last night as long ago, 

And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,

I met their eyes and found them mild --

Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,

And for them am I too a child?

- Sara Teasdale (1920). (Sarah Teasdale committed suicide in 1933, at the age of 49.)
 

The hound of heaven

When the late night television talk shows were forced into home studios and zoom calls by the pandemic, it felt a bit forced and weird at first. 

The traditional opening monologues felt bare and raw with no audience laughing, cheering, and clapping. The zoom interviews also felt a bit naked, but they also, over time, seemed more intimate. 

Maybe I shouldn't use "naked" and "intimate" in the same sentence. I mean that the exchanges had the opportunity to feel a bit more genuine: less like an interview, and more like a conversation. 

Or more like an interview, and less like a performance. 

I was talking about Fleabag yesterday, and this morning, I remembered this encounter from over a year ago with Stephen Colbert locked down in his home in South Carolina, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge replying from England, where she was sheltering with her sister. 

At the very end of the relaxed and entertaining session, Colbert ambushed Waller-Bridge with a question about the fox (the animal kind, I should clarify) who seems to stalk the "Hot Priest" in the second season of Fleabag. 

Replying to his own question, Colbert quoted quite hefty bits from a poem by Francis Thompson called "The Hound of Heaven". It's very long, and Colbert didn't quote the whole thing, but watch Phoebe Waller-Bridge's reaction: I think she's reacting in astonishment and wonder. 

Colbert is a practising Catholic, and Waller-Bridge, although not practising, attended an all-girls' Catholic school. And heaven knows, the poem is really Catholic, in its intensity, passion, length... 

And yes, if you watch Fleabag (and you should), it does make a certain degree of sense. It's odd to get this sort of insight from a talk show; I'm not sure it would work with a studio audience.

Watching this clip, and reflecting on the story arcs of both seasons of Fleabag, I remembered the comedian David Steinberg and one of his early routines, when he said, of his interfaith marriage with his Catholic wife: "I teach her all about guilt; she teaches me about shame." 

The chief character of Fleabag (Waller-Bridge), nameless as she is, (as is the Priest), is in a morass of guilt and shame about a tragedy that takes place before the first season and is revealed, shockingly, in the final minutes of the last episode of the first season.  In the final minutes of the second season, she moves beyond the guilt and shame.  I don't think she's being pursued by the hound of heaven; she's remaining an atheist, but I think she has respect for those who are pursued, knowing that the pursuit is a personal one, and does involve a decision.

But you should really watch Fleabag and decide for yourself.

From bag to verse (write of passage number forty-four)

He's all in black, wearing a jacket on a warm day, and seated at the bus stop,loaded down with a suitcase on wheels and a couple of shopping bags. When he asks me for the time, I can't place his accent.

He says he's on his way to the Paint-in at Moss Street and offers to read me a poem.

Oh heck,why not? I think, so he pulls sheaves of vellum from a sort of large wallet, and unfolds a large sheet which, fortunately, bears large handwriting.

Unfortunately, he spends a little too much time on the preamble, and the bus pulls up before he can begin reading.

This never happens in Ottawa.

That deadly piper

When I rose yesterday morning, there was a birthday reminder from one of my online calendars, and my heart lurched. It was the birthday of a recently deceased friend.

Two weeks ago, word came from a mutual friend that the poetry man had died two weeks before that. The length of time between his departure and its announcement in an email from the university department where he'd worked, the lack of an obituary, and the knowledge that the poetry man had battled depression for years all seem to indicate a suicide.

I felt punched, bruised, numbed. The only clues I had to my feelings on the matter were strange, intermittent leakages of tears as I fired off a brief and, I hope, compassionate email to his estranged wife, to let her know that I'd heard. She's someone I've known since adolescence, and it's entirely in her character to keep a discreet silence, shielding their vulnerable children.

Eventually, I moved to the bookshelves in the study, and pulled out a baggie of poems, sent to me, at my request, some time after we left for Ottawa, when I first learned that the poetry man wrote poems. I remember my relief when I first read them and realized that they were good.

