Tag: elements

“Baby Tortoise” – D.H. Lawrence

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

You know what it is to be born alone,
Baby tortoise!

The first day to heave your feet little by little from
the shell,
Not yet awake,
And remain lapsed on earth,
Not quite alive.

A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.

To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would
never open
Like some iron door;
To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base
And reach your skinny neck
And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage,
Alone, small insect,
Tiny bright-eye,
Slow one.

To take your first solitary bite
And move on your slow, solitary hunt.
Your bright, dark little eye,
Your eye of a dark disturbed night,
Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise,
So indomitable.

No one ever heard you complain.

You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little
wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes,
Rowing slowly forward.
Wither away, small bird?
Rather like a baby working its limbs,
Except that you make slow, ageless progress
And a baby makes none.

The touch of sun excites you,
And the long ages, and the lingering chill
Make you pause to yawn,
Opening your impervious mouth,
Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly
gaping pincers;
Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums,
Then close the wedge of your little mountain front,
Your face, baby tortoise.

Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head
in its wimple
And look with laconic, black eyes?
Or is sleep coming over you again,
The non-life?

You are so hard to wake.

Are you able to wonder?
Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the
first life
Looking round
And slowly pitching itself against the inertia
Which had seemed invincible?

The vast inanimate,
And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye,
Challenger.

Nay, tiny shell-bird.
What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row
against,
What an incalculable inertia.

Challenger,
Little Ulysses, fore-runner,
No bigger than my thumb-nail,
Buon viaggio.

All animate creation on your shoulder,
Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.
The ponderous, preponderate,
Inanimate universe;
And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.

How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled
sunshine,
Stoic, Ulyssean atom;
Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.

Voiceless little bird,
Resting your head half out of your wimple
In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.
Alone, with no sense of being alone,
And hence six times more solitary;
Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through
immemorial ages
Your little round house in the midst of chaos.

Over the garden earth,
Small bird,
Over the edge of all things.

Traveller,
With your tail tucked a little on one side
Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.

All life carried on your shoulder,
Invincible fore-runner.

Startled Mirror

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Once I was a child I looked upon the world as an eyeflash of hope – shatters of stars thrown across the night sky, I said to myself that that is where I will be someday.

that is where I’ll be someday

And that I wondered about those stars, and wrote on papers, multiplying my age by tens and wondering where I would be at each point, who would I be? who would I love? who would love me? and I wondered if I would be rich? well-liked? Poor? Scorned?

I had no fears. I loved the world, even when I felt they did not love me back.

But then the first of those decades struck me – a strange ruffling wind tossing me over the sea under a night sky born anew and still there was hope because hope had yet to be born, writhing in its placenta, rueing a fierce-eyed tenacious grip, clinging to a vestige of what I felt to be the right path.

However, that path was but illusion. I walked it fearlessly, regardless of destiny. I had youth on my side, and in youth there are days to burn like tinder, one twig after another until the pile becomes depleted and we scrounge for more to keep the fire burning.

And then the people came, because I had never noticed them before. They had faces that all looked alike, as they do now, not any of significance, but rejoicing in their commonality, the pale fish-eyed thin-lipped galley slaves rowing to the rhythm of commerce, to each wanting the glimmering sheaf of light on the other shore, the other shore not their freedom, or their salvation, but what they can own, what they can have, driving picket fences into the earth to shut others out and bloat flatulently under rich fruit trees regarded itself as a bounty of the earth, and not the property of a tenant. And the ripe fruit drops and decays into the earth.

The dreams of the child become the dashed hope of the ogre-spector of adulthood. Eyes are grim, skin turns to gray, wrinkles crease a riverbed of woes across the astonished face and others, and even others still, use that frightened disbelief as another peg for commerce. Ah! With those fears, like many others, I can capitalize on vanity, insecurity and old age. I eat greed with my lust, eat lust with my greed. On Sundays I pray to be a better person, so that I can step back into the poisoned river and begin my workweek anew.

The child that wondered stands at the precipe of decades later, astonished still at his reflection, that of the startled mirror unmitigating in its refusal to reflect what we want to see. We have allowed ourselves to become slaves to numbers.

Age is our whipping post.

It has become the monster at the end of our youthful dreams. The Hegira from child to adult is but a trail of glass-shattered tears.

He turns. Lights off. Dreams no longer a melodious cargo, but an embargo on our past, taxed and regulated for the blank-face masses. We drag our feet to the grave and stand looking down into an open stinking pit. The moneymakers are waiting to push you in and take more. We have allowed ourselves to be vessels for others to capitalize on, from the individual to that Hydra called government.

Astonished we have no other recourse but to step in.

Let Me Show You …

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Let me show you, she said.

She sat on the bed and opened a shoe box and removed a handful of photographs, dustwiping two and offered them smiling: a little girl on a horse; a woman seafoamed and glittering sprinting in the hot sand. ‘These are me,’ she said in a cloud of yellow morning, breathing in hot rushes an infold of warm colors and darkness and light.

She was so there she was so there … ‘these are me,’ and she knowing already that was once was, now was no more except what was captured photographically, almost a betrayal, to defy the past.

Silhouetted she entered. I smelled her before seeing her felt her before I knew her – perfume hangs the air aura-like.

I entered and saw her before I smelled her and knowing it was her and so I closed the door to her closed the door to her…

Fred accosts me on the street and asks about real estate prospects. I cannot entertain his earthly offers, your head must be in the sun, my friend, and I tell him of her, and that she is not here, she is there, across the way standing at the coastline where the picture was taken, and so I look across to a sea rush roar seducing a chain of broken islands and she is waving in the high dark where the foghorn soaks a somber deathblow bellow….

I wade to follow through a street of strangers, a sea of strangers an irrepressible tide of unkindly strangers amassed in colors and hostile energy, billowing folds of a cloth stirred by wafts of dirty hot air rushing toward me, through me searching through this world.

Is she here?

excerptus

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

the fetus beats eternal; the cage of a restless ova bursts into dimorphism, implanting the seed of all knowledge, truth and desire into the womb to emerge from the navel of the cosmos.

A sun glints grounded beach mica, shining in one step, disappearing at the next, unable to signify itself from a vista of churning sands, broken by the indentations of bare feet, cool and quiet, a restive from a meditation of rolling cold waves, trailing off to where horizon and sea are broken by the long beckoning finger of a getty.

This is twenty-two years ago: a New England town perched at the edge of the continent, where the land itself is a toppling of boulders formed from a long glacial sweep into victorious oblivion. The distant sweeping of a lighthouse beacons over the cold mystery of the shallow seas luring myth and magic, budding romance and allure, a matchmaker of eternity desirous to render memory into oblivion. How many beating hearts sealed their union on such a night, now no longer with us (the dead do not linger), shining, bright, eradicated in a flash, as sudden as a lighthouse beacon.

The rain had already fallen twice the previous night, broken at intervals by a shock of calm. A fleet of clouds had left the land and sailed onward east over the ocean, before a new flotilla arrived from the west soaking the town all over again. Unceasingly the sea sent a charge of waves to soak the shore and aerate the charged humid atmosphere. The stars burned through the clouds, a floral spray of pinpointed tears in the ink-wash of night. Some houses of Boar’s Head stayed dark, its residents having left the shores for the season to settle south in more agreeable climes.