Just Like "Peer Gynt"

i

ii

iii

iv

The Linnet's Wings

v

Published by The Linnet´s Wings 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, mail the publisher at thelinnetswings@gmail.com Ordering Information: Single Copies available from our website: www.thelinnetswings.org Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, mail the publisher at the address above.

ISBN-13: 978-1532854323 ISBN-10: 1532854323 Summer 2016 First Edition

vi

Other Publications by The Linnet´s Wings Classic: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ISBN 13: 978-1480176423 Classic: Randolph Caldecott, The House that Jack Built ISBN-13: 978-1483977669 One Day Tells Its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine ISBN-13: 978-1480186354 About the Weather--Spring Trending by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN-13: 978-0993049330 This Crazy Urge to Live by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN-13: 978-0993049-0-9 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN-13:978-1522869504

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue: For Maggie if ever I may find her by Carla Martin­Wood xiv Editor´s Note x Epigraph: Bushes by Marie Lightman xvii Epilogue: Arthur Rackham 130 SHORT STORIES The Books by RK Biswas 3 Cherry-RIPE by Dan McIsaac 87 Grandma's Story by Bill Frank Robinson 114 CREATIVE NON FICTION No Share in the Common Treasury by James Graham 11 CLASSIC Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen 17 MICRO FICTION Do Elephants by G David Schwartz 1 From Summer Porch Stories by Akeith Walters 8 Capsize by Joseph West 25 Your Honor by Marian Brooks 63 FLASH FICTION The Party by Adam Kluger 36 Love and the Reefer by Mir Yashar Seyedbagheri 26 LIMERICKS There once was a man who was nameless by John Bellinger 22 There was once a hamster called ron by Jon Harrington 22 POETRY Anent the Scots Leid an its Makars On the Scots Language and its Poets by James Graham 74 (Previously published in 'Bewildering Stories') December Dusk by Anne Britting Oleson 3 A Recall for Seamus Heaney by Tom Sheehan 19 Trout Fishing with Rommell's Last Known Foe by Tom Sheehan 20 Galileo by Beate Sigriddaughter 65 Lock of Hair by Barry Charman 86 The Gun by Emily Bilman 87 viii

The Slow Walk At The End Of The Day by Akeith Walters 89 A Father by Pippa Little (from The National Trust Housekeeping Manual) 91 Armoury by Pippa Little 93 Another Country by Tina Cole 95 The Last Chime by Mr. Harry Lane 96 Rough Surfing by Jim Hatfield 98 How Winter Reduces Me by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson 100 I Do Not Sing Of Soldiers by Des Dillon 103 Rivers and Roads by David R. Cravens 105 To An Old Lover Or Two, Maybe Three, I Forget How Many by Akeith Walters 107 All That ’s Left is the Night After Mark Strand by Ronald E. Shields 108 Sanctuary Wood, Jim Hatfield 111 Immortality by RK Biswas 112 SPANISH NEW WORLD POETRY Rubén Darío, Stephen Zelnick 40 PHOTOGRAPHY C. Mannheim (IbidemImages@yahoo.com) The Hunt 65 ix

CLASSIC ART

Children's Heads by Pierre Augusta Renoir xi Magic Flute Scene by Max Slevogt 8 Paa Rangel by Theodor Severin Kittelsen 24 Woman In Blue (Frau Barth) by Edvard Munch 30 Romantic landscape by Konstantin Bogaevsky 62 Ishikawa Goemon pulling a painting of himself out of a lidded jar Utagawa Toyokuni 84 The Scapegoat by William Holden Hunt 86 The Vagabonds by Jan Toorop 88 Red Riding Hood Meets Old Father Wolf by Gustav Dore 90 Madame Zborowska with clasped hands (1917), Amedeo Modigliani 92 Landscape with Couple Walking and Crescent Moon Vincent Van Gogh 94 Child with Red Hat by Mary Cassatt 99 The Bulb Fields by Vincent Van Gogh 101 Breakfast under the big birchby Carl Larsson 104 The Painter and the Art Lover by Pieter Bruegel the Elder 106 Sunrise with Monsters by J. M. W. Turner 104 Woods near Oele by Piet Mondrian 110 Immortals Celebrating a Birthday (Detail) BY Chen Hongshou 113 Men must Work and Women must Weep by James Webb 115 For years he'd been quietly filling his stocking, Arthur Rackham 120

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS Sergio Michilini

Retrate de Ruben Dario 2013 40

Adam Kluger Friendly Doorman 37 Art Student 38

PHOTOSHOP

Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Askeladdens adventure by Theodor Severin Kittelsen 1 Reading Girls by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky 6 Collage From Egon Sheil's and Piet Mondrian's, Woman Walking and Still Life with Gingerpot 2, 5 The Tresaury and the Academy Gray Weather by Camille Pissarr 10 Farmers at work by Umberto Boccioni 12 Trout Stream in the Tyrol by John Singer Sargent 20 Mother with baby at her breast, and child in landscapel by Paula Modersohn-Becker 26 x

Schoolroom 28 A Young Beauty by Eugene de Blaas 30 The Poet's Window Overlooking Rob Roy's Castle 74 Girl Reading at Stream, 83 Babbling Stream 97 Soldiers' Song 102 Tears in Spring 117

Editors for the Issue Managing Editor Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Senior Editor Bill West Fiction Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Bill West Poetry Oonah Joslin Spanish Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

Consulting Digby Beaumont Yvette Flis Martin Heavisides Web and Database Peter Gilkes Photography Maia Cavelli Offices: Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. Ireland and Motril, Granada, Andalusia, Spain Online: Zoetrope Virtual Studio and The Linnet´s Wings Design: Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick 2016

Jose Guadalupf Posada: The Artistic Purgatory, Where The Skulls Of Artists And Craftsmen Lie

xii

Editor's Note Dear Reader, Each quarter during the design process, I try to image or mirror our external environment to pin the timeline. This quarter was rife with mischievous witchery: Political insults and commentary, the thoughts of money galore going in all directions other than where it might be most needed; such colour and who knows what will happen, what power-players will lead us on from Obama’s reign.

Peer Gynt (1867) is Ibsen's second 'dramatic poem', following Brand (1866). In the summer of 1862 Ibsen had made a trip to Gudbrandsdal, one of the valleys of central Norway, north of Oslo, and his studies there meant he was able to give Peer Gynt a genuine historical basis. But Ibsen's highly individual mythical world goes far beyond actual folklore. He also made critical and ironic comments about narrow nationalism. Throughout, his epic poem is a dramatic dialogue with multifarious implications. The literary historian Edvard Beyer (1920–2003) says it is both 'fairytale and picture of folk-life; tragedy and fantastical, satirical, Aristophanic comedy; dream play and morality'. Its portrayals of erotic yearning have features in common with earlier European Romanticism. Biting intellectual irony, humour and wit mingle with poetic and compassionate insight. Peer Gynt leaves his loved ones in the lurch, like a modern-day chameleon, without scruples. Grieg saw in this a philosophical critique of contemporary ethics: 'the performance of Peer Gynt can do some good just now in Kristiania [Oslo], where materialism is on the up and is trying to choke everything we find best and most sacred; what we need, I think, is a mirror in which all this egotism can be seen, and Peer Gynt is just such a mirror.'

Through satire, the play shows up our (self-)destructive side and the falsehoods within us. But it has a serious and constructive message too, which Grieg played his part in developing and expressing.

Our "Just Like "Peer Gynt."" is not an epic poem but it is a dialogue—dramatic in areas—with multifarious layers that reflects our literary past in essay, prose, poetry and art as it trips us into our future.

My best, Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Managing Editor

xiii

prologue:

For Maggie if ever I may find Her

by Carla Martin­Wood I remember scars on your arms slender wrist to shoulder burnt offerings to life earned beneath a searing sun while you picked chili peppers their juice leaving blisters on skin that had never known the slightest blemish you couldn’t even spare the few cents it might have cost to rent gloves from the farmer you served in the fields where your Mexican friends sold their bodies for pennies working the land working things out in the soil you did what it took to stay alive then clearing what webbed your mind though nothing lightened whatever inscrutable burdens lay buried in your heart evening came announced by the noise of gravel scattered by the arrival of an ancient pickup truck you climbed aboard with the others

xiv

off to an evening of Rosa’s tamales gossip and laughter in her kitchen then drinking with the men and while everyone slept you walked miles to a gas station where you paid a man a quarter to use the shower a sliver of scented bath soap your small nod to who you used to be later when you tried to explain fears stormed my mind but never blinded me to the wealth of what you learned those two years you were a stranger and I thought you hadn’t really gone that far remembered long ago Irish roots our ancestors who knew what binds the soul to soil as they toiled on land no longer their own and buried what they could not bear beneath.

xv

xvi

epigraph:

Bushes I like to hide in the bushes, sit still with my Ordnance Survey book, noting down bird species.

A raindrop lands on a print of a thrush, a paisley pattern.

Robin, summer size, ventures close to keep an eye, then bobs off to look for bugs.

Marie Lightman

xvii

xviii

xix

The Linnet's Wings

Do elephants crimp into works of wisdom with their wisdom on high, and if the answer is no then dogs will bark and ravens will caw. I am going to threaten the days built out of dawn and shall beacon the dreams of the berry bush to go with the sun into and out of dreams. Do elephants drive automobiles or just walk on the great gushing legs. I once saw an elephant jump with and on a parachute but as I yet do not know if he is truly wise I will not progress. But nor will he.

1

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

She wipes her breath from the window.

Outside the birches are ghosts raising their spindly arms; pale against the dying day, they wail against the coming of winter.

She draws the ring from her left hand and peers through it, as through a telescope, the wrong way, making the world smaller, tighter.

The sky bleeds into a night which stirs with the cry of a lost soul. Bone marrow feels the oncoming freeze.

She bends stiffly and places the ring in the ashes on the hearth.

Tonight there will be snow.

The Linnet's Wings

2

The Linnet's Wings

orning arrived on her doorstep one day with a strange new day in tow.

Her house was like before. Chores done, half done or waiting to get done.

The radio in the kitchen nattering away. A newspaper fluttering beside the breakfast plate and cup. A hum in the air anticipating another busy day.

On her hands however, as in the days preceding it, there was time. She noticed that she had more than she needed, and it made her feel vacuous. She would look up from some task or the other and wonder. A dot in the air before her would claim her eyes. A lop sided smile would begin but fail to stretch her lips.

The children she observed had little to say when they came home from school. They were two of them, and one was already a teenager. It was not that they did not talk. They had things to share too.

But each one’s life had become more solidly defined than before. There were picket fences, and sometimes 3

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

thick and tall hedges through which she could see little, in spite of the chatter carelessly tossed up from the other side.

At their age, she had been a voracious reader. She thought nothing of finishing three hundred pages at a single sitting, often staying awake until dawn. She still bought books and held them lovingly, kept them at her bedside table for days, unread, though cared for. Books were everywhere. Coffee table books in the parlour. A rotating book shelf held more of the same, and some encyclopaedias as well.

Nobody read them. They preferred Google and Wikipedia. Shelves and book cases creaking with books sat in every room, like brooding hens. Even her kitchen had a shelf with sliding glass doors for cookbooks and recipe notebooks. When was the last time she had flipped through the pages?

The taller book cases reminded her of angry cliffs with bases so eroded, they threatened to come crashing down any minute, and bury her under her own books in the most brutal way imaginable. Would anybody find her? She felt estranged.

The day confronted her. It spoke of books unread and the spirits of books past, whispering into her head, nudging at her elbow. As if it wanted her to get into the book shelves and flatten herself among the covers and pages. This time the feeling was far from ominous; it was delicious exhilarating and liberating too. But she still couldn’t bring herself to begin reading again.

She lay down on the couch and watched TV. Perhaps she fell asleep. She could not remember afterwards. The house had grown quiet. The air felt thick, as if a fog had slunk in through her windows and gone out through them again, leaving behind thickened air molecules. She got up and closed the shutters.

The telephone rang. It was him. He would not be home for dinner. He had to take a client out.

Was his client a she? Was she pretty? The thought drifted in and out. She was not sure she cared. It was just a niggling sort of feeling. She was annoyed at herself for being niggled. She kept a good house. She wore good clothes. They went out regularly on weekends. They had their annual holidays, two full weeks spent abroad, with rows of pictures for her friends and relatives on WhatsApp and Facebook.

That morning she had found an old book on a shelf, among her handbags, the unlikeliest of places!

She could not remember how it had gotten there. It was a book of poems. She had not read one for years.

The thought that she used to read poetry at one time embarrassed her. There was something written on the first page, right below the author’s name, but the ink had faded. She could barely make anything out. Endearments? Someone had written them to her. Who? When? The unknown discomfited her.

How could her past keep secrets from her?

She made herself tea, looked around, and suddenly felt violent towards the house. It was always eavesdropping on her. It had grown round on her thoughts. She needed absolute privacy. She glanced at the book cases. But the books kept themselves shut. Their covers looked coldly back at her. She felt they were accusing her of ignoring them and all the ideas they had planted in her head when she had been a reader. She could not bear to look at them directly. She was sure they were raising their paper fingers at her and whispering about her shallow heart, her fickle mind. They were hopping about on their stiff gummed spines and baring the side where the pages were clamped together like teeth.

“She can’t hold a single sentence in that head of hers,” they seemed to say to each other. “She’s like a giant silver fish chewing words without comprehension.”

She was certain she heard them snicker as she went by, and the tune she was humming collapsed inside her throat. One minute she was at ease, taking the cake out from the oven, but the very next

The Linnet's Wings

4

The Linnet's Wings

instant she thought she saw something streak past behind her, a flash of glossy paper or perhaps leather. She pretended to look for something, when in reality she was waiting to catch the little sneak. She waited.

Nothing happened for so long that she forgot about the whole thing. But they refused to let her be. Just when she got busy with something, a book fell flat on its face, like a baby that had lost its balance or was about to throw a tantrum. She could hear soft titters from the rest of them, lined up on the shelves, eager for their turn. She set the fallen book right, exasperated, sad, and angry too. She knew it would happen all over again. They were intent on making her feel brainless. Empty of everything but the most frivolous of thoughts.

It was no use. She could not bring herself to be with them anymore. They had grown apart. The distance appeared unbridgeable. She put her face in her hands, but could not weep. She felt hollow inside.

Her hands trembled. The tea was worse than cold sugar water, utterly flavourless. She went out to the balcony. The world was full of sad unknown people, even though they were all familiar. She came inside and switched on the TV and surfed for a while. It made her feel no better. She finally got up, picked up her purse and left the house.