The poetry man was a gracious fellow with a gentle, erudite Alabaman accent. Even before I knew he was a poet, I was always struck by his measured and lyrical way of speaking. He introduced me to the novels of William Faulkner, each one a challenge, each one not like any of the others.

While I may not have been quite as enthusiastic about Faulkner as he was, he and I did share an appreciation for the Hooters. I sat up for a while, listening to a couple of my favourites, including this one, which turns out to be about suicide.


Surrender into the night,
Silently take my hand.
Nobody knows what's inside us,
Nobody understands.
They handed us down a dream,
To live in this lonely town.
But nobody hears the music,
Only the echo of a hollow sound.

Where do the children go,
Between the bright night and darkest day?
Where do the children go,
And who's that deadly piper who leads them away?

Together we make our way,
Passengers on a train.
Whisper a secret forever,
Promises in the rain. No, whoa...
We're leaving it all behind,
While castles are falling down.
We're going where no one can find us.
And if there's a heaven,
We'll find it somehow.

(Bazilian/Hyman)

Hasty haiku

A couple of weeks ago, I was leaving the park with the Accent Snob, using the wooded path that leads past someone's fairy-lit backyard. I suddenly saw what seemed to be a tiny invisible blind being drawn to the ground just to the right of where my foot was striking the dirt. It took me a baffled second to realize that two maple seed-pods had helicoptered down at the exact same time, resulting in this unearthly illusion. Impossible to film or photograph of course -- not that easy to describe, either.

So I'm resorting to haiku.

Helicopter blades
Maple tree pair feathers down
Invisible blind

Nope. Still doesn't work.

You're welcome

I feel guilty for not saying anything about St David's Day this year.  (It was March 1st, but you knew that, didn't you?) To make up for it, I'm offering Ioan Gruffudd, who has been on my mind because I was watching Forever this evening. Speaking Welsh. About Taliesin the bard.   I think this may have been filmed in Cardiff in 2000.

Focused and critical

Some years ago, I took a course on documentary film.  I have never forgotten it.  It was taught by a National Film Board of Canada film-maker, and among the many things he pointed out to us was the fact that a documentary film can never ever be totally objective, no matter what you've read about cinéma vérité.  We are looking through the film-maker's eyes; s/he has chosen what to shoot and where to zoom or pan out.  We saw many classics, among them Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman, about the Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts.  I chiefly remember a chilling scene where a prisoner declared insane by the state articulately argues that he is sane, and how the staff, after his departure from the meeting, explain among themselves how everything he has said proves his mental illness.

Today, I remembered that National Gallery, Wiseman's latest film, was showing at the Bytowne Cinema.  There was a huge line-up to see it, but I managed to secure a seat on the far aisle.  The movie begins with galleries filling with art-lovers and their faces which all have similar expressions:  the head pulled back, the eyes focused and critical.  The faces are all male, for some reason.  When the voices begin, they are female - the voices of the docents, addressing crowds of patrons, or lectures for art teachers,  or workshops for blind and nearly blind art-lovers who are feeling specially upraised outlines of paintings while they listen.

Three pieces that figure heavily in my own life are featured, albeit briefly: "Doge Leonardo Loredan" by Bellini; "The Fighting Temeraire" by Turner (both favourites of my mother's), and the Burlington House cartoon which I encountered on my first trip to London. I had never heard of it before and loved it so much that I would hurry back into the National Gallery at every opportunity to drink it in, even if there were only fifteen minutes available.  I got posters and postcards of it, of course, but it didn't match the magic of being able to gaze on the original.

