Verse and Prose Poem

Dark Times and Enigmas

I have been here since before the beginning of time, and will

Be here after you and your world have disappeared:

My stories live in the wild rivers of the north,

At the bottom of the secret oceans where legends spill

Below the seething fires. You see my beard

And hear my voice, but nothing now goes forth

That ever was unspoken or been perceived:

Like clouds that circle in the heavens into darkness,

Like heavy mountains of dust we are not deceived

And watch you dance away your powers, confess

In gestures what you cannot speak in words or signs.

I will not give you understanding: what you received

At the opening of knowledge is all you get. Your spines

Are nothing in the emptiness of space.

When you are gone, I will laugh: no other trace

Of your existence but my enigmatic face.

Ten Creatures I Might Have Killed

(1)   Coming out of the shower, I saw a large black roach. I grabbed a plunger and gave it a mighty thwack. It split in two. Later, when I looked, the two parts crept together, like infant lovers. For more than a day, the legs waved, then went dead. Aristophanes who tells the myth in Plato’s Symposium was right.

(2)   On a leafy suburban street many years, where long lawns reached down to the road, as I walked I saw a squirrel. It looked at me. A car came along and swept the creature into its wheels.  Round and out, it lay there quivering. For many years, in my dreams, I wondered if I should have walked back to give it comfort.

(3)   Sparrows play in the street. They peck at scraps of food. One day, as I drove along, a pair of birds fluttered and danced the dance of love. I thought they would fly away, as they always do. They were crushed in their ecstasy. But when I slowed down and looked back, they were nowhere to be seen.

(4)   It was a summer five years after the War, early my tenth birthday, the Fourth of July. I took a small string of little fire crackers, placed them one by one in the entrance to the ants nest under the garden in our backyard. I set them off, piff piff piff more stink than noise. Then I their bodies. The pain swept through me, and the guilt, so I spent the next few days digging with a spoon elaborate roads and buildings, with small platforms filled with sugar. An act of penitence or madness?

(5)   A grey and frail hedgehog lay in the middle of our lawn. I gave it a shove but it barely shivered. It couldn’t be left there to rot, so I took a shovel, scooped it up, placed it in the far corner of our yard where the fence meets a neighbour’s. I dug a shallow grave, pushed it in, and covered it over rotting leaves. It may or may not have been dead.

(6)   “Do you want to see how to kill a chicken?” asked my Grandma Molly, when she took me to the Thirteenth Avenue market: it must have been sometime in 1946 because she was dead before the end of 1947. You could feel the feathers on the ground and smell the smell of fresh-killed fowls all around. I nodded yes, and thus came to be complicit in what followed. She pointed to a rooster in a cage. The man who ran the stall took it out, grabbed it firmly in his fist, and spun it around a few times; then he took out a knife and chopped off its head. The headless chicken ran around in a crazy dance for a few minutes. Everybody laughed. “You want this chicken flicked?” asked the man. Grandma said, “Naturally.”

(7)   Out in the woods, into the mountains, on a hike through the Catskills, we were eight boy scouts of the Pine Tree Patrol. The year was 1953. We came upon a little pond and saw a snake.  It was long and fat. It was lying very still. Someone said it was sleeping. Someone said it was dead. Someone said it was pregnant. Someone said let’s kill it and look at its babies. We picked up sticks and smashed it until it burst open. A dozen little worm-like creatures wriggled out and into the water. Such is the mystery of life.

(8)   On a holiday near Lake Hematoa with some dear old friends, we walked across a small isthmus between two lakes. There was a narrow path up the hillside where a herd of cows were climbing. Suddenly one slipped and fell down. My friend and I went up the path looking for the farmer. It was a steep climb for two old codgers. When we found him, we said one of his cows had fallen down the steep cliff. Not a word, but he walked back to his farmhouse, got out his tractor with a lift, and went down the path.  He picked up the cow and went back up the hill.  Was it alive or dead? Should we have first tried to resuscitate the creature? Are there protocols on this?

(9)   Like everyone else, in my house we vacuum away the cobwebs, spray away the ants, and lay traps for mice. We also try to lift very gently the praying mantis and put him outside when we can. But there once was a rat, big and grey shadow, who came in with the onset of the rains. For several days it was only a dark flash racing from under the fridge to the dark places elsewhere. Finally we bought three large traps, the old-fashioned mechanism, and baited each with cheddar cheese and peanut butter. Placing them strategically around the kitchen, we went away to wait for the hoped-for slam of the spring unleashed. An hour later, going for a drink of water, there it was: the metal wire had snapped down silently, the creature was laid out, its head half off. I picked it up in a shovel and threw it out trap and all into the furthest reaches of the back garden. The other two traps were un-baited and disarmed, then put away for another hunting season. But the victory parade seemed peculiarly unsatisfying and disgusting.

(10)  A black bird flew into the kitchen, caught itself in a corner above the sink, and flapped desperately for close to an hour, not understanding the concept of windows. After many tries, I managed to coax it into a plastic box and carry it outside. Who knows what stories it told when it got back to its nest: rescue or entrapment?