She drove aimlessly around the city. She got off at a swanky mall and walked past the shop windows and the stylish mannequins. She ignored the shop assistants desperately trying to catch her eye. She loitered near the multiplex where a variety of movies were being screened ­ something for everyone.

She stood in the queue, but turned away again. Nothing seemed to be working for her.

Why was she so jobless today? What was wrong with her? She ought to return home. She could always find something to do there. It was her own place after all. She could even lie down if she so wished, close her eyes and keep still until she fell asleep. She could daydream until the real dreams began. There was adventure in that, though not always pleasant. Nonetheless, dreams brought variety into her life.

And that was something.

She left the mall and drove towards the road that would take her home. She took a turn. A building caught her eye. It was a square steel and glass thing, with a manicured garden in front and a parking lot to the side. There were bars of brilliant orange painted like gashes on its façade, as if to make up for the otherwise sober exterior. She drove into the parking lot, took her ticket from the attendant and parked the car. The ground floor housed a children’s play area and a coffee shop. It also had racks and racks of

5

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

magazines from every part of the world, or so it seemed to her. The main library was on the second and third floors. Large halls, carpeted in beige, with rows of dun coloured shelves stocked with books.

There were chairs and tables, upholstered arm chairs for lounging, grouped together and placed at intervals across the halls. She filled in her particulars at the reception counter, paid, took her temporary card and stepped in.

The books were quiet. They did not seem to be making faces at her behind her back or whispering about her. She liked that. It was a start. She walked from row to row at a leisurely pace, from the light romance section, to the thrillers, to the science fiction and fantasy, to the management books, poetry, science, philosophy … . Her journey among the books seemed endless. They remained still, but now their quietness was beginning to unnerve her. She decided to touch them and see what happened. She moved to the section that said sci­fi, fantasy and speculative fiction. She had always loved the genre, from a time when they had not been given that label, but were simply books that dished out enjoyable, memorable stories, entertaining grownups and children alike. She stretched out her hand until the tips of her fingers touched a book’s spine ­ the colour of a moody sea.

The book hesitated, and then it moved imperceptibly, returning her touch ever so lightly. She felt buoyant. The book began to draw her in, coax her out of the library and lead her to a secret place.

The Linnet's Wings

6

The Linnet's Wings

She carried the book to an upholstered chair and settled down to read. The story was interesting, but she was still attached to her surroundings. A part of her mind tinkered with unrelated thoughts. Another part of her mind sniggered at her fractured attention. But surprisingly, the part of her mind that was engaged with the book could make sense of what she was reading.

Suddenly she remembered what an old lady, a writer, had once told her. She’d said not without condescension that sci­fi books were light, to be read and tossed aside. The memory annoyed her. Now the book lay sullen and inert upon her lap, refusing to go along when she returned to it. But she persevered.

The part of her mind that was busy with other things dropped before her a sudden vision of him, home early because his meeting had been cancelled, pottering about her kitchen, looking for something to eat. She saw him turn with a start as something flashed past. She put her hand to her mouth to suppress a giggle.

When she looked at the open page before her again, the story in the book reached up and pulled her down by her nose. Just the way her children did when they were little, and she had been momentarily distracted from the book she was reading aloud to them.

End

7

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Eight little boats, awkward pre­teen origami battleships built from loose­leaf notebook paper, twist in tiny currents of gutter water. The boy, called Little Keith because his neighbor is bigger and named Keith, too, had to sneak a handful of sheets from the bottom drawer of Daddy’s grey metal desk while the others waited outside. Mommy was folding wash towels on her bed. The blue ruled lines on the paper were faded to lavender, the white background too yellowed for any more cursive handwriting lessons.

Elbrus. Moonlit Night, Arkhip Kuindzhi The Linnet's Wings

8

The Linnet's Wings

Rain fell during the night and early morning forcing Little Keith and his mom to mop with brown­ edged newspaper just inside the porch door. Water seeped across the floor the same way eggnog did from the carton Daddy dropped last Christmas near the basement fridge—he always wobbled about and slept a lot down there during the winter when the snow grew too deep to work on the roads for the city.

The boy’s summer­tanned toes had gripped the wet­cracked floor as they pushed the soggy news print further against the bottom of the door—they grip the gutter’s warm cement bank the same way now as he watches the water, listening to its soft gurgles.

The boats list sideways as they float slowly downstream, following the curve of the street. The other kids giggle and push ahead of Little Keith to trail their battleships along the edge of treeless suburban lots. It becomes a game of crossing the boundaries of different countries with each one of them being the king or queen of their own yard.

The boy’s cousin, Linda, who’s two years older and lives three houses down in the middle of the block, hikes her Pentecostal dress up to her gritty playground knees as she straddles the gutter. She spends more time outside since her brother’s funeral last year. He twisted his neck the wrong way after being tackled at the Friday night football game and wouldn’t get up. Linda’s mother, Keith’s aunt, comes over to his house a lot now. She and his mommy wear such crinkled frowns despite their smooth, kitchen­ flushed skin. The two of them would often hug each other just out of the blue.

The last lot, a corner one covered with spotted grass, contains a small coveted mound above the metal drainage grate. Being the youngest, Little Keith had to stop the boats before they rushed over the lip into the noisy darkness below. Linda says that if they get past him, the soggy paper would clog the sewer lines underground and he would have to go to the bathroom in the backyard at night, when no one else was around to see. He’s careful to catch them, one by one tossing them up onto the grass, although Linda’s oversized ship slips beyond his reach. But he figures losing just one couldn’t hurt anything. Besides, she had taken his quarter for the ice cream truck and he wouldn’t get an orange pushup later that afternoon. ###

9

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

10

The Linnet's Wings

omewhere in his great chronicle of the poor, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck has his character Tom Joad say in a moment of despair, 'We take a beatin' all the time.'

Ma Joad tells him: ‘Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people ­ we go on. Don' you fret none’.

My family, on both sides, took many a beating. My maternal grandmother lost her first husband in the Boer War, her second at the Somme, and her only son in the bombing of Coventry. At the end of her life my father’s mother was working 12, sometimes 14, hours a day for a pittance. My father’s long, hard working life brought him little reward, and he was a wholly undeserving victim of disrespectful and often callous treatment on the part of his employers. It’s hard not to fret. Ma Joad is right, though. To fret in adversity is futile. We need to respond to poverty and its attendant calamities far more purposefully: with anger, determination and egalitarian values on which we are prepared to act. Having told Tom not to fret, Ma Joad adds: ‘A different time's comin'.

But only if we make it happen.

This is the story of my father’s life, and the lives of those closest to him. Much of it speaks for itself; the hardship and injustice are self­evident. But I will not avoid the politics of it. Ma Joad’s ‘they’ who ‘ain’t gonna wipe us out’ are the capitalists, landowners and bankers, and the politicians who serve their interests. They may not wipe us out but they keep us down. They diminish our lives. We need to work towards a new society which has no place for them.

My father was never destitute, but he was a man who needed courage and perseverance to live

11

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

the life he inherited. He was born in 1875, the youngest of twelve children—all of whom survived— in a farm labourer’s cottage in County Antrim.

He started school at the age of five and left when he was eight, able to read well but still struggling to write—a handicap that was to remain with him for the rest of his life. Even in his later years he laboured to compose a letter, not because he had trouble knowing what to write but because he lacked confidence in forming the words on paper. Eight­year­old Danny was hired out to a farmer who needed a boy, and thus he began a working life which was to continue almost unbroken until his death at the age of 76. He never retired.

When he was 15 his father died. For widows of country labourers this meant only one thing: notice to quit. Danny’s mother, Ellen Dodds Graham, decided to pack up, get on the boat at Larne, and move to Glasgow. As all of Danny’s eleven brothers and sisters were as well settled in Northern Ireland as could be expected, she took him with her, in the hope of a better life.

Their introduction to this better life was a ‘single­end’ in Parkhead in the East End of Glasgow.

This was a one­room flat at the end of a tenement block, on the second floor, with an outside toilet down two flights of common stairs and through the back entry. The flat had been left in a filthy state, and Ellen had to clean it as best she could, from floor to ceiling.

To pay the rent they both had to find work. I don’t know how long this took or how difficult it was, but I imagine them walking the streets between factories, shops and council offices, asking if there were jobs available, being turned away, and finally succeeding. Ellen went to work in a rope factory, where The Linnet's Wings

12

The Linnet's Wings

the normal shift was 12 hours, extended at busy times to 14 or 15. There was a one­hour lunch break, but at least half of it was taken up with cleaning her machine, which was shut down only at that time.

Her wage, if it was the average for the 1890s, would be 7 shillings (35p) a week, just under half that of male workers. Unsurprisingly, more women than men were employed. On Sundays, of course, much of her time would be spent in the wash­house.

This is the politics of it: Ellen and her fellow­workers were made to work as many hours as they could physically tolerate. Their employer bought their labour as cheaply as possible. The ropeworks was a capitalist enterprise. It functioned in the way Marx described. Workers were ‘alienated’, which means two things: they were alienated from the product of their labour, that is denied their fair share of the value of what they This is the politics of it: Ellen and her fellow-workers were made to produced; and alienated from work as many hours as they could physically tolerate. Their employer themselves, that is denied the ability bought their labour as cheaply as possible. to determine their life and destiny and live as fully autonomous human beings. Ellen had little or no choice as to where to live or how to live. She did not own a share in the value of the ropes that were sold to shipping companies and others.

Keir Hardie was elected to Parliament in1892, the first fully committed representative of the interests of exploited workers. But even the advent of decent wages and working hours was a long way off—and Ellen would not live to see it.

Danny’s job was, to put it over­politely, in waste management. He was the boy who helped the man who went round the streets in the early hours with horse and cart, collecting refuse from back­ courts and taking it to the tip. A dirty, unpleasant job, but less arduous than his mother’s, I imagine.

Sometime around 1900, I don’t know exactly which year, Ellen Graham died. Her health had deteriorated; her heart was taking too much strain; in short, she was worked to death.

My father found a better­paid job in Parkhead Forge, a steelworks owned by William Beardmore—a famous man in his day, one much praised for his entrepreneurship. After working there for less than a year, however, Danny made a serious mistake. A co­worker was trying to organise a trade union branch in the factory, and he agreed to join the organising committee. One day, without any warning, the members of the committee were called one by one into the general manager’s office, and sacked. My father remembered that the manager did not speak to him at all except to confirm his name. He simply handed him his ‘books’ and gestured to him to leave.

Some time after he lost his job at the Forge, he went to Middlesbrough—perhaps because there was similar work to be found there. This was where he met his first wife, Elizabeth Lord. I believe he had work there for a time until he was made redundant, then moved with his wife back to Glasgow. He found various temporary jobs but could scarcely make ends meet. Soon after, he made a decision that was to change his life: he found a job as a general handyman on a country estate in Ayrshire. Elizabeth (he called her Libby) may have been unhappy in Glasgow, and certainly weary of the struggle to stave off poverty, but my father had another motive: he wanted to be a countryman again.

They moved to a cottage on the edge of a beech­wood, six miles from the nearest town. My father began the tasks that would occupy him for the rest of his life: trimming—with hand shears of course—a mile or so of hawthorn hedge; hoeing and raking hundreds of yards of paths; feeding and grooming horses and riding them to the smithy; scything and gathering hay in season and taking it by pony and cart to the store.

13

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

His first boss was a decent man, but it was not long until he died and the Georgian mansion and extensive grounds were sold to a man who had inherited a fortune from his industrialist father. There is little to be said in this man’s favour. It may not be strictly true to say he never did a day’s work in his life, but it’s likely he did very few. He Even in the blighted Soviet Union, the son or daughter of a was a mine­ owner and slum landlord, rural worker could have a free education, all the way through taking rents from people who lived in university, and become an academic, a scientist or an engineer. tenement flats much like Ellen Opportunities for girls were virtually equal to those for boys Graham’s in Parkhead. Later he acquired another business, manufacturing flush toilets and gents’ urinals, never a rival to Twyford but installed in conveniences around the country, with his surname Howie clearly printed on the product. For reasons I won’t go into in too much detail, I always took pleasure in using one of these. He was bad­tempered, quick to complain if a job was only 99% perfect, addressed my father—even after years of good service—with condescension bordering on contempt. He was a fascist in his politics, in two minds about Hitler but an ardent fan of Mussolini. Worst of all—at least in personal terms—he paid my father £3.00 a week, even after the Second World War when farm labourers were earning £6.00. In real terms this would be very little more than the pay he had received as a farm boy. Howie never deigned to give him a raise of even a meagre 10 shillings.

My father dealt with all this in his own way. His boss’s political views, frequently expressed, he put down to ignorance. He answered complaints by quietly insisting that he knew his job and no other man could do it better; the boss would walk away without another word. He did not lose sleep over this man; never punished himself by bottling up anger and resentment. The man was simply unimportant; the woods, the parkland and the horses were what mattered.

Libby died in March 1936, and later the same year my father returned to Middlesbrough, proposed to her niece Lilian, brought her home and married her. My sister Mary was born, and died, in 1938, and I was born in 1939. By that time, my father was 64 (my mother 28). He went on working because if he retired the family would have been evicted. Until he died at 76, he worked Monday to Friday from 7.30am until 5.00pm and 7.30 till 12.00 noon on Saturdays—for half the wage of a farm labourer. My mother worked for most of this time as cook and housekeeper, afternoons and evenings, finishing at 8.00 pm or whenever the family had finally got through their several courses, for less pay than my father—woman’s wages, that is. Even with the extra pittance she earned, and even though the cottage was rent­free, I don’t know to this day how they managed.

Sometimes in the school holidays I would go to work with my father, usually in the afternoon because I was too lazy to get up for 7.30. I remember him working on a fallen tree, sawing it to make logs for the ‘big house’ fires. In his early seventies he used a heavy two­handled saw, intended for use by two men but which he managed single­handed. A pony and cart stood by; I picked up logs and loaded them on to the cart. I was often aware, even at 10 or 11 years old, that my father was very tired, not with a natural temporary tiredness that passed with a good night’s sleep, but a deeper weariness that slowed him down and never quite left him.

I remember him scything hay, raking and loading it—with my help, which didn’t make a great deal of difference. He had been told to finish the job that day, though it should have been given at least half a day more. Between the hay­field and the store there was a steep hill; I remember the pony stopping on the hill, unable to go any further. We got down from the cart and gently led him to the top, pausing The Linnet's Wings

14

The Linnet's Wings

now and then. ‘Daddy, this is too hard,’ I said. ‘Aye son’, he replied. ‘He’s killing horse and man’.

Not long after, he suffered a fatal heart attack. Had he retired at the usual age, perhaps it would have happened anyway. But it is hard to escape the thought that he was, like his mother, worked to death.