The film takes us into boardrooms where the accents are (mostly) Oxbridge, females address males whose arms are crossed.  We return to more docents where the accents are more varied: Scottish, Australian, and (mostly) Estuary.  The faces of the gallery staff are all white, while the gallery visitors are every colour, and, in the case of school groups, possibly there under duress.  All manner of people bundle up against the weather (I think this was mostly filmed around Christmas of 2012) and wait overnight to secure tickets to a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit. Greenpeace guerrillas post a protest banner across the facade as passersby gape and the police wait to move in.  Paintings being cleaned and restored, and scholars argue for and against such restorations. We see a television arts series being filmed, and press conferences, and opening galas attended by very wealthy people.  We see a life class featuring models with, miracle of miracles, unwaxed pubic hair.  We see piano recitals, ballet, and a poetry reading by Jo Shapcott.
This isn't footage from the documentary, but a film by the National Gallery done about the same time.  Jo Shapcott says roughly the same things in Wiseman's documentary, but ruins it a little by explaining that Callisto was experiencing rape a second time when exposed by Diana, because she had experienced "rape of a sort" by Jupiter.  I have double-checked the versions of the myth.  I think it's pretty safe to say that she was raped by Jupiter, period.

By the third hour, I was fighting to keep myself awake -- not because it was boring, but because the movie is probably about 45 minutes too long.  But I was happy I stayed to the end which features faces from many of the paintings that have been featured.  They stare at us, the eyes focussed and critical.

Bludgeoning myself with poetry

I'm reading one of the earlier books by Sue Miller, and while I like her writing very much, it's not painless.  Every now and then, her characters will make an observation, or have something happen to them that is just a little too close for comfort.

In this book, For Love, the protagonist is waiting for her twenty-something son at the airport and is ruminating over the changes in their relationship now he is grown:  She was, on the whole, glad for this. But she missed the other too.  She missed him, the person he had been and wasn't anymore.  The younger Ryan, the little Ryan -- all the little Ryans -- who might as well have died, really.  Sometimes she dreamed of him as he was at three, or six; and woke with a mixture of gratitude and bottomless sorrow, the same feeling she had when she dreamed of one of the few close friends she'd had who'd died.

Oh ouch. And yet, like a glutton for punishment, I find myself rooting around in my anthology of Phyllis McGinley poems for this one, which has similar (but not quite) sentiments:

Ballade of Lost Objects
Where are the ribbons I tie my hair with?
Where is my lipstick? Where are my hose -
The sheer ones hoarded these weeks to wear with
Frocks the closets do not disclose?
Perfumes, petticoats, sports chapeaus,
The blouse Parisian, the earrings Spanish -
Everything suddenly up and goes.
And where in the world did the children vanish?

This is the house I used to share with
Girls in pinafores, shier than does.
I can recall how they climbed my stairs with
Gales of giggles on their tiptoes.
Last seen wearing both braids and bows
(And looking rather Raggedy-Annish),
When they departed nobody knows -
Where in the world did the children vanish?

Two tall strangers, now I must bear with,
Decked in my personal furbelows,
Raiding the larder, rending the air with
Gossip and terrible radios.
Neither my friends nor quite my foes,
Alien, beautiful, stern and clannish,
Here they dwell, while the wonder grows:
Where in the world did the children vanish?

Prince, I warn you, under the rose,
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
These are my daughters, I suppose.
But where in the world did the children vanish? 

Not that my children borrow my stuff much, since I am, after all, a fashion disaster.  Elder daughter has been known to make off with my pumps from time to time.  But the "neither my friends nor quite my foes", and the "alien, beautiful, stern and clannish" -- yes, I can attest.  And I find myself, from time to time, laid low with a pang of grief, for the little girls who will come no more.

Phyllis McGinley won a Pulitzer Prize for Times Three, the very book of selected verse through which I'm rummaging.  Since she specialized in light and often humourous verse on life in the suburbs, some of her stuff is very dated, and some is timeless.

