Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs > Recent Status Updates

CHEMIN DE FER
Alone on the railroad track
I walked with pounding heart.
The ties were too close together
or maybe too far apart.

The scenery was impoverished:
scrub-pine and oak; beyond
its mingled gray-green foliage
I saw the little pond

where the dirty hermit lives,
lie like an old tear
holding on to its injuries
lucidly year after year.

... how sternly Siddhartha’s mother
Peered into her toddler’s mouth.... and saw
The whole universe spinning within the dark interior of his throat.

From the depths of that luminous dark, he spoke.
YOU MUST FIND YOUR WAY. LOOK WITHIN.
It is that intimate. More birds fly through.
The branch blossoms. It is that close to you. That close.

Then one morning (my father) remarked, ‘I think I saw Chaim the locksmith. He was shining like the sun.’
‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘He told me where he lives in the Garden of Eden....’
Father whispered the secret into Mother’s ear. Mother turned white. It was hard to believe that Chaim the locksmith could achieve such heights.

Of the sole other sound that of cries enlivener of his solitude he sat at his table head in hands the same was true. Of their whenceabouts that is of clock and cries the same was true that is no more to be determined now as was only natural then.
- A final, masterful wincing ‘short’, so compassionately balancing journalistic sang froid with inexpressible agony.

- Love these Norton editions! I have a new one on Jonathan Swift that I’m dying to crack open...
Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to love and beauty!

- Kick-back-and-relax memories of HOW IT ALL BEGAN for a Great Poet:
The thing was that the whole sense of having to find my own feet (at Harvard) and the whole sense of what language can do and the whole sense of what complexes and feeling and emotion it can register began to really get to me....

BUTTERCUPS
When we were children our papas were stout
And colourless as seaweed or the floats
At anchor off New Bedford. We were shut
In gardens where our brassy sailor coats
Made us look like Black-eyed Susans bending out
Into the ocean.

They became close friends. She soon realized that he was a high school outcast because he actually had intelligent, thoughtful and kind things to say. He was the complete opposite of every cool kid who spewed sarcasm, ignorance, and obscenity as a tactic to survive the kill-or-be-killed high school food chain.

AWARE
When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers....
I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.

This perpetual fan fave is on sale today on Amazon in its Kindle version!
27 Jan 2019

A bit farther away sat the locksmith, his face shining with an otherworldly joy. His bronzed face seemed to melt with pleasure, and the eyes beneath his bushy brows were filled with light. Perhaps such was the happiness... at Mount Sinai when God revealed Himself amid fire.

SHEEP
The sheep has stopped crying.
All morning in her wire-mesh compound
On the lawn, she has been crying
For her vanished lamb. Yesterday they came....
He did not survive a warm summer night.
Now his mother has started crying again.
The wind is oceanic in the elms
And the blossom is all set.

WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING
- (a tongue-in-cheek look back at Canada’s longest serving, fair-to-middlin’ Prime Minister!)
William Lyon Mackenzie King
Sat in the middle & played with string
And he loved his mother like ANYthing...
William Lyon Mackenzie King.

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds -
since their movements
are towards new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned).

I return to reading this, with a vast sense of its jarring, multilayered and omniverous Solidity, a solidity that, so seemingly ill advisedly, aspires to swallow up an entire life spent in a thankless town in its vivid maw. There is no escape from brute reality here - as opposed to the more casual montage of lightweight snapshots that make up Williams’ shorter poetry!

THIS IS PIONEER WEATHER
Me, go to Florida!
Ha ha!
At Northfield when
we were girls
we used to take
the trays
we
had in the kitchen
and sit on them
Wow!
what a thrill!
in the field
back of the
school!
down hill screaming
our heads off!

God is in heaven, and men below:
Be short our tunes; our words be few:
A solemn reverence checks our songs,
And praise sits silent on our tongues.

Isaac Watts
1674-1748

The gathering of white birds grew: gulls
dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships
but stained by vapours from forbidden shores.
Alarm! Alarm! Around refuse from a cargo boat...
And gulls careered across watery wastes
With blue acres gliding in the foam.

- You know, back in the 1800’s you couldn’t be a great composer without possessing a great, and rather enervating sensitivity! Times have really changed... An interesting, though rather prosaic, account of a great living composer’s life & influences.

I sometimes wanted to shout at them, ‘Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you think I know how I look? Or how bad I smell? Do you think that I like walking down these streets, instead of sitting in a nice heated car like you, sipping coffee and eating a doughnut?’ But thankfully, so far I’ve always managed to avoid the temptation.

Sink deep, sink subtly
into God’s great love;
then you will be easy,
gentle, still and serene.
Our Lord’s Cross is such a soft pillow -
do not miss it for velvet
and silk.

PASTORAL
When I was younger
It was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor..
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

MERCIFULLY,
What an elate tongue is music...
Celestial refrain. My mind
hears it again. Without music
life is flat - bare existence.
Dirgelike David and Absalom. That.
Let it be that.

If however, we live in a new ‘open’ and fluid global village, one with ‘no boundaries,’ how is the Other actually held at a safe distance? There is a chilling poignancy (in the words of a)
French economist who in the early 1990’s predicted: ‘By 2050... millions will attempt to (escape their misery, but rich countries) will close their borders to immigrants.’