He did hard manual work almost without a break from the age of 8 until he was 76. He never received a fair reward for his labour, or the respect he deserved.

A few years later I was at university, in contact with ideas of many sorts, including political radicalism. I became a communist, partly through the influence of a Marxist history lecturer, but also as the meaning of my family history began to take shape in my mind. My father’s life, and that of the women in his life, especially his mother, perfectly illustrated Marx’s theory of Surplus Value.

Workers receive only a fraction of the value of the goods or services they produce. Put another way, out of every 8 hours a man or woman works, he or she is paid in wages only two hours worth at most.

The rest is taken by the capitalist. Certainly some of this is re­invested in the enterprise, but a great deal of it augments the owner’s personal wealth and that of his shareholders.

Well, as soon as you learn about Stalin’s crimes it’s hard to go on being a communist. But something remains to this day, in spite of Stalin: an ethos, a set of principles that (for me) cannot be invalidated. Up to a point I am still a communist, and refuse to write off the communist regimes of the past. Even in the blighted Soviet Union, the son or daughter of a rural worker could have a free education, all the way through university, and become an academic, a scientist or an engineer.

Opportunities for girls were virtually equal to those for boys. (My own generation in Britain had similar opportunities, thanks to the 1945 Labour Government.)

My father, the workers who produced Howie toilet bowls, my grandmother who bore twelve children and ended her life working in a rope factory, were all exploited. They were poor because the wealth they created was expropriated by others. It was not only material deprivation that they suffered; they were deprived of health and wellbeing, and their sense of their own worth was continually undermined, so that whatever self­esteem they could muster had to be found within themselves.

No­one ever expressed this ethos more eloquently than Gerrard Winstanley, speaking for the Diggers and Levellers in the English Revolution: ‘The Earth was made to be a Common Treasury for all mankind, without respect of persons’. My father should have had a real share in the piece of Earth he husbanded: the right to make decisions as to the use that was made of it. It could have been made more productive; fields that were used only to graze fox­hunting horses, or were not used at all, could have been cultivated. My grandmother should have been a member of the board of management of a rope­making co­operative, an enterprise that had no need of an individual wealthy owner or external shareholders.

My father, and those he loved, never received their due share of the Common Treasury. I visit his grave, and think of these things. ~~~ James Graham.

15

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Peer Gynt: In the Hall of the Mountain King

The Linnet's Wings

16

The Linnet's Wings

SCENE VII Pitch darkness. PEER GYNT is heard slashing and hitting about him with a branch of a tree.

PEER GYNT. Answer ! Who are you ?

A VOICE IN THE DARKNESS. Myself!

PEER GYNT. Let me pass, then !

VOICE. Go round about, Peer ! Room enough on the mountain. {PEER GYNT tries to pass another way, but runs up against some-thing.} PEER GYNT. Who are you ?

VOICE. Myself. Can you say as much ?

PEER GYNT. I can say what I like, and my sword can strike !

Look out for yourself! I'm going to smash you !

King Saul slew hundreds ; Peer Gynt slays thousands !

[Hits about him wildly..} Who are you ?

VOICE. Myself.

PEER GYNT. That's a silly answer, And you can keep it. It tells me nothing.

What are you ?

17

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

n a day, at the end of two years from his arrival on Iona, Columba goes to the beach, where his craft of wicker and cowhide lies moored, waiting the use of any member of the community of Hy whose occasions may call him away from the island. He is accompanied by two friends and former fellow­students, Comgal and Cainnech, and followed by a little escort of faithful attendants. Taking his seat in his currach, he and his party are rowed across the sound to the mainland."

St Beccan of Rùm may have lived on the island for four decades from 632 AD, his death being recorded in the Annals of Ulster in 677.

He wrote of Columba: In scores of curraghs with an army of wretches he crossed the long-haired sea.

He crossed the wave-strewn wild region, Foam flecked, seal-filled, savage, bounding, seething, white-tipped, pleasing, doleful.

The Linnet's Wings

18

The Linnet's Wings

I name myself walking through the house before I get there.

blackening spuds in a field fire, chatting rain alive

On birch floors my shoes sound dull as wood pulses an ancient drummer

on slow coals of sticks like hiccups, hawthorns for roofing and stone

marked time with.

These dead trees are full of sassy talk.

markers for walls; pressed foul as fish in subterranean passage

A strata of air, corporeally chilled, moves a cubit wide in the kitchen,

with the metallic Atlantic telling me all its old stories,

a polar exercise taking place.

I have been

icebergs and whales and the loan sharks waiting in the new land;

other places before, before I got there: banging a curragh

scavenging a city dump for furniture, books and bedding,

against the Atlantic the long watch of a day,

waging private wars against prejudice, hunger, Roscommon calling me home;

wind full of slam and salt and voice of the seal;

this kitchen, now, dark­cornered, remote, out of which I walk toward myself.

19

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The alders went bare above us, came blue lightning jagged and ragged as scars on his arms, the proud chest, not welts in the beginning but Swastika­ made, bayonet­gathered somewhere south of France, high­dry Saharan.

Leaves, forsaken, were false blasts about limbs; from small explosions came huge expulsions.

He recalled the remarkable incumbent grace and energy of grenades, the godness of them, ethereal, whooshing off to nowhere unless you happened to get in their way, conclusively, incisively.

He said, “The taste of shrapnel hangs on like a pewter key you mouthed as a sassy child, a wired can your father drank from which you’d sneak a few drafts from for yourself in the cellar, nails you mouth­cached, silvered, lead­painted, wetted, iron­on­the­tongue gray­heavy metal The Linnet's Wings 20

The Linnet's Wings

you’ve only dreamed of since. Yet, where he’s come to since that eventful sand wasn’t all he knew.

On our backs, the bare alder limbs mere antennae in the late afternoon above us, October’s flies grounded for illustrious moments, the squawk at our trespass merely a handful of crows in their magnificent kingdom, he brought home the last of his brothers, goggle­eyed veteran tankers, tinker Tommies under the Union Jack, raw Senegalese old sentries still worry about, dry bodies fifty years under mummifying sand, perhaps put away forever, and then some.

He thinks Egypt has a whole new strain of sleepers fifty years down the road of their making, the wrap of sand as good as Tutankhamen had at hand, their khaki blouses coming up a detective’s work, a special digger’s knowledge, at last citing army, corps, division, regiment, battalion, company, father, brother, son, neighbor, face, eye, lip, hand, soul, out there on the everlasting shift of sand, the stars still falling, angular, apogean, tailing across somewhere a dark night. Here, our worms, second place to uniqueness of fashioned flies, keen hackles, are ready for small orbits, small curves, huge mouths. And his battles, faded into the high limbs, a flag run up after all this recapture, say he knows yet and ever Egypt's two dark eyes.

21

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

22

The Linnet's Wings

23

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

24

The Linnet's Wings

oday I am ill. Not the sicky-snotty-vomitty-acheyjointsandinflammation kind of ill. The other kind.

The kind that sits on your shoulders and tells you that everything is terrible. The kind of ill that you'd normally attribute to the first bad thing you can find, and obsess over it until you get to retreat to your bed again: telling yourself that you'll feel better in the morning (which you probably will) but never really believing it. The kind of ill that makes you wish there was something more physical, and you're almost disappointed to see the same bones and blobs and wobbly bits that make up you every day - just working away as normal as you'd expect them to. The kind of ill that leaves you flabbergasted to see the sun shining and strangers smiling and absolutely nothing blowing up or catching fire.

The cure is to power through, not belligerently but pro-actively, until your capsized metaphor-boat rights itself: stops letting water in and you paddle past the eddies to calmer banks. You use structure and knowledge as an oar, and try not to let yourself throw up from navigating such ridiculous symbolism, because you know that ultimately this feeling will pass. And when you moor up on pleasant shores, there will be just your boat and you: nothing blowing up, nothing on fire, nothing on your shoulders any more. I'll see you there.

25

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

etty’s looking for rolling papers in her dead son’s desk, when she discovers his last story.

The one he wrote before she killed him. It’s about mothers and sons, abandoning each other. She wonders why Nicky wrote this. The others too. She wonders if they’re fictitious, or if there’s a shadow of truth hidden in the dells of worlds and characters.

Betty can’t blame Nicky. She raised him on her own, after all. She taught him to fight for what he wanted, taught him that morality wore many faces. It wasn’t ample.

Nick wanted love.

The Linnet's Wings

26

The Linnet's Wings

Surely he’d known love was a given. She was never fluent, talking about love. It required giving up too much. She didn’t know how. Every time Nick said, “I love you, Mama”, she’d laugh. Tell him she needed to grade papers. Ignore it and turn up her Tchaikovsky, as though love would return to the shadows.

She’d taken Nick drinking on his twenty­first birthday, wanting to expose him to the people he wanted to write about. Bitter divorcees. Lonely singles. She’d dared him to play chicken with a train, five beers later. Betty recalls the pleading look in his eye, as though pleasing her was the most important thing. The way his face was flushed with pleasure and drink, as the train approached, light beaming like a searchlight into her soul.

Betty reads further. This mother and son make peace, go to a party. They set old photographs and papers on fire. She weeps, leaning over his oak desk. This blue­walled room still wears a hint of annoying cheer. She thinks of Nick’s life, the possibilities. She places him, in her mind, as a big­name writer.

Drifting between ideas and beers, in hidden apartments.

She opens a drawer. No rolling papers.

Betty needs a joint. She’s smoked since Nick died. It’s the only way to stare into an audience of tenth­graders, with their two­parent families, full of starched smiles and barbeques. Smoking lifts her into this chalkboard of consciousness, a sort of nothingness. When she’s high, she’s a ghost, drifting outside the world.

She sees Nick again. He’s eight, stealing downstairs, to watch her grade. She felt irritated and honored by the idea that grading papers held some deep mystery about her.

Betty closes the other desk drawer. She crumples the story, smiling. She rolls it methodically, into a joint. She lights it, blows a cloud. Smoke mingles with the lavender shadows and the rising moon, a smiling silver disc.

“I love you,” she whispers. ~~~

27

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

28

The Linnet's Wings

other was more than a meddler. Call her a tyrantess. My father Cameron Myles she badgered til he took the only honourable way out–signing up for the Gordon Highlanders, the regiment garrisoned in Victoria, the capital city, stuck way down at the heel of Vancouver Island. Shipped overseas, he was quick to give up the ghost. Lance Corporal Myles, dug in deep like a vole, got strangled by a poison fog slithering out of the Hun lines. I stayed behind on the farm. His tree stumps, gnarled and witch­haired, I pulled. Wreckage I piled and torched. His ditches I mucked out, leaving a sludge boot­lace deep. His posts I pounded into clay. The clobbered alder stuck fast. And between those posts I strung barbed wire taut as a choker. That kept his stock in the field and the rovers out. I stayed, though I was rangy enough to be taken by a recruiter. But Mother treated me no better for being steadfast.

Usually I kept my yap clamped tight as a mudflat clam. Despite Mother’s prying–her jimmying.

But one moony night over a cold supper, she started muttering about how she just didn’t get me. My father had been red­blooded enough to take her on. He didn’t shilly­shally about. They first met in the early days of harvest, when she stepped in for her own father who was dickering poorly, losing ground with a stump farmer over a used harness. Poor tack it was, tarnished and shredded, and she drove the price down to a steal. My future father was at market for a lark, not buying or selling that day. But her hard­headed haggling caught his eye. He took a shine to how she went after a good bargain like a black lab after a gunshot goose. So he introduced himself and they soon hopped to it–getting churched before the weather turned cold. Her Ronny didn’t turn tail til he was past forty, hustling off to Flanders in a khaki kilt. But as she saw it her own son, not even twenty, was quitting the field of females before he even got started.

She was getting to me. I started to give way but clenched my jaw.

She went on about how she just didn’t understand why I was steering clear of the ladies–whether I couldn’t be bothered or was just bone lazy.

Taking good aim she was and hammering home. Like a crowbar busting open a barred door.

I stammered how I meant to wait. How I was hanging back til the girl was out of school.

Mother’s mouth twisted and her left eyebrow, black as chimney brush, rose. What girl?

I coughed up the name.

Mother told me flat out she didn’t think much of my choice, Ruth Bertram. She didn’t care for that fluff of a girl, especially when Lotte Marshall–whose parents held the best bottomland on Vancouver Island–was willing. I was told how Lotte’s own mother confided loudly every time they met up at a church social how willing her daughter was. How Lotte had saved up a fancy trousseau piled high as a haystack, and how, being the only daughter of two ageing parents, she wouldn’t wander far. Before you knew it, my mother claimed, the old folks would be planted ten feet under and I’d be turning black sod on a first­rate farm.

To my mind, getting hitched to the Marshall girl would be like being buried alive in her hope chest. I saw myself slaving away like a hired hand on that soggy bottomland for long years til I came into my own farm when my widowed mother finally kicked the bucket. She wouldn’t be perishing any time soon. Her own granny outlasted two loafing husbands, five shiftless sons, and eight grandsons, 29

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

all slackers. And my slogging for a Marhall bride would get me nothing. The Marshall place would go to their eldest son Sidney, unless he drowned first in that bog of a farm. It was no prize holding but a sorry spread, mostly flood plain, hard by the river. You’d need an ark more than a barn down there. Not that I said any of this aloud.

Mother said I was being mulish. She griped about how she was tired of having me underfoot all

the time, and how I ought to be pointing my spade at a grown woman like Lotte instead of lolling about, mooning after a schoolgirl whose cedar chest was likely stuffed only with moldy old books.

Though I had lived with a human hurricane my whole life, it just didn’t occur to me that my mother might rush out and put Ruthie to the test. Mother was no matchmaker of mine come market day when she marched over to the neighboring farm to catch the girl alone. After, she delighted in telling me about the whole disaster. Knock down a fence, Mother had said to the girl, and we’re more than neighbours.

Mother admitted to Ruthie she was fixed on getting me off her hands fast but let it slip she wasn’t at all keen on having a Bertram as a daughter­in­law. As Mother told it, by the end of the spiel, that red­ lipped chit looked flabbergasted. The girl’s mouth gaped like a hooked rock cod.

Likely Ruthie had no clue about my plans until Mother took to wooing. Mother knew her words would spook the girl good and warn her off. But my mother had bulled in. Too far. Without my say­so she’d horned in. So I had to tell her, for the first time ever, to step back and get out of my business.