Here's one she probably thought would not date, but she could not have foreseen the coming of video games and computers.  My childhood just predates the advent of both, so I do remember the wordless change of activities in the school yard.  One week, it would be Chinese jump-rope, only to change, with no one having actually said anything, to marbles.  These are the last two verses of The Tom-Tom:

If you ask them, they are perplext.
The calendar gives no warning.
One does not tell the next,
Yet they wake and know in the morning
(As a swallow knows the time
For quitting a rainy land), 
When the rope should whirl to the skipping-rhyme
Or the baseball thud in the hand,
Or the multitudinous din
Of the roller skates begin.

It is something the tom-toms say.
You cannot explain it away,
Though reason or judgment reels.
For yesterday was a swimming day
And today is the same as yesterday,
Yet now they are all on wheels.

(When exactly did this stop?  Probably about the same time when the kids stopped passing on skipping rhymes.)

On the other hand, this poem, about l'esprit de l'escalier, has always applied to me and always will:

Melancholy Reflections After a Lost Argument
I always pay the verbal score
With wit, concise, selective.
I have an apt and ample store
Of ladylike invective.

My mots, retorts, and quips of speech,
Hilarious or solemn,
Placed end to end, no doubt, would reach
To any gossip column.

But what avails the epigram,
The clever and the clear shot,
Invented chiefly when I am
The only one in earshot?

And where's the good of repartee 
To quell a hostile laughter,
That tardily occurs to me
A half an hour after?

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Who nastily have caught
The art of always striking when
The irony is hot.

So there. But here's the wistful, short, and bittersweet observation she left about the relationship between mother and child (especially mothers and their not-so-supposed daughters).  I have it committed to memory and frequently bludgeon myself with it:

The Adversary
A mother's hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.

Oh, ouch.  The Resident Fan Boy and I had a Susan McGinley poem read at our wedding.  But since it was a June wedding, I'll save it for later in the month.  I may need the post.

Another close call

A friend of mine had a birthday the other day.  Facebook notified me with the tiny little birthday cake icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and since the fellow in question is a talented poet (no, seriously, he's good -- he's been published), I quickly dashed off a post:  "Happy birthday...."  No.  That needs a little something extra. "Happy birthday, Poetry Man!"

Wait a minute.  Isn't there a song called Poetry Man? The internet being what it is, I quickly found the song and a nice accompanying video.  I could just attach that to my message. However, something checked me.

I listened to the song, which I only know vaguely:

Now, after the first few lines, I was thinking:  Well, thank goodness I checked before sending this!
After checking for the lyrics online, I was even more grateful:

You make me laugh
Cause your eyes they light the night
They look right through me
You bashful boy
You're hiding something sweet
Please give it to me yeah, to me
Talk to me some more
You don't have to go
You're the poetry man
You make things all rhyme
You are a genie
All I ask for is your smile
Each time I rub the lamp
When I am with you
I have a giggling teen-age crush
Then I'm a sultry vamp
So once again
It's time to say so long
And so recall the cull of life
You're going home now
Home's that place somewhere you go each day
To see your wife 

Well, yikes.  1) Not really an accurate description of this fella, who is a charming Southern-gentleman type who is not bashful; 2) I've never harboured any feelings beyond friendship for this guy, who would be mystified (and probably horrified) if I sent this rather suggestive tune his way; 3) he separated from his wife over a year ago, who happens to be an old school friend.

The moral of this story:  If you've got the internet at your fingertips, take those few extra seconds to check before you send anything.  I still wished a very happy birthday to the poetry man, but left it at that.  The guy's got enough problems.  Maybe he's getting some poems out of them.

I did spend a few more minutes finding out about Phoebe Snow because all I really remembered about her were her distinctive looks and voice.  I didn't know she had a daughter born with brain damage who died a few years before Snow herself did, and that she largely gave up hopes of advancing her career because she insisted on caring for her child herself.  And I didn't know that "Poetry Man" was her biggest hit.  I actually prefer this wistful number:


I wish I was a willow
And I could sway to the music in the wind
And I wish I was a lover
I wouldn't need my costumes and pretend
I wish I was a mountain
I'd pass boldly through the clouds and never end
I wish I was a soft refrain
When the lights were out I'd play
And be your friend
I strut and fret my hour upon the stage
The hour is up
I have to run and hide my rage
I'm lost again
I think I'm really scared
I won't be back at all this time
And have my deepest secrets shared

I'd like to be a willow
A lover, a mountain or a soft refrain
But I'd hate to be a grown-up
And have to try to bear my life in pain

Personally, I think anyone who made the choices that Phoebe Snow made and who could also reference the Marx Brothers and Shakespeare in the same song is the highest definition of "grown-up" there is.  She looked and sounded like one too.