She scowled, soot under a cold stone brow. Six days in a row she burnt my porridge black. Only on the Lord’s Day were the oats safe from a scorching. She kept working me over, warning how my The Linnet's Wings

30

The Linnet's Wings

intended had no feelings for me at all, how the whole Valley knew the schoolgirl was smitten with her wavy­haired schoolmaster. And that I should take neither hope nor comfort in the ironclad fact that the teacher was all heart­sick for Esme Fathom, the Anglican Minister’s brand­new second wife, who danced like a hurdy­gurdy girl and who smelled even showier than the store­bought blooms did at the first wife’s funeral. Because, Mother insisted, young Ruthie was a goose: the girl knew nothing of the ways of men. She was blind to the facts–and stuck fast on the schoolmaster. Like a fruitfly in corn syrup. Besides, Mother claimed, she’d told the missy that I was the kind of man who was too dull–and maybe even too idle–to do his own romancing. And she recited how she complained to Ruthie about how the chore of wooing had fallen, as all tiresome tasks did, to her, the woman­of­the­house. She, my mother, wasn’t just the go­between; she was a drover, the “go­git­ ‘er.” So, Mother urged me, I ought to take her advice and throw over Ruthie Bertram for Lottie Marshall, who lived on loamy land easy to plow, and who kept safe a hope chest foaming over with fine­spun bed linens, calico quilts and needlepoint doilies.

But I wasn’t keen to listen. I saw I had to step up and start courting quick before Mother’s meddling had me roping the heifer she cut out for me. And I had a plan but no words to back it up. I was a rough sort with only a bit of schooling. Six years in grade school is more than enough for working a farm, Mother had always said. I’d heard Ruthie loved her poetry–but I knew nothing about verse except the first few lines of “God Save the King” and some snatches from the Psalms like “Lay me down in green pastures.” So I swallowed my pride and wandered up to the schoolhouse after classes to haggle with the teacher. For my part of the barter, I’d haul and split a winter’s worth of wood: a deal in kind.

“I’ll swap ya four cords for the right words,” said I. The wavy­haired teacher stood tall and grand in the doorway to the schoolhouse with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his blue satin vest. Smiling like a riverboat gambler, he asked, “Whatever for?”

“I’ll be doing some, er, courting. I’m aiming for the top­notch kind. Of keeping company. And I heard poetry is a sure­fire way.”

“I see. And what sort of poetry does the young lady, ah, favour?”

“Dunno. But I know how she looks to me.”

“How’s that?”

I hesitated.

“Come on, man.” He grinned. “Out with it.”

I blurted, “She’s got a kisser on her–just like a cherry.”

“Ah,” he answered, then dashed into the schoolroom, and strode back waving a leather­bound book.

“Herrick!” he almost hollered. “Now there’s a poet for courting and sparking!”

The teacher dusted off the top plank of the schoolhouse steps. Then he pinched the front pleat of each baggy pant leg, hitching the cloth up, and plunked himself down. He had me hunch over to follow along. But he soon took to reciting so loud, like a preacher in a pulpit, that I swivelled my head around to make sure nobody was nosing about: Cherry­ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry, Full and fair ones; come and buy.

And if you ask me where They grow, I answer: There 31

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Where my Julia’s lips do smile; There’s the land, or cherry­isle, Whose plantations fully show All the year where cherries grow.

“I’ll buy,” said I, “Though her name’s not Julia, I can make it fit.”

The schoolmaster snickered, then pointed out in his teacherish way, “Her name won’t scan. Not a monosyllable like–Ruth.”

I accused, “You knew. From the start.”

“The whole Valley knows. Your mother’s was traipsing around telling anybody who cares to listen about how the impertinent snippet turned her down.”

The thought of all those tattlers gabbing about my own business made me steaming mad. But I held my temper and asked him to hear me read. The teacher corrected me til I had it passable.

I promised, “I’ll be back with an axe and wedge.”

“No,” he said. “I shouldn’t be putting a price on it, on poetry.”

“You sure?” I asked but I didn’t argue. Cause it wasn’t a fair swap to start with. A fellow just reading out of a book don’t work up a sweat. Not a drop. And, after splitting even one cord in exchange, I’d have been drenched.

But I spoke up on something else, barking away like my own mother who was famous all over the Valley for speaking her mind. Big­hearted she was in handing out opinions by the shovelful. She had a take on most things. Her every say­so was given out like a favour, whether she was scheming at the time or plain­dealing.

Straight to his face, I accused, “Bet you’d take the poetry over the real person, wouldn’t ya?”

The apple sure don’t tumble far. I was blaring away loud and smug as the woman­of­the­house.

All I needed was a big calico apron to curl my fists in. But the schoolteacher just sighed and tugged the forelock of his ripplely hair.

It took me a good week of reciting to get the words right. Sure, my head and tongue were out of kilter at first but I worked on the poem steady, even when mucking out the barn. A top­notch set of gear I ordered to match the words. Nothing run­of­the­mill for me. Special­rush­ordered it was through Proctor’s. But I learned that hovering around the store don’t make a shipment come in any quicker.

And that people do talk–about how the hardworking son of a hard­talking woman can turn loafer. The order moved slow and by the time I got word the packets were in, I had spit­polished those lines. I hustled down to Proctor’s. That stack of parcels tied up with twine, those would be my courting clothes, fresh in by ferry and rail from Frisco. Inside one of these packages would be what I was counting on most as gear–a blue satin vest glossy as the waistcoat of the most high­falutin’ gentleman caller. Too eager to wait til I got home, I ripped at a corner of the most likely parcel–judging by its size. But the colour that shone through was not true blue but a blaring fire engine red.

“Took a peek myself,” drawled the owner Proctor, leaning thick elbows on his saw­board counter and propping up his bulldog jowls with both chunky palms, “just ta make sure nuttin’ was damaged–and nuttin’ was ‘cept the colour. The wife calls it crimson. Though some might call it hussy red.” Then he dropped his paws off his doggy jowls and hardy­harred.

Picking up my goods, I hot­footed it home. I hauled water for a three­bucket bath, though it wasn’t The Linnet's Wings

32

The Linnet's Wings

Saturday night, and gave my back and knees a good scouring. I wrestled into the gear. Soon I was slicked up and ready for sport. All afternoon I watched out for Ruthie. Then I spotted her heading up to the spur road. Her step was brisk. Her straw hat bobbing as she bounced along. Scrambling, I got to the end of our lane without a spill. Then taking long strides, my new Oxford bags whiffling around my legs, I caught up to her on the road.

“Ruthie–Miss Bertram,” I greeted her, doffing my rabbit­felt Homburg hat and knocking the creased crown against my knee.

She turned and drew herself up, raising a hand to touch her hat strings. I let my linen jacket and my wool Ulster fall open to show off my vest, ruddy as a spring robin.

She answered stiffly, “Er. Hallo. Er. Alfie.”

Nervous, I wiped my left hand against my thick coat. “I’m going by Alfred now,” said I. “More refined.”

There was a crack of a smile. “So. Alfred.”

33

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

“Not that you called me much of anything. Before. Not even Alfie. Much. So it should be easy for you to call me something else. You weren’t in a rut. At all. Over my name.”

She paused, then answered, “True.”

And I just stood there, like a scarecrow, raggedy­headed and stuffed with straw.

She said, “So. Er. Then. Good­bye.”

She took one two three steps away.

All in a rush, I blustered, “So I’ve been learning some poetry, seeing I’m more refined now.”

She turned about. Big­eyed as a pine squirrel, she looked me over.

And I launched into Herrick, putting in, for effect, extra helpings of “ripe ripe ripe.”

At the end she looked wholly astonished, as if a toad had hopped up to her and sung like a lark.

But I felt grand, getting all the way to, “All the year where cherries grow,” without a stumble. And I knew I looked grand, not a loose thread on my coat, not a kink in my hair–and sporting a vest like the first sunrise of spring.

Grinning, I asked, “There’s a dance Saturday night. Will you go with me now that I’m refined?”

She spoke slow like she was stepping across mucky ground, “But I’ve never been.”

Quick to answer I was. “Me neither. But I figure, after reciting, prancing up and down in a clean­ swept barn otta be easy.”

“Er. Ah. All right,” she said.

So I did some practicing up for the dance. Next few nights I was in the cow pasture after sundown, whirling about like a maple seed. Then, turns out I was as light on my feet as she was easy on the eyes.

So I kept inviting Ruthie to dances from Cumberland to Qualicum til there was no kind of asking left, apart from one question–which I wouldn’t be leaving to the tyrantess to ask again.

So before I put the question to the girl, I decided to have a chin­wag with the master once more.

And I tracked him down after supper. He sat, long legs sprawled out, on the plank floor of the schoolhouse, with a bottle of kill­devil, the top half gone, in his mitt.

“She won’t run away with me,” the teacher moaned, his hair tossed and stormy. “Esme told me she’d miss her comfortable pew.”

“Bah,” I answered, hunkering down on the floor with him. “The woman’s wedded. Like you’d really want another man’s mare. Who’s used to taking the same old path to pasture every living day. Though she might crop a daisy or two along the way.”

Handy in my pocket I found my own flask of fancy man’s drink, London dry gin. I leaned over and offered him a swig.

He took the flask, praising me, “My good man, you’re right. Like yourself, I need to find a fine young, ah, filly.”

“And,” he took a slug, “I like your manner of speaking.”

Passing the drink back, he cuffed me on the shoulder with his other hand. Rum and sloe gin, a bad boozy mix, had him slurring a word or two, “You, you show a touch of poesy.”

Being a greenhorn at all this, I asked him how best to put the question.

“Never asked it myself, not exactly, never out loud,” the schoolmaster admitted.

There was a lull. A spell of quiet. Except the glug of drink.

Then he lurched to his feet, crowing, “Got it. You could ask her to solve a riddle and if she can’t

The Linnet's Wings

34

The Linnet's Wings

give the answer, well … she’s yours.”

He yakked on, a tipsy lilt to his tongue, “Confounding a bride, winning her through a confusing riddle or a love­crazed wager, goes a long ways back. Time­honoured. From the high age of heroes.

Your Ruth knows about riddling contests from the old tales–a princess robbed of her night robe and the chieftain’s daughter leaving her plaid in a fortune­hunter’s fist. So how about a baffling rhyme?– "A one­legged lass In a red petticoat, A shine on her cheek, And a stone in her throat.”

With my cracked nails I scratched away at my scalp, which does wonders for shifting nits but nothing for thoughts. I asked for a hint, which he refused.

Stumped, I griped, “What in the blazes is the answer?”

He gave me the solution, got me to repeat the puzzler til I knew it like an old saw, then added almost soberly, “Alfred, when you’re courting, you needn’t get so gussied up. Only the likes of me have to be dandies, strutting about in fancy duds.”

So, this time wearing home­laundered clothes, at ease in a warm meadow, I wooed my lady. I spouted some more poetry, then offered to do some riddling with her at a price. Fixed. No haggling.

And winner take all. Truth be told, I had my doubts about romancing through riddles. But by then I knew how Ruthie loved sass and silliness. She didn’t need any coaxing at fun.

Tossing her hay­coloured hair, she laughed gaily at the rules of the deal, saying, “I’m not a girl to turn down a challenge.”

She heard out the whole brain­wringer. For a while she hummed, tilting her head to and fro. Then, batting spidery lashes at me, she pleaded for “just a bit of a tip, a smidgen of a clu­oo­ue.”

Coldly, I gave her none. She pouted. Frowned. Then her lips pursed. Cinched tight. Drawing back her thin shoulders, she tilted up her nub of a chin. She gave me a snippy look.

The corner of my mouth started to twitch with triumph.

Until she let slip, “Cherry.”

I ho­ho­hoed at her play­acting. Wasn’t she the wily one? Hoodwinking me. Shamming at being bamboozled. Looking all knotted up. When the riddle was just a highwayman’s hitch in her hand. A breeze to tug loose. But there was no real ranting from me. I took my lumps, admitting loudly that she was the brainy one. She’d come out ahead even against my own widowed mother, who sure was an old fox. Ruthie judged I was a good loser, the mark of a sound husband. She’d bested me–and she’d be my missus. And I swore to stick by her. I wouldn’t be running off to any Great War, if one ever came up again, though I’d never been even a mile offshore. She claimed to have not one worry in her head about me straying. She always knew I was steady. Keeping my hand on the plow. For her, the clincher was my ranking of her smarts above the widow’s. And surely not my reciting.

So my own true words sealed the deal. Not second­hand sweetness. Not fruit stole off a high branch.