Billy Collins is not a kind of drink

Through the wonders of live-streaming, I can pop into Sunday services at Demeter's church.  I watch her toddle up after the offering to light a candle, and sometimes I see her bun hovering at the bottom left of the screen. It's oddly reassuring.

One recent Sunday,  I tuned in to discover that the morning service would be a lay-led poetry reading and that my mum was among the readers.  To my delight, my mother's selection was from a poem-a-day anthology I'd sent her a year or so ago.  With a world-weary wryness that matched the tenor of the poem beautifully, she read "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins, and told us afterwards that she was unprepared for the laughter. The lady who had organized the service, a long-time friend of my mother's, made a comment afterwards about Billy Collins being "accessible". I have a nasty feeling that she was not being complimentary (she's a writer and artist herself and can be a wee bit snarky about those kind of things), but hope I'm wrong. Here's the man himself reading "Forgetfulness" and a poem that is particularly pertinent with Mother's Day coming up -- "The Lanyard":
I first became aware of Billy Collins when he was a guest on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, about the same time he became the US Poet Laureate. Almost immediately, I got myself a collection of his poems, accessibility being a plus for me. It must have been about 2002 because elder daughter was turning ten, and I knew this was not the moment to show her this poem:

On Turning Ten 

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in a bad light ---
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
 It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, 
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees.  I bleed.

- from The Art of Drowning (1995)

Another favourite of mine is called "Passengers" and I'm putting a link to it for two reasons:  1) you may like the option of hearing it read as well as reading it; 2) if you're travelling by air any time soon, you may want to skip it.  Trust me.

Counting blessings (write of passage number twenty)

I don't enjoy riding sideways on the bus. Besides, the side seats are usually in the "priority seating" (recently renamed "courtesy seats" in one of those futile re-branding exercises), so I move back if I can.

Last week, we couldn't. It was the morning of younger daughter's speech therapy appointment which means leaving the house at 8:15 rather than 7:20, which means more people. Someone offered me a side-seat, and it seemed churlish to refuse. The Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter took seats further back.

About halfway into town, a very tall beefy young man thunked into the space between the elderly woman sitting behind the driver, and me. He spread his sizable knees and squared his broad shoulders and I found myself pushed to a forty-five degree angle away from him. I had time to catch an amused glance from the Resident Fan Boy before I noticed that Beefy Young Man was talking. The times being what they are, I thought he might have a cell phone which I wouldn't be able to see, given that I was leaning from my waist like a famous Italian tower. Then I noticed how rhythmic his words were:

"...Number two, she is walking toward me. Number three, her love is like...."

Across the aisle, a teenager in a khimār gazed at BYM, her jaw dropping open. Her eyes found mine and she gave me a mischievous eyebrow flash and grin.

"Number five, she looks at me..."

"What was that about?" asked the Resident Fan Boy, waiting to see younger daughter and me off at our transfer.
"Uh....I think he was rapping," I shrugged.
"Rapping or raving?"
"Well, he kept saying words like "love", so I don't think I was in danger."
"Well, no. Not unless he was saying: 'Number six, kill the white lady....Number seven, kill the white lady..."

I rolled my eyes at my snickering husband, handed younger daughter her bus pass, and got on with our day.

A glancing blow

I was writing some Easter letters last week. Yes, I write Easter letters. We do have some friends and family who are quite serious about Easter, so we send them cards and we might as well enclose a letter while we're at it.

In one of my missives, I was describing our February trip to Toronto which included a trip to the Ontario Science Centre. On Family Day. We deserve a medal.

We saw a special exhibit on whales and I sought to illustrate my letter with a picture of the pakicetus, the ancient land-living ancestor of today's whale. Only I couldn't recall the actual word "pakicetus", so typed "Whale Evolution" into Google Images. One of the images that came up was of a round young woman standing on a beach, and the photo was captioned with some adolescent joke about evolving hands out of flippers to hold Twinkies. And I sat there sadly, feeling a little sick, thinking of this girl, posing innocently on the beach for a friend or maybe a family member who presumably posted the photo to something like Flckr or PhotoBucket where some guy (it has to be a guy, right?) thought it would be a hilarious joke to paste this all over the internet.

The next morning, I glanced into one of my Poem of the Day books, and up came this famous triolet:

To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much? - Frances Cornford (1886-1960)

Frances Cornford was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and married to a classical scholar named Francis Cornford. This is supposed to be one of her most famous poems which is a pity, because she actually wrote some lovely stuff. This isn't lovely: it's mean-spirited, pretentious, supercilious, arrogant and inequitable. The sort of thing, in short, that might be written by a very young person, as I suspect that puerile photo-poster with the cruel sense of humour was. Cornford was twenty-nine when she wrote it, so I feel even less inclined to excuse her.

Fortunately, GK Chesterton gave Mrs Cornford a well-deserved literary smack:

Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
Why do you flash through the flowery meads,
Fat-head poet that nobody reads;
And why do you know such a frightful lot
About people in gloves and such?
Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much?
How do you know but what someone who loves
Always to see me in nice white gloves
At the end of the field you are rushing by,
Is waiting for his Old Dutch?

Quite right. You go, Gilbert.

However, it occurred to me that I am guessing so much about both GK Chesterton, whom I really only recognise in passing, and Frances Cornford, about whom I knew nothing until now. So I've got a book about Chesterton out of the library and will now head off in search of more of Cornford poetry, because, as I've said, she did write some lovely stuff. I may even read it on the train. But a bus is more likely.

Missing lives

Younger daughter likes the National War Museum. I'm not sure why, but during school breaks and holidays, it's something else to add to the list of things to get us out of the house. This past March break, I was ready when we approached one of the guides to get our hands stamped for entry:
"I'm here to see the Missing Lives exhibit."
"The what?"
"The Missing Lives exhibit about the Balkans; I saw it on the web site..."
Hurriedly, she checked with someone else, then told us to head straight, then turn left. When I got there, I understood her confusion. It was a small row of photos down a side hall. I suppressed my disappointment, then went to have what I'd thought would be a quick look.

Each photo had names beside it, sometimes just one, sometimes several. The people in the pictures were the relatives of those names, just a few of the thousands who disappeared when Yugoslavia disintegrated into a morass of civil war and mass murder in the 1990s. This exhibit, which is only making one Canadian stop, is based on the work of British photographer Nick Danzinger and Canadian writer Rory MacLean. They published a book last year, but the exhibit I saw concentrated on fifteen families caught in the nightmare of not knowing for years, even decades, what really happened to sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands, mothers....

I do remember when the first stories of what went on in the former Yugoslavia first reached the newspapers. What was hard to grasp was, in so many instances, people were being beaten, raped, and murdered by neighbours after years of living side by side. Of the fifteen stories represented at the War Museum, the one that haunts me is that of a girl who was only a toddler at the time. They tied her father to a chair in his living room and shot him, starting with his legs. Then they turned to his wife, a woman they had known for years and said: "You did not expect us to be the ones to kill you. We are happy to surprise you."

Their one surviving child, spared because her aunt had taken her away before the murders, is now a young woman and was photographed by Danzinger during a recent visit to family home where these horrors took place. The neighbours can be seen peering at her from the house next door.