Nothing borrowed or showy or sly.

~~~ 35

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

36

The Linnet's Wings

"H

is prose?" "wonderful, piquant" "Sentence structure, syntax, use of colloquialisms?"

"The entire body ... of his work ... is chopped ... a little hard to digest but deliciously robust narrative nonetheless"

"You really have been spending a lot of time on your food blog, huh?"

"Platform is everything these days Bascombe. How are plans coming for tonight's get­together."

"Oh you know, the usual drama and complaining, of course. It wouldn't be a literary circle event if someone wasn't bitching about someone or sticking the knife in somebody's back. It's all part of the fun and games, I suppose. You're part of the scene long enough and nothing surprises you. These writers—though—continue to show even poorer taste if I do say so. This latest one—couldn't have been any more impertinent really. You shepherd them through "the process,"you offer them immortality and you give them a chance to be sampled by the true arbiters of the literary intelligentsia and do you receive any form of gratitude from them whatsoever­­hardly."

37

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

"I know Bascombe, they are truly the basest of all creatures. All ego and no talent. Insecurity and hubris.

They grab and cloy and never once realize that they are not special in the slightest. They are simply the current flavor of the month."

"This new one was the worst I tell you—he thought he was born with a gift of some sort. You know the type. He had no time to "play the game" as he would call it. No time for foolish submission guidelines or petty protocols."

"Can you imagine?"

"Yes ... he really did say that."

"Didn't he realize that those submission guidelines and protocols that he mocked were instituted centuries ago to keep out the dreck and the unwashed masses who claim to be writers? If we did not maintain standards or a threshold, then there would be nothing but a giant mud puddle of dung surrounded by flies."

"And by flies you mean, of course, aspiring writers" "Of course" "So who shall we expect at tonight's heavenly soiree?"

"Oh, all the usual suspects ­ the staff from Creative House including the illustrious Madame B and her devilish young ingénues all dressed in high fashion like Dorothy Parker clones, all the top literary lights, bloggers and buggerers ... some glitterati, musical theater friends, a surprise or two—expect the usual standing room only."

"Lovely, lovely—are they all going to be pulling this new fellow apart to get at him?"

"Mmm ... there should be enough of him to go around .... when last we spoke he impressed me with his big personality" "So how did you handle the particulars?"

"Per usual ... he signed his rights over to us for the novel etc, etc ... for the standard minor advance."

The Linnet's Wings

38

The Linnet's Wings

"Did you make him jump through hoops?"

"Of course" "And dance like a chicken with his head cut off" "Naturally" "And he didn't read the fine print on the contract?" " They never do ... do they" "That's right, so eager they are for that small advance and for that sweet taste of fame." " They never have time for contracts or submission guidelines or petty protocols . ..."

"They never do." " Even when it says very clearly in black in white." " Upon the occasion of my death, all rights to my novel revert back to Bascombe Wellington & Associates."

"Speaking of which ... how's your famous "writer­stew" coming along?"

"Should be the hit of the party—as always" "Bascombe, you are a cheeky devil."

"Thanks, old friend—be a good fellow and pass me a fresh sprig of rosemary will you ... and could you toss these left over metacarpals into the incinerator, I have a feeling he won't be needing them anymore" "Quite right .... you incorrigible old rascal, you." ~~~

39

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

NEW WORLD POETRY

By

Stephen Zelnick

[pic] [Rubén Darío (Nicaragua, 1867-1916), a monumental figure in Spanish literature, overturned the poetic conventions of the crumbling Spanish empire and invented a new style, called Modernismo. Darío addressed new subjects in the style of French poetry and the liberating voice of Walt Whitman.]

Art: ­­ Sergio Michilini, “Retrato de Rubén Darío” (2013)

The Linnet's Wings

40

The Linnet's Wings

Like Neruda and Mistral, Darío’s name was acquired. He was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento in a no­account town in Nicaragua. His parents disappeared soon after his birth, and he was raised by family members. He grew up with religious mysteries that haunted his dreams and filled him with heavenly light. In his autobiography, Darío claims he was a reader at three and lists an impressive bibliography.

Jesuits spotted his hunger for reading and found work for him in his teen years at a library in Managua.

A Nicaraguan David Copperfield, Darío was soon publishing, pursuing his brilliant and unlikely destiny. .

[pic] [Nicaragua, the largest nation in the Central American isthmus, gained independence from Spain in 1821; the US occupied the country from 1909-1933; the Somoza family, US proxies, ruled from 1927-1979; in the 1980’s the Sandinistas prevailed, withstanding a terror campaign directed by the Reagan administration. Nicaragua is now a liberal democracy and prized by tourists for its natural beauty and warm climate.]

His first volume, Azul (1888), drew critical attention, some quite negative. Azul is a small volume, mostly in prose, but the poetry is a new voice for Spanish, more French in style and subject, as in “De Invierno” (Of Winter): En invernales horas, mirad a Carolina.

Medio apelotonada, descansa en el sillón, envuelta con su abrigo de marta cibelina y no lejos del fuego que brilla en el salón.

In winter hours, looking at Carolina… half snuggled into a ball, resting on a couch, wrapped in her coat of cybeline sable, not far from the fire that glows in the salón.

El fino angora blanco junto a ella se reclina, rozando con su hocico la falda de Aleçón,

The fine white angora reclines next to her, rubbing his muzzle in her skirt of Aleçón silk, 41

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

no lejos de las jarras de porcelana china que medio oculta un biombo de seda del Japón.

not far from the porcelain china jars half hidden by a silken Japanese screen.

Con sus sutiles filtros la invade un dulce sueño: entro, sin hacer ruido: dejo mi abrigo gris; voy a besar su rostro, rosado y halagüeño

Sweet dreams, with subtle hints, possess her: I enter, without a sound: remove my gray coat; and kiss her face, rosy and alluring

como una rosa roja que fuera flor de lis.

Abre los ojos; mírame con su mirar risueño, y en tanto cae la nieve del cielo de París.

as a red rose or fleur­de­lis. She opens her eyes; looks at me with sunny smile, while the snow covers all under Paris skies.

Azul (1888)

All translations are by S. Zelnick

“De Invierno” invokes no gods or mysteries and manages its realism quietly. It portrays the luxurious world of a European aesthete; its language is free and open, and the voice pleasantly relaxed rather than rhapsodic, a mood fashioned in deft sketches.

[pic] [Like many Nicaraguans, Darío was mestizo with dark complexion. This meant he struggled to gain diplomatic postings to Europe, the most common route for artists. While Europe intrigued him, he embraced his indigenous origins when the US threatened Hispanic culture.]

1. Pythagorean Harmonies Darío’s poetry is cerebral and derives from pre­Christian sources, notably a tradition associated with the pre­Socratic mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras. The creed suits poets well, emphasizing correspondences among nature, mind, and soul and a strong drift towards harmony. Modern life is out of tune; and, as in “Torres de Dios Poetas!”, the poet works to reestablish original harmonies.

The Linnet's Wings

42

The Linnet's Wings

Torres de Dios Poetas!

Towers of God are the poets!

Pararrayos celestes, que resistís las duras tempestades, como crestas escuetas, como picos agrestes, rompeolas de las eternidades!

Celestial lightning rods, that withstand the hard tempests, like gentle crests, like country peaks, break­waters of the eternities!

La mágica Esperanza anuncia el día en que sobre la roca de armonía expirará la pérfida sirena.

Esperad, esperemos todavía!

Through magic, Hope announces that day when the treacherous siren expires on the rock of harmony.

That Hope, we hope for still!

Esperad todavía.

El bestial elemento se alza En el odio a la sacra prosa, y se arroja baldón de raza a raza.

La insurrección de abajo tiende a los Excelentes.

El caníbal codicia su tasajo con roja encía y afilado dientes.

Hope still.

The bestial element arises, despising the sacred wisdom, and insult is hurled from race to race.

Insurrection from below aims its dart at Excellence.

The cannibal lusts after his prize with red gums and filed teeth.

Torres, poned al paredón sonrisa.

Poned ante ese mal y ese recelo, una soberbia insinuación de brisa y una tranquilidad de mar y cielo….

Towers defend with thick walls of smiles.

Standing against this evil and mistrust, with a proud puff of breeze, with the tranquility of sea and sky…

Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905) Sirens arouse treacherous desires, but poets supply the sources of harmony. The world is torn by bestial hatreds, racial insults, Caliban’s jealous hunger to drown excellence in mud and savage lust. The poet defends and renews us. As in this excerpt from “Las Ánforas de Epicuro”: La celeste unidad que presupones hará brotar en ti mundos diversos, y al resonar tus números dispersos pitagoriza en tus constelaciones.

The celestial unity, presuposing it will sprout in your diverse world and echo your endless variety, whistles in your constellations.

Escucha la retórica divina del pájaro del aire y la nocturna irradiación geométrica adivina;

Hear the divine rhetoric of the birds in flight and the nocturne foretelling multiple irradiations;..

Prosas profanas (1896­1901) 43

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Beneath the endless diversity of things lies a “celestial unity”; the birds’ mysterious nocturne hints at harmony radiating outward through all things.

[pic] [No works of Pythagoras of Samos (570-495 BCE) survive, but legend identifies him as the author of the famous geometric theorems we all know. He is also said to have been a philosopher who influenced Plato profoundly in his notions of the rational basis for all existence.]

“Caracol” (Sea Shell) includes the long path of history. The “irradiation” links phenomena in the present, but also the present with ancient myth. The sea shell echoing immortal sounds is the human heart: En la playa he encontrado un caracol de oro macizo y recamado de las perlas más finas; Europa le ha tocado con sus manos divinas cuando cruzó las ondas sobre el celeste toro.

On the beach I found a golden shell, massive and studded with pearls most fine; Europa had touched it with her hands divine when she crossed the waves on a heavenly bull.

He llevado a mis labios el caracol sonoro y he suscitado el eco de las dianas marinas, le acerqué a mis oídos y las azules minas me han contado en voz baja su secreto tesoro.

I raised to my lips the sonorous shell and stirred up an echo of sea reveilles, placed it to my ear and the blue mines whispered to me their secret treasure.

Así la sal me llega de los vientos amargos que en sus hinchadas velas sintió la nave Argos cuando amaron los astros el sueño de Jasón;

So the salt comes to me from the sharp winds that the Argos felt in its swollen sails when the stars blessed Jason’s dream;

y oigo un rumor de olas y un incógnito acento y un profundo oleaje y un misterioso viento...

(El caracol la forma tiene de un corazón.)

I hear the waves murmur in accents unknown and a deep tide and mysterous wind … (from the shell shaped like a heart.)

Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905)

The Linnet's Wings

44

The Linnet's Wings

Attempting to understand the “murmur in accents unknown”, the poet revives the ancient myths, the “sea reveilles” that manifest the “deep tide and mysterious wind” in things. This poem models perfect harmony; not only the sonnet form, but the balance of each line poised gently on its caesural pause.

The Pythagorean smile, as in “Aleluya!”, includes the body’s joys, free and blissful: Rosas rosadas y blancas, ramas verdes, corolas frescas y frescos ramos, Alegría!

Nidos en los tibios árboles, huevos en los tibios nidos, dulzura, Alegría!

El beso de esa muchacha rubia, y el de esa morena, y el de esa negra, Alegría!

Y el vientre de esa pequeña de quince años, y sus brazos armoniosos, Alegría!

Y el aliento de la selva virgen, y el de las vírgenes hembras, y las dulces rimas de la Aurora, Alegría, Alegría, Alegría!

Red and White roses, and green branches, fresh buds and fresh boughs, Such joy!

Nests in the warm trees, eggs in their warm nests, so sweet, Such joy!

The kiss of this blonde girl, and that of this brown one, and that of this black, such joy!

And the belly of this little one, fifteen years old, and her willing arms, such joy!

And the breath of the virgin forest, and that of the virgin girls, and the sweet rhymes of Aurora, Joy, Joy, Joy!

Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905) Pantheism’s argument is sensuous elation lit by lust, sweetly permitted. This poem sings its truth in free­flowing verse without rhyme or reason. Art welcomes us to embrace the harmonizing forces in our minds and spirits. Darío praises many artists – here Cervantes and Velasquez: UN SONETO A CERVANTES Horas de pesadumbre y de tristeza paso en mi soledad. Pero Cervantes es buen amigo. Endulza mis instantes ásperos, y reposa mi cabeza.

Hours of depression and sadness I pass in my solitude. But Cervantes is a good friend. He sweetens my bitter moments, and soothes my head.

Él es la vida y la naturaleza, regala un yelmo de oros y diamantes a mis sueños errantes.

He is life and nature, provides a helmet of diamonds and gold to my wandering dreams.

45

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Es para mí: suspira, ríe y reza.

It’s for me: I sigh, smile and pray.

Cristiano y amoroso y caballero parla como un arroyo cristalino. ¡Así le admiro y quiero,

Christian, dear friend, caballero…

He speaks like a crystal stream.

So I admire and want him,

viendo cómo el destino hace que regocije al mundo entero la tristeza inmortal de ser divino!

coming like destiny he reconciles this sad world with the divine being of the immortal.

Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905) He praises Velasquez in an imagined letter from the dramatist Góngora, who sat for a famous Velasquez portrait, to his renowned friend: Mientras el brillo de tu gloria augura ser en la eternidad sol sin poniente, fénix de viva luz, fénix ardiente, diamante parangón de la pintura,

While your glory promises to shine in eternal sun that never sets, phoenix of living light, burning phoenix, diamond paragon of painting,

de España está sobre la veste oscura tu nombre, como joya reluciente, rompe la Envidia el fatigado diente, y el Olvido lamenta su amargura.

from Spain it shines through the veil obscuring your name, like a resplendent jewel, and envy cracks its worn­out tooth, while those forgotten mourn in bitterness.

Yo en equívoco altar, tú en sacro fuego, miro a través de mi penumbra el día en que el calor de tu amistad, don Diego,

I at my ambiguous altar, you at your sacred fire, I see through the haze of my day the heat of your friendship, Don Diego,

jugando de la luz con la armonía, con la alma luz, de tu pincel el juego el alma duplicó de la faz mía.

playing with the harmony of light, with the soul’s light, that with your brush’s play copied the soul of my face.

Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905) The writer serves at an “ambiguous altar” unable to fix a clear image through the haze of language, while the painter, at play with harmonious light, copies Góngora’s soul in his features. This poem, formal and precise, balances its calm precision with friendship’s warmth, a harmonizing theme with Darío.

The Linnet's Wings

46

The Linnet's Wings 2. The Joys of Sensuality

“Alaba Los Ojos Negras de Julia” (Praising Julia’s Dark Eyes) moves from the witty search for classical comparisons to sensuality. The smooth­flowing lines, lending the guise of sincerity, create a verbal serenade in the beloved’s garden, in the exaggerated accents of Cyrano and John Donne: ¿Eva era rubia? No. Con negros ojos vio la manzana del jardín: con labios rojos probó su miel; con labios rojos que saben hoy más ciencia que los sabios.

Was Eve a red­head? No. She saw the garden’s apple with dark eyes; with red lips tasting of honey; red lips that know today more science than the wise.

Venus tuvo el azur en sus pupilas, pero su hijo no. Negros y fieros, encienden a las tórtolas tranquilas los dos ojos de Eros.

Venus had blue eyes, but her son did not. Black and fiery, they burned at peaceful love­birds those two eyes of Eros.

Los ojos de las reinas fabulosas, de las reinas magníficas y fuertes, tenían las pupilas tenebrosas que daban los amores y las muertes.

Those eyes of fabulous queens, ­­ magnificent and mighty ­­ were dark eyes shining with love and death.

Pentesilea, reina de amazonas; Judith, espada y fuerza de Betulia; Cleopatra, encantadora de coronas, la luz tuvieron de tus ojos, Julia.

Pentesilea, Amazon queen; Judith, sword of Betulia; Cleopatra, enchantress of crowns, they had your eyes, Julia.

La negra, que es más luz que la luz blanca del sol, y las azules de los cielos.

Luz que el más rojo resplandor arranca al diamante terrible de los celos.

Black, with more light than the bright light of the sun, and the azure of the heavens.

Light that the reddest splendor steals to form the terrible diamond of jealousy.

Luz negra, luz divina, luz que alegra la luz meridional, luz de las niñas, de las grandes ojeras, ¡oh luz negra que hace cantar a Pan bajo las viñas!

Black light, light divine, light that pleases, light of the South, light of little girls, great eyes to stare at, ¡oh, black light that made Pan sing beneath his grape­vines!

Prosas profanas (1896­1901)

“Para La Misma” (For the Same) experiments with short­line verse. The spare detail produces a delicate poem as much about art as Eros. The poem praises a Cuban beauty whose features evoke Japanese delicacy and mystical “there­ness”: 47

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Miré al sentarme a la mesa, bañado en la luz del día el retrato de María, la cubana japonesa.

Seated at the table, I saw, bathed in bright day­light, the portrait of Maria, my Cuban “Japonesa”.

El aire acaricia y besa, como un amante lo haría, la orgullosa bizarría de la cabellera espesa.

The air caresses and kisses like a lover she would have ­­ the proud gallantry of her luxuriant hair.

Diera un tesoro el Mikado por sentirse acariciado por princesa tan gentil,

I would give the Mikado a treasure to feel cherished by so elegant a princess,

digna de que un gran pintor la pinte junto a una flor en un vaso de marfil.

worthy to be painted, by a great artist, next a flower in a marble vase.

Prosas profanas (1896­1901)

[pic] [This attractive photo shows a young and handsome Darío in Paris.]

Darío traveled broadly as a journalist throughout Latin America and Europe. His poetry invokes Nicaragua’s pastures and ragged towns, the tarnished grandeur of Spain, the brilliant salons of Paris, and more. “Margarita” (The Daisy) evokes the French salón and its demi­monde sensuality: ¿Recuerdas que querías ser una Margarita Gautier? Fijo en mi mente tu extraño rostro está, cuando cenamos juntos, en la primera cita, en una noche alegre que nunca volverá.

The Linnet's Wings

48

Remember, you wanted to be a Margarita Gautier? your strange face is fixed in my mind, when we dined together at our first meeting, one happy night never to return.

The Linnet's Wings

Tus labios escarlatas de púrpura maldita sorbían el champaña del fino baccarat; tus dedos deshojaban la blanca margarita, «Sí... no... sí... no...» ¡y sabías que te adoraba ya!

Your lips, enscarleted a damned purple hue, sipped champagne from a fine baccarat; as you plucked apart a white daisy, “Yes…no… yes…no…” and you knew I worshipped you!

Después, ¡oh flor de Histeria! llorabas y reías; tus besos y tus lágrimas tuve en mi boca yo; tus risas, tus fragancias, tus quejas, eran mías.

Later, flower of Hysteria! Tears and laughter; I had your kisses and tears in my mouth; all your smiles, fragrances, complaints.

Y en una tarde triste de los más dulces días, la Muerte, la celosa, por ver si me querías, ¡como a una margarita de amor, te deshojó!

One sad afternoon of those sweetest days, Death, so jealous, supposing you wanted me, like a daisy of love, plucked you!

Prosas profanas (1896­1901)

[pic] [Greta Garbo and Robert “Camille”, based on Alexander Dama de Las Camelias” (1848).

Gautier, the doomed courtesan young lover. Darío’s treatment false illusions of her young lover. of Verdi’s “La Traviata”.]

Taylor in the 1936 film Dumas (son) his novel “La Garbo played Margarita pursued by her idealistic is sardonic, rejecting the The novel is the source also

“ EPITALAMIO BÁRBARO” (Barbarous Epithalamium) recalls Greek deities. The poem mixes nature celebration – “the naiad weaves her pattern in foam” with a comically tough­talking goddess: El alba aún no aparece en su gloria de oro.

Canta el mar con la música de sus ninfas en coro y el aliento del campo se va cuajando en bruma.

Teje la náyade el encaje de su espuma y el bosque inicia el himno de sus flautas de pluma.

49

Even dawn seems dimmed in its golden glory.

The sea sings its nymphs’ choral music and the fields’ sweet breath gathers in mist.

The naiad weaves her pattern in foam And the forest hymns with flutes of feathers.

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Es el momento en que el salvaje caballero se ve pasar. La tribu aúlla y el ligero caballo es un relámpago, veloz como una idea.

A su paso, asustada, se para la marea.

La náyade interrumpe la labor que ejecuta y el director del bosque detiene la batuta.

—¿Qué pasa?—desde el lecho pregunta Venus bella.

Y Apolo: —Es Sagitario que ha robado una estrella.

Now flashing before us the wild caballero ­­ the tribe howls, the light horse is a bolt of lightning, fast as a thought.

At his fearful step, the tide stands still.

The naiad halts her delicate weaving and the forest conductor sets down his baton.

“What’s up?” asks beauteous Venus from bed.

And Apollo – “Sagittarius has stolen a star.”

Prosas profanas (1896­1901)

“La Negra Dominga” (The black girl Dominga) was written in Havana. It resembles a smutty limerick jotted down in a bar but captures the vibrancy of the real thing: ¿Conocéis a la negra Dominga?

El retoño de cafre y mandinga, Es flor de ébano henchida de sol.

Ama el ocre y el rojo y el verde, Y en su boca, que besa y que muerde, tiene el ansia del beso español.

Do you know that girl black Dominga?

She’s offspring of Kafre and Mandinga ­­ an ebony flower stuffed with the sun.

She loves ocher and red and bright green, in her mouth, filled with kisses and bites, one finds lust for the bold Spaniard’s kisses.

Serpentina, fogosa y violenta, Con caricias de miel y pimienta Vibra y muestra su loca pasión: Fuegos tiene que Venus alaba Y envidiara la reina de Saba Para el lecho del rey Salomón.

She’s a serpent, wild and fierce, with caresses, sweet, hot, and spicy, she writhes with the pulse of mad passion.

Bold Venus worships her fires, and the Queen of Sheba is jealous, from the royal bed of King Salmon.

Vencedora, magnífica y fiera, Con halagos de gata y pantera Tiende al blanco su abrazo febril, Y en su boca donde el beso está loco, Muestra dientes de carne de coco Con reflejos de lácteo marfil.

Conqueror, magnificent and wild, with delights of the cat and the panther her feverish embrace longs for white men, and her mouth whose kiss drives to madness, she has teeth like meat of the coconut that shine milky­white like fine ivory.

In Havana Darío found a new source of art, anticipating the Negritude movement by decades.

3. Conquest and Resistance But Darío was foremost a Latin American, responding to the crisis of the new world Spain relinquished The Linnet's Wings 50

The Linnet's Wings

to a turbulent future. His political poetry announces the dangers of the northern Colossus. Some welcomed being handed over by a moribund Spain to a vigorous modern nation, but others feared their new master’s rapacity. The year 1898 launched issues in the Hispanic World still left unsettled. [pic] [Roosevelt rose to fame by way of his heroic and well publicized charge at San Juan Hill, Cuba, in 1898.]

Here is the middle section of “Los Cisnes” (The Swans), one of Darío’s most famous poems: Brumas septentrionales nos llenan de tristezas, se mueren nuestras rosas, se agotan nuestras palmas, casi no hay ilusiones para nuestras cabezas, y somos los mendigos de nuestras pobres almas.

September hazes fill us with sadness, our roses pass away, our palm trees decay, our heads are almost without illusions, and we go as beggars to our weary souls.

Nos predican la guerra con águilas feroces, gerifaltes de antaño revienen a los puños, mas no brillan las glorias de las antiguas hoces, ni hay Rodrigos ni Jaimes, ni hay Alfonsos ni Nuños.

They sing to us of war, of ferocious eagles, ancient indignities repaid with mighty blows; where now shine the glories of ancient heroes, of Rodrigo, of Jaime, of Alfonsos, or of Nunos?

Faltos del alimento que dan las grandes cosas, ¿qué haremos los poetas sino buscar tus lagos?

A falta de laureles son muy dulces las rosas, y a falta de victorias busquemos los halagos.

Lacking the symbols that feed grand deeds, what can poets do but seek your placid lakes?

We lack the laurels, sweet as roses, and fail in search for recognition.

51

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

La América española como la España entera fija está en el Oriente de su fatal destino; yo interrogo a la Esfinge que el porvenir espera con la interrogación de tu cuello divino.

Latin America, like Spain itself is fixed fast to its fatal destiny; I ask the Sphinx what offers hope, with the question mark formed by your divine neck.

¿Seremos entregados a los bárbaros fieros? ¿Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés? ¿Ya no hay nobles hidalgos ni bravos caballeros? ¿Callaremos ahora para llorar después?

Will we surrender to the fierce barbarians?

So many millions of us, will we speak English?

Are there no longer noblemen or brave knights?

Will we stay silent now, only to weep later?

["Los Cisnes"] Cantos de vida y esperanza, los cisnes y otros poemas (1905)

The meditation begins with the swan’s mysterious elegance ­­ their supple necks posing a question ­­ proceeds to the absence of the heroic, to a call to defy the United States, all to end in bemusement and vague hope. The middle section, shown here, depicts artists in a time of humiliation ­­ when without illusions “we go as beggars to our weary souls.” The sphinx predicts Latin America’s submission to barbarians, adopting English and rude manners, where no heroes revenge humiliations, and where a somnolent Latin America postpones its struggle to some undetermined future.

[pic] “A ROOSEVELT” confronts the “great hunter, primitive and modern” about to overwhelm “innocent America”. With his “cult of skill” and lust for “setting things ablaze”, he may destroy Latin America.]

The Linnet's Wings

52

The Linnet's Wings

A Roosevelt Eres los Estados Unidos, eres el futuro invasor de la América ingenua que tiene sangre indígena, que aún reza a Jesucristo y aún habla en español.

You’re the United States ­­ the future invader of innocent America, and indigenous people who now pray to Jesus and speak in Spanish.

Eres soberbio y fuerte ejemplar de tu raza; eres culto, eres hábil; te opones a Tolstoy.

Y domando caballos, o asesinando tigres, eres un Alejandro­Nabucodonosor.

(Eres un profesor de energía, como dicen los locos de hoy.)

Crees que la vida es incendio, que el progreso es erupción; en donde pones la bala el porvenir pones.

No.

You are superb, the mighty type of your race; you’re a cult of skill and oppose Tolstoy.

Commanding horses, or slaughtering tigers, you’re an Alexander­Nebuconezzar.

(You’re a professor of energy, as this day’s madmen declare.)

You believe that life is setting things ablaze, and that progress is eruption; wherever you go, you bring the bullet and bring the future.

No.

Los Estados Unidos son potentes y grandes.

Cuando ellos se estremecen hay un hondo temblor que pasa por las vértebras enormes de los Andes.

The United States is powerful and great.

When it shakes a deep trembling passes through the huge vertebras of the Andes.

*** Sois ricos Juntáis al culto de Hércules el culto de Mammón; y alumbrando el camino de la fácil conquista, la Libertad levanta su antorcha en Nueva York.

You are rich.

You join Hercules’ cult to that of Mammon: And lighting the road of easy conquest, Liberty raises her torch in New York.

Darío recalls Central American cultures from centuries past ­­ poets and astronomers, myth­makers and nation builders, the mighty Aztec and Inca. He celebrates a world that “lives /dreams, loves, pulsates” and foresees a Hispanic uprising against those “with Saxon eyes and savage souls”. Darío warns the invader to beware the “thousands of cubs whelped by the Spanish lion”.

53

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

[pic] [Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472) is remembered as a poet and philosopher and wise ruler of the city-state of Texcoco in pre-Columbian Mexico.

His graceful statue looks out over Mexico City.]

Mas la América nuestra, que tenía poetas desde los viejos tiempos de Netzahualcoyotl, que ha guardado las huellas de los pies del gran Baco, que el alfabeto pánico en un tiempo aprendió; que consultó los astros, que conoció la Atlántida, cuyo nombre nos llega resonando en Platón, que desde los remotos momentos de su vida vive de luz, de fuego, de perfume, de amor, la América del gran Moctezuma, del Inca, la América fragante de Cristóbal Colón, la América católica, la América española, la América en que dijo el noble Guatemoc: «Yo no estoy en un lecho de rosas»; esa América que tiembla de huracanes y que vive de Amor, hombres de ojos sajones y alma bárbara, vive.

Y sueña. Y ama, y vibra; y es la hija del Sol. Tened cuidado. ¡Vive la América española!

Hay mil cachorros sueltos del León Español.

[Sois Ricos] Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905) The Linnet's Wings

54

But our America, that had poets from the old time of Netzahualcoyoti, that guarded the footprints of the great Bacchus, that at one time learned the panic alphabet; that consulted the stars, that knew Atlantis, whose name comes back to us in Plato, that since the remote moments of its life lived in the light of fire, of perfume, and of love, the America of great Montezuma, of Inca, the America fragrant of Christopher Columbus, Catholic America, Spanish America, the America of which noble Guatemoc said: “I am not in a bed of roses”; that America that shakes from Hurricanes and lives in love, (oh you with Saxon eyes and savage souls) lives, dreams, loves, pulsates; daughter of the Sun. Take care. Spanish America lives!

The Spanish Lion whelped thousands of cubs.

The Linnet's Wings

[pic] [In 1979, the Sandinista Movement cast out the US-backed Somoza family that had ruled Nicaragua for 52 years. Its leader, and soon after President, Daniel Ortega, is one of the “thousands of cubs the Spanish Lion whelped.”]

“A COLÓN” (To Columbus) imagines Columbus’ dismay in witnessing the New World become “a hysteric /with nervous convulsions.” Now indigenous peoples war upon one another in “fraternal fields of blood and ashes.” Cannons and battle trumpets issue the laws, and people with Mestizo mouths drink French wine and sing the Marseilles. Latin America is infested with the “ambitious and treacherous”, as Conrad documented in Nostromo (1904). The conclusion of the poem recalls the brave caciques and their warriors; the world Columbus, to his misery, destroyed: Libre como las águilas, vieran los montes pasar los aborígenes por los boscajes, persiguiendo los pumas y los bisontes con el dardo certero de sus carcajes.

Free as eagles, they looked on from the mountains, those aborigines passing through the forests, pursuing pumas and bison with the unerring dart from their quivers.

Que más valiera el jefe rudo y bizarro que el soldado que en fango sus glorias finca, que ha hecho gemir al zipa bajo su carro o temblar las heladas momias del Inca.

What worth now the rude and peculiar chief when in the mud of their farmlands soldiers made them groan under the caisson’s wheels, shaking even the frozen mummies of the Inca.

La cruz que nos llevaste padece mengua; y tras encanalladas revoluciones, la canalla escritora mancha la lengua que escribieron Cervantes y Calderones.

The cross you brought us suffers decline; and through swirling revolutions, the swinish writer stains the language in which Cervantes and Calderon wrote.

55

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Cristo va por las calles flaco y enclenque, Barrabás tiene esclavos y charreteras, y en las tierras de Chibcha, Cuzco y Palenque han visto engalonadas a las panteras.

Christ staggers the streets thin and sickly, Barrabas has slaves, sports epaulettes, and rules the lands of Chibcha, Cuzco and Palenque, once swarming with panthers.

Duelos, espantos, guerras, fiebre constante en nuestra senda ha puesto la suerte triste: ¡Cristóforo Colombo, pobre Almirante, ruega a Dios por el mundo que descubriste!