I mentioned a few months back that I had received a couple of books for Christmas that have poems for each day. The poems often have a spooky resonance with what is actually going in my life. This poem came up the week I went to the museum. It's written by Goran Simic who came to Canada with the help of PEN Canada in 1996, becoming a resident writer-in-exile at Massey College at the University of Toronto:

The Sarajevo wind
leafs through the newspapers
that are glued by blood to the street;
I pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

The river carries the corpse of a woman.
As I run across the bridge
With my canisters of water,
I notice her wristwatch still in place.

Someone lobs a child's shoe
into the furnace. Family photographs spill
from the back of a garbage truck;
They carry inscriptions:
Love from...love from...love

There's no way of describing these things,
not really. Each night I wake
and stand by the window to watch my neighbour
who stands by the window to watch the dark.

(- The Sorrow of Sarajevo, Goran Simic, translated by David Harsent)

You can see some of the photos I saw in this interview with Nick Danzinger. The story to which I referred earlier is about three minutes in:

Of burning babes and gin-haired strangers

Well, here it is, the Second Day of Christmas, otherwise known as Boxing Day, but we eschew that questionable Canadian tradition of braving the box stores for bargains and plan to spend the day treasuring our love offerings.

I could, if I chose, indulge in a David Tennant frenzy. Not only is the Space Channel showing a marathon of Doctor Who specials (which, until this evening's Canadian premiere of Matt Smith's first Christmas special are all "Tennanted"), but I got a Tennantude of wonders: People Like Us, the wincingly funny mockumentary from Chris Langham (before he, rightly or wrongly, became a pariah); A CD of Shakespeare's sonnets (DT being among the readers) and an audiobook version of How to Treat a Dragon's Curse by Cressida Cowell, narrated by you-know-Who.

However I also received not one, but two books with 366 poems each, one for each day of a leap year. Eagerly I opened one to see the poem for December 25.

Yikes:

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow ;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear ;
Who, scorchéd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Alas, quoth he, but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I !
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns ;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiléd souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I calléd unto mind that it was Christmas day.

Evidently a poem for one with Catholic tastes, this one is by Robert Southwell, priest, something like sixth cousin to William Shakespeare. Southwell was eventually imprisoned, subject to a variety of tortures by Richard Topcliffe (sadist, rapist, and Member of Parliament) then, of course, butchered on the gallows in that delightful Elizabethan way. He was canonized in 1970.

A little shaken, I turned to the other anthology, and for Christmas Day, found a poem better suited to December 28, but which also fits in spookily with nativity by Peter Anderson, the play I saw at the National Arts Centre earlier this week:

Who's that knocking on the window,
Who's that standing at the door,
What are all those presents
Lying on the kitchen floor?

Who is the smiling stranger
With hair as white as gin,
What is he doing with the children
And who could have let him in?

Why has he rubies on his fingers,
A cold, cold crown on his head,
Why, when he caws his carol,
Does the salty snow run red?

Why does he ferry my fireside
As a spider on a thread,
His fingers made of fuses
And his tongue of gingerbread?

Why does the world before him
Melt in a million suns,
Why do his yellow, yearning eyes
Burn like saffron buns?

Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:

Herod is his name.

This poem, by Charles Causley, was written during a Cold War Christmas and bears marks of the Flanders and Swan ditty "Twenty Tons of TNT" (even though that may have been written later):

Children have no need of sharing;
At each new nativity
Come the ghostly Magi bearing
Twenty tons of TNT

I discovered that Causley's poem has been put to music by folk-musician A Show of Hands. There's a YouTube video set to this. I'm not a great fan of anime, but it's the clearest recording I could find:



So, as usual, even in the glowing haven of Christmas, the world will keep barging in. Well, never mind, this family is wrapping itself up in the Twelve Days of Christmas. I'm off to ferry the out-of-town presents down to their rightful place under the Christmas tree, where we'll gradually enjoy them until January 5th.

Take that, you gin-haired stranger.