Sorrows, terrors, wars, constant fevers have put bad luck in our path: Cristopher Columbus, poor Admiral, pray to God for the world you discovered!

El canto Errante (1907)

[pic] [Darío’s 1913 satiric portrait of New York City, La Gran Cosmopolis anticipates Brecht’s opera “Mahagonny” (1930). New York City’s sky-scrapers, fifty-stories high, typify the massing of economic and cultural power and the global reach of the new colossus.]

"La Gran Cosmopolis" (excerpts)

Casas de cincuenta pisos, servidumbre de color, millones de circuncisos, máquinas, diarios, avisos y ¡dolor, dolor, dolor!

Fifty story buildings, a mass of colored servants, swarms of the circumcized, machines, daily papers, notices And pain! pain! pain! ***

The Linnet's Wings

56

The Linnet's Wings

Todos esos millonarios viven en mármoles parios, con residuos de Calvarios, y es roja, roja su flor.

No es la rosa que el Sol lleva ni la azucena que nieva, sino el clavel que se abreva en la sangre del dolor.

All these millionaires live in marble splendour with but a residue of Calvary, with its red, red flower.

It is not the rose that shines in the sun, nor the Lily that whitens the day, but the carnation that quenches its thirst in the blood of pain.

Allí pasa el chino, el ruso, el kalmuko y el boruso; y toda obra y todo uso a la tierra nueva es fiel, pues se ajusta y se acomoda toda fe y manera toda, a lo que ase, lima y poda el sin par Tío Samuel.

There passes the Chinese, the Russian, the Kalmuck, the Prussian; and all work and all use serves the millionaire's new’s world; there, all faith in every way adjusts and accommodates to whatever grooms, primps and polishes peerless Uncle Samuel.

New York, 1913

4. Tests of the Spirit In “A PHOCÁS, EL CAMPESINO” (To Phocas, the Farmer), a simple farmer addresses his dying son.

The father accepts his son’s fate and clings to his hope for justice in the world to come. His acceptance is childlike, and thereby painful: Phocás el campesino, hijo mío, que tienes en apenas escasos meses de vida, tantos dolores en tus ojos que esperan tantos llantos por el fatal pensar que revelan tus sienes...

Phocas, the farmer, my son, who has seen in hardly a few scarce months of life, so many pains bring so many tears and fatal thoughts your brows reveal…

Tarda a venir a este dolor adonde vienes, a este mundo terrible en duelos y en espantos; duerme bajo los Ángeles, sueña bajo los Santos, que ya tendrás la Vida para que te envenenes...

You come late to this pain, to this terrible world of griefs and frights; now sleep with the angels, dream with the saints, now you will have the Life that was poisoned…

Sueña, hijo mío, todavía, y cuando crezcas,

Dream, my son, still, and when you awake, 57

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

perdóname el fatal don de darte la vida que yo hubiera querido de azul y rosas frescas; pues tú eres la crisálida de mi alma entristecida, y te he de ver, en medio del triunfo que merezcas renovando el fulgor de mi psique abolida.

forgive me this fatal life I gave you… though I wished you blue skies and fresh roses; now you are the chrysalis of my grieving soul, and I will see you, in triumph you deserve, renew the brightness of my broken spirit.

Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905)

Darío’s life was turbulent, from his ragged upbringing, through several marriages, endless travel and failure to acquire financial security, to the alcoholism that killed him. He had friends and admirers, but his poems reveal an undercurrent of despair. The hopefulness of his earlier poetry turns to gloom, recalling Hamlet’s tormented questionings. Two extraordinary nocturnes, voice with great eloquence his growing disillusionment:

NOCTURNO

Nocturne

Quiero expresar mi angustia en versos que abolida dirán mi juventud de rosas y de ensueños, y la desfloración amarga de mi vida por un vasto dolor y cuidados pequeños.

I want to express my anguish in verses that abolish my youth of roses and dreams, and the bitter deflowering of my life by vast sadness and tiny cares.

Y el viaje a un vago Oriente por entrevistos barcos, y el grano de oraciones que floreció en blasfemia, y los azoramientos del cisne entre los charcos y el falso azul nocturno de inquerida bohemia.

The voyage to vague hopes in leaky boats, the grain of prayers that bloomed in blasphemy, the confusion of swans among the puddles, and the false blue nocturne of a bohemian bitch.

Lejano clavicordio que en silencio y olvido no diste nunca al sueño la sublime sonata, huérfano esquife, árbol insigne, obscuro nido que suavizó la noche de dulzura de plata...

The distant clavichord, silent and forgotten, never produced a dream­like, sublime sonata, orphaned skiff, illustrious tree, obscure nest that softened the night with sweet silver …

Esperanza olorosa a hierbas frescas, trino del ruiseñor primaveral y matinal, azucena tronchada por un fatal destino, rebusca de la dicha, persecución del mal...

Odorous hope of fresh herbs, trill of the spring­morning nightingale, the lily cut off by fatal destiny, remains of happiness, persecuted by evil…

El ánfora funesta del divino veneno que ha de hacer por la vida la tortura interior,

The fatal amphora of divine venom that has made life an inner torture,

The Linnet's Wings

58

The Linnet's Wings

la conciencia espantable de nuestro humano cieno y el horror de sentirse pasajero, el horror

the frightful awareness of our human mud, the horrid feeling of impermanence, the horror

de ir a tientas, en intermitentes espantos, hacia lo inevitable, desconocido, y la pesadilla brutal de este dormir de llantos ¡de la cual no hay más que Ella que nos despertará!

of groping along in endless terrors, towards the inevitable unknown, and the brutal nightmare of this sleep of tears from which the soul never awakens.

Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905) Darío satirizes his “youth of roses and dreams”, endless voyages to nowhere, religious devotion turned to blasphemy, his swans and salons proving illusory, the nightingale’s trill and the pathetic lily cut off by fate. But the human condition overwhelms him, “the frightful awareness of our human mud”, “groping along in endless terrors”, and “the brutal nightmare of this sleep of tears.”

[pic] [This forceful image of Darío is the most regularly reproduced on book covers and at websites.]

Another Nocturne invests a common malady with tragic grandeur: Los que auscultasteis el corazón de la noche, los que por el insomnio tenaz habéis oído el cerrar de una puerta, el resonar de un coche lejano, un eco vago, un ligero ruido...

Those who count their heart­beats at night, those insomniacs who hang on every sound ­­ the closing of a door, the rumble of a far­off car, a vague echo, a slight noise…

En los instantes del silencio misterioso, cuando surgen de su prisión los olvidados, en la hora de los muertos, en la hora del reposo,

In those moments of mysterious silence, when forgotten thoughts escape their prison, in the dead of night, the hour of repose, 59

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

¡sabréis leer estos versos de amargor impregnados!...

then read these verses printed in bitterness!...

Como en un vaso vierto en ellos mis dolores de lejanos recuerdos y desgracias funestas, y las tristes nostalgias de mi alma, ebria de flores, y el duelo de mi corazón, triste de fiestas.

It’s as if I poured in a jar all my grieving from distant memories and ill­fated disgraces, and my soul’s sad nostalgia, drunk with flowers, and my heart’s ache, sad from celebration.

Y el pesar de no ser lo que yo hubiera sido, y la pérdida del reino que estaba para mí, el pensar que un instante pude no haber nacido, ¡y el sueño que es mi vida desde que yo nací!

Regret at not being what I should have been, loss of the kingdom meant for me, the thought that by accident I might not have been born, and the dream that is my life since I was born!

Todo esto viene en medio del silencio profundo en que la noche envuelve la terrena ilusión, y siento como un eco del corazón del mundo que penetra y conmueve mi propio corazón.

All this comes amidst deep silence when night envelops our earthly illusion, and I feel like an echo from the world’s heart that keeps rhythm and disturbs my own.

Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905) The Nocturne speaks for all who suffer insomnia, poring over regrets and the grinding thought that it all comes to nothing, that “La vida es sueño” and our very life is accidental, and even our heartbeat merely an echo of the world’s heart throbbing persistently with no reason we can discern. “Thanatos” supplies the final word: En medio del camino de la Vida... dijo Dante. Su verso se convierte: En medio del camino de la Muerte.

In the middle of Life’s pathway… said Dante; but his verse really means: In the middle of our journey to Death.

Y no hay que aborrecer a la ignorada emperatriz y reina de la Nada.

Por ella nuestra tela esta tejida, y ella en la copa de los sueños vierte un contrario nepente: ¡ella no olvida!

There is no erasing or ignoring the empress and queen of Nothingness.

By her our end is woven, as she stirs fate in her cup of dreams and the potion: she never forgets!

Cantos de Vida y Esperanza (1905)

The Linnet's Wings

60

The Linnet's Wings

[pic] [Momotombo is active volcano located on Lake Managua and serves as a proud symbol of Nicaragua. Darío’s poem (1907) seeks strength and wisdom from “the father of fire and stone”… “I beg /for the secret of your flames, your mystery of harmony, /the initiation you could give; /I thought of you in the immensity of Ossa and Pelion, /that there are titans above in the constellations, /and below beneath earth and sea.”]

Bibliography: Darío, Ruben. Azul (Chile, 1988), Barcelona, 2012, Spanish Edition, www.linkgua­­digital.com. ___________. Prosas Profanas. (Madrid 1901), Biblioteca de Grandes Escritores. Spanish Edition, Kindle. ___________. Cantos de Vida y Esperanza. (Madrid 1905), ed. Perez de Tudela. Penguin edition (Kindle). ___________. Selected Writing. Ed. Ilan Stavans. Trans. Hurley, Simon, and White. Penguin books, 2005. (Kindle). ___________. La Vida de Rubén Darío Escrito Por El Mismo. Madrid, 1916. Spanish Edition, Kindle. ___________. http://www.poesi.as/Ruben_Dario.htm provides a useful though incomplete compilation of Darío’s poetry.

All translations in this essay are by Stephen Zelnick. Stephen Zelnick is Emeritus Professor at Temple University, living in retirement in Puerto Rico.

61

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

62

The Linnet's Wings

Dolores Tyler returned from the local library on a particularly windy evening. She opened the door of her Chevy just as a gust of wind whipped by nearly wrenching her arm out of its socket. The wind ripped the door from her hand and slapped the Chevy’s full weight into the passenger side of the big black Explorer beside her. She sat there for a moment pretending not to notice the huge dent in the Explorer. Her heart was beating wildly.

Her first instinct was to move her vehicle immediately to another location in the parking lot of the apartment complex. No one would suspect her as the psychopath who would hit someone’s car and run off. After all, she was treasurer of the condo association. Dolores considered herself a pillar of the community although it did seem deceitful not to leave a note at least. Dolores, a tiny sparrow of a woman, easily intimidated, was dismayed to learn that she, indeed, could have a dark side. She moved her car some twenty yards away and didn’t look back.

Dolores told her husband, George, about the accident. He lectured her in his blustery way about the “right thing to do.” He was always pontificating about the importance of morals and ethics and justice and transparency. “Transparency” was a term neither Dolores nor the five year old twins fully understood no matter how many times he explained it. Dolores watched her husband’s lips move noticing for the first time how enormous his head was. His whole body seemed to spill over the brown recliner like a rich chocolate pudding. She wondered why she’d ever married the man. She allowed even darker images to emerge. How would George look with a colander on his head or hanging from a rafter in the family room?

The next morning, George opened the door to his new Lexus. He couldn’t miss the huge gash and red paint residue on the driver’s side door. The car to his left was a ruby­ red Honda, red as George’s face. He picked up a large river rock and bashed the windshield. He slashed one tire, lit a cigar, smiled and drove to his office where his new law clerk greeted him. “Good morning, Your Honor,” she said. ~~~

63

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

64

The Linnet's Wings

Photos by C. Mannheim IbidemImages@yahoo.com GALILEO In this world of illusion I admire your courage to kneel and to lie and to live.

Beate Sigriddaughter

65

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

66

The Linnet's Wings

67

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

68

The Linnet's Wings

69

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

70

The Linnet's Wings

71

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

72

The Linnet's Wings

73

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

74

The Linnet's Wings

n a website I visit from time to time, you can click on such things as Rake, Steid Cairt, and Airtins tae ither Wabsteids. This is the Scots language website Scots Online. 'Rake' could be trendily translated as 'Google' ­ but literally it's 'search'. The 'Steid Cairt' is the site map, and 'Airtins tae ither Wabsteids' means links to other websites.¹ Such coinage of technical terms in Scots is, to say the least, rather artificial, since no­one says in conversation, ‘D’ye ken the Linnet’s Wings wabsteid?’

The spoken language still exists, mainly in rural areas and small towns, but in a diluted form. It’s not yet a dead language, but it’s not ‘alive’ enough to assimilate coinages and borrowings, and bits and pieces of its vocabulary are easily lost in favour of their English equivalents.

Some would say it’s as good as dead. The trouble is, it won’t lie down. Throughout the twentieth century, right up to the present, there have been writers—especially poets—who have used it in their work, often with astonishing vibrancy. As the spoken language becomes more and more sparse, literary Scots seems to have gone from strength to strength. It is this surprising fact that prompts me to write this essay.

I want to share a few samples of the Scots poetry I love and admire —poetry which is part of the poetic heritage of the British Isles, but may for obvious reasons be a little challenging to those not familiar with the language. Since Scots has been with me since childhood, and I can read it as easily as I read English, it's difficult to know how comprehensible it is to English hearers or readers, or to Americans or Australians. If my notes and translations are too obvious, too spelled out, I apologise. Contrariwise, I hope they're spelled out enough!

First, a mini­treatise on the language. Then the poems.

The Leid Here's a sample of Scots first of all, a familiar text to give us a flavour of the language. The English version that follows is more or less a literal translation.

1 The Lord is my herd, nae want sal fa' me: 2 He louts me till ligg amang green howes; he airts me atowre by the lown watirs: 3 He waukens my saul; he weises me roun, for his ain name's sake, intil right roddins.

4 Na! tho' I gang thro' the deadmirk­dail; e'en thar, sal I dread nae skaithin: for yersel are nar­ by me; yer stok an' yer stay haud me baith fu' cheerie.

5 My buird ye hae hansell'd in face o' my faes; ye hae drookit my head wi' oyle; my bicker is fu' an' skailin.

6 E'en sae, sal gude­guidin an' gude­gree gang wi' me, ilk day o' my livin; an' evir mair syne, i' the Lord's ain howff, at lang last, sal I mak bydan.

75

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

1.The Lord is my shepherd, no want shall befall me.

2.He makes me to lie among green pastures; he leads me beside the still waters.

3He awakens my soul; he guides me [round] for his own name's sake, into right paths.

4. No! though I walk through the death­dark valley; even there, I shall fear no hurt: for you are near me; both your rod and your staff keep me very cheerful.

5.My table you have bestowed in the presence of my enemies; you have anointed my head with oil; my cup is full and spilling over.

6.Surely shall goodness [good guidance] and mercy [good reward] go with me, every day of my life; and for ever, in the Lord's own house, at long last, shall I make my home.

This Scots version of the 23rd Psalm, or one very like it, would be commonly heard in churches at any time up to the 19th century. Scots was also the language of the laws and of the law courts—that is, used by judges and lawyers as well as defendants. It was a 'complete' language in the sense that it was used throughout society.

It began as a variant of Northern Anglo­Saxon—just as Anglo­Saxon in turn had begun as a variant or dialect of the Northern Germanic language spoken by the Saxons before they migrated across the North Sea. Virtually all literature not written in Gaelic was written in Scots. Even in its heyday there was always some vocabulary shared with English, but in the 17th century mutual comprehension between Scots and English speakers would have been difficult.2 Since then its status has declined.

Even so, it's still widely taught in schools, not merely as a salvage operation but much more importantly because of the quality of the literature that has been written in Scots from the late Middle Ages to the present. The literary tradition is so strong that no teacher working in Scotland can reasonably justify its omission from the curriculum. Every teacher of English literature has to be a teacher of English and Scots literature.

During my thirty­odd years of teaching English and Scots, I found that most Scottish schoolchildren enjoyed poems and stories in Scots. For younger children there's a whole genre of 'bairnsangs', and for senior pupils there's the work of Burns, the Scots short stories of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the astonishingly rich Scots poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid and others in the twentieth century.

In the classroom, the language itself presents little difficulty. There are always some obsolete words, or some regional words, that the children don't recognise, but there's always a glossary to help them with these. And even if they don't speak the whole language of the text in front of them, in some indefinable way it always seems a 'natural' language for most of them, like a second language heard and spoken from infancy. In any case their engagement with the stories and poems tends to overcome any linguistic problems that remain.

The Makars ­ Burns Arguably the greatest writer in Scots is Robert Burns—though he has his rivals. Despite calumnies that are still sometimes uttered about his supposed drunkenness and promiscuity, Burns is profoundly admired and respected among Scots. The project he undertook in the last years of his life, which he did without payment as a labour of love, was to enrich and secure for all time the heritage of Scottish song.

The Linnet's Wings

76

The Linnet's Wings

In a time of failing health, and increasing poverty after he had to give up his farm at Ellisland near Dumfries, he contributed more than 300 songs to two major collections published in Edinburgh—songs that are still sung by professional and amateur singers, in concert performances, at weddings and funerals, and while gardening or doing the housework.

Burns had a genius for a very special art that few poets or composers have been able to master—the rare skill, not of setting a poem to music as Schubert did so superbly, but of putting words to an existing tune.

In just this way, to an old folk tune that could be played on the fiddle he put these words: Summer's a pleasant time, Flowers of ev'ry colour; The water rins o'er the heugh, And I long for my true lover!

Aye waukin, O, Waukin still and weary: Sleep I can get nane, For thinking on my dearie.

When I sleep I dream, When I wauk I'm eerie; Sleep I can get nane, For thinking on my dearie.

Lanely night comes on, All the lave are sleepin: I think on my bonny lad And I bleer my een wi greetin.

Heugh (pron. hyuch) ­ rock, crag; waukin ­ waking; the lave ­ the rest, the others; bleer ­ inflame3 Burns produced a rich treasury of songs like this ­ and an equally rich repository of comic and satirical songs.

He was also a great comic writer and satirist. There's no better example of his satire than Address to the Deil, of which a few snippets follow. Remember the poem was written in an age when the Devil was no mere fantasy figure; when a minister could put real anxiety into the hearts of his congregation by telling them Satan was writing in his book the names of all the drinkers, fornicators and intermittent church attenders in the parish. I don't think at that time belief in the actual existence—indeed, immanent presence—of the Devil was anything like universal, but it was widespread.

Burns ironically places under the poem's title a quotation from Milton's Paradise Lost ­ 77

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

O Prince, O chief of many throned powers, That led th'embattled Seraphim to war... then immediately launches into: O thou, whatever title suit thee!

Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie, Wha in yon cavern grim an' sooty Closed under hatches, Spairges about the brunstane cootie To scaud poor wretches!

Clootie­ cloven; spairges ­ splashes (implying, in a clumsy, messy way); brunstane cootie ­ brimstone bowl; scaud ­ scald. (A cootie can be several kinds of container, including a chamber­pot. I like to think that was among the meanings Burns intended.)

Satan's 'real name' is included, but the rest are impudent nicknames; and the description of Hell is a purely comic scene far removed from Dante or Milton. The derisive tone of this opening gambit is pretty clear.

So far the poem's speaker, for all he talks so insolently, nevertheless seems to assume the Devil exists. At the same time the poem is infused with such irony that anyone who so blatantly thumbs his nose at the Devil must be more than half certain of his chimeric status. As the poem develops the 'address' to this shadowy figure becomes much more nuanced. We hear how the Devil appears in many forms, including the Miltonic—as a roaring lion, or riding the 'strong­winged tempest'. This is the fearful creator of all evil, God's adversary, who represents the terror of eternal punishment. Burns gives the Devil a good build­up, especially his capacity to assume cunning disguises; but then comes the deliberate anti­climax: Ae dreary, windy, winter night, The stars shot down wi sklentan light, Wi you, mysel, I gat a fright Ayont the loch: Ye, like a rash­buss, stood in sight, Wi wavin sugh.

The cudgel in my neive did shake, Each bristl'd hair stood like a stake, When wi an eldritch, stoor quaick, quaick, Amang the springs, Awa ye squatter'd like a drake, On whistling wings.

The Linnet's Wings

78

The Linnet's Wings

sklentan ­ shimmering; ayont­ on the other side of; sugh­ sigh, or the sound of a gust of wind; neive­ fist.

I remember one winter night, the poet tells Satan affably, you did give me a bit of a fright, when you assumed the form of a wild drake rustling a clump of reeds (rash­buss) down by the loch and then taking off with 'an eldritch, stoor quaick, quaick' (an unearthly, harsh quack­quack). So with God's adversary now in the form of a quacking duck, we begin to see his power diminishing. In fact ... dare we think the unthinkable? Can it be that it's not Satan in the form of a wild duck in the reeds ... that after all it's only a duck?

Later in the poem Burns gives a lyrical description of Adam and Eve in Eden, and takes the Devil to task for interfering: Then you, ye auld, snick­drawing dog!

Ye cam to Paradise incog, An' played on man a cursed brogue, (Black be your fa'!)

An' gied the infant warld a shog, Maist ruined a'.

You old cat­burglar, he tells Satan no less amiably than before ('snick­drawing' means stealthily pulling a door­latch or bolt), you entered Paradise incognito, played a filthy trick (brogue) on humanity, gave the infant world a bit of a shake (shog), and ... here's the punch line ... maist ruined a'. Almost spoiled everything. Almost. Burns's Adam and Eve are fellow human beings who should have been left alone to found the human race, without interference from the despicable Auld Hornie ­ or, for that matter, from the heavy­handed, authoritarian God who evicted them from their beautiful and fertile land. All this egregious meddling, however, could do no more than almost destroy the human spirit. It was a near thing, but less harm was done than we sometimes think.

After casting up a few more of the Devil's misdemeanours, the poet raises the possibility that he himself is bound for Hell.

An' now, auld Cloots, I ken ye're thinkin, A certain bardie's rantin, drinkin, Some luckless hour will send him linkin To your black pit; But faith! he'll turn a corner jinkin, An' cheat you yet.

79

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Linkin ­ hurrying; jinkin ­ dodging.

As the poem proceeds, Satan is gradually and inexorably reduced to a mere trickster, a con­man.

Once you see through him he's finished; he can't wind you up any more. Burns's satire in Address to the Deil ­ we might say his good humour too, for although it hits the spot it's very genial at the same time, a joshing humour—is an authentic voice of the Enlightenment in an age of superstition.

The Makars ­ MacDiarmid In 1925 a young man called Christopher Murray Grieve produced one of those books, like Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, after which the literary scene is never the same again. Under the pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid, he published Sangshaw (Song­festival), which kick­started what has ever since been called a renaissance in Scots literature and language. The influence of this collection of twenty­seven poems, and MacDiarmid's subsequent work over the next fifty years, has been massive. Here's just one of the poems from Sangshaw:

The Watergaw Ae weet forenicht i the yowe­trummle I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi its chitterin licht ayont the on­ding; An I thocht o the last wild look ye gied Afore ye deed!

There was nae reek i' the laverock's hoose That nicht ­ an' nane i' mine; But I hae thocht o' that foolish licht Ever sin' syne; An' I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then.

For readers unfamiliar with Scots, there's quite a lot of explaining to do. But I hope that if I can explain clearly and carefully enough, readers will be able to appreciate this short poem which uses the Scots language so immaculately, and must surely be one of the finest modern lyrical poems in any language.

Stanza 1. The first line needs a careful commentary. 'Ae weet forenicht i the yowe­trummle' ­ One wet early evening during a cold spell just after the sheep­shearing. The 'yow­trummle' (literally 'ewe­ tremble') is, or used to be, a common country expression—like 'Indian summer' but a sort of opposite to that, a cold spell in Spring when the poor shorn sheep were exposed to bitter winds.

The Linnet's Wings

80

The Linnet's Wings

The rest of the stanza translates: I saw that fleeting thing, a rainbow with its shivering light, beyond the rain­squall; and I thought about the last wild look you gave before you died.

Stanza 2. "There was nae reek i' the laverock's hoose/ that nicht, an' nane i' mine' ­ there was no smoke in the skylark's house/ that night, and none in mine'. The skylark's house could be its nest, or it might be the sky, that 'most excellent canopy, the air' where the lark is so much at home. If there's smoke, there's a fire—maybe a peat­fire; there's warmth, food and drink, and company. All's well. But the night she died all the joy seemed to have gone from the poet's house, from his heart, even from his natural surroundings.

But that light, and the poet's feelings about it which he thought foolish at the time, have never left him. And because of it, he begins to understand that last look she gave.

'What your look meant then' is ineffable; any attempt to give a pat answer to the question 'What did it mean?' would fall short not only of the poem's meaning, but of its depth of feeling too. 'I know what your look meant' is an intuitive knowing. It is bound up with the rainbow, the storm, our joy of living in the world and our grief at leaving it ­ and that remarkable thing that sometimes happens to us when something accidental, something observed in a passing moment, becomes an epiphany.

As much as anything else, it's the astonishing quality of work like this in Scots that keeps the language alive. In the far future, even if nobody speaks it any more than Chaucer's English is spoken now, the work of the makars is unlikely to be forgotten.

*** ¹ For those who are as intrigued by words as I am, here's a lengthy but fascinating footnote. The everyday use of 'rake' in Scots refers to looking for something among a whole lot of other stuff, say in a drawer; you rake with your fingers to try to turn up the thing you're looking for. The Scottish National Dictionary gives this meaning, but also the meaning 'to look into, to investigate'.

(On Gaelic websites, 'Search' is 'Rannsaich', pronounced 'ransach' or 'ransack' if you can't manage the 'ch'. The Gaelic and English words have the same Old Norse origin in 'rannsaka', literally a house search. It's not hard to imagine what a bunch of Vikings just off the longboat meant by a 'house search'.

In these more civilised times we can all rannsaich the Internet for information ­ yet another word for Google.)

The word 'steid' is not far removed from 'stead' as in 'homestead'. In Scots usage, however, it tends to mean a site on which a building is to be erected.

'Cairt' is related to the 'cart' in 'cartography', and to 'chart'. The English and Scots words have their common root in Latin carta, a sheet of paper or parchment. But for a sheet of paper with roads, rivers 81

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

82

The Linnet's Wings

and towns marked on it, English has used the word 'map' from Latin 'mappa', originally meaning a printed or painted cloth such as a towel or napkin.

'Airtins' is the least recognisable word, as it derives from the Gaelic for 'quarter', i.e. compass point. In Scots it means a direction, or a route taken on a journey. ² How different are languages? Some languages are cognate: much of their vocabulary is from the same origin.

English is basically a Germanic language, with of course many words taken from Latin, Greek and a host of other languages.

So, as far as simpler words are concerned, we can guess that Mann is man, and Maus is mouse, and even Strasse is street.

(Though Dutch 'straat' is closer.) So we have to say that English, Dutch and German have words in common, any variations in spelling and pronunciation being not enough to prevent us recognising that they are the same words.

English: My house is next to the church. Dutch : Mijn huis is naast de kerk. German: Mein Haus ist neben der Kirche. Scots: My hoose is neist tae the kirk. A family of languages?

3 Burns's

language in this song looks more English than it sounds. All the best singers of Burns songs give words their characteristic Scottish pronunciation, e.g. (in the first verse) simmer, pleesant, flooers, watter. 'O'er' is pronounced 'ower' rhyming with 'tower'. In Address to the Deil, note especially the sound of the rhymes nicht, licht, fricht, sicht (spelt night, light, fright, sight). The vowel sounds in these words are also different from English ­ not long 'i' as in 'bite', but short 'i' as in 'bit'. ­ James Graham.

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to "Carcanet Press" for allowing publication of "The Watergaw" by Hugh MacDiarmid

83

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

84

The Linnet's Wings

mum cut it after we found his body small reminder, she said put it in a little white box porcelain, chequered lid as if all the moves made are laid bare within now sits on a shelf single lock, curved almost like a smile waiting for you to remember

85

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

86

The Linnet's Wings

Trigger­blind, the loner targeted his peers, and kept on shooting by impulse, those he disowned, as the children of an original imprinted sin. Their spilled blood expiated his pent­up guilt, hidden, until, he, blood­eyed, shot himself with his sin­eating gun.

87

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

88

The Linnet's Wings

Old feet, coal in my stockings, leave skid marks on the ground.

It’s a finely-tuned dance on stiff ankles, a wobble of black scuffs on the white cement leading home.

Your faded specter sidesteps dust-filled cracks in the sidewalks as we walk hand-in-hand again discussing the arrangement of your remains, the yellowed bric-a-brac of photos left on the shelf by our apartment door.

They reflect the long-shadowed memories under my eyes of a time when the black and white of youth framed our world view with surprising moments of color.

We had hung so many over the years on lamp-lit walls in narrow halls of life’s first foyer, a space I now only shuffle through on the slow heels of recollection as I make my way to bed without you.

89

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

90

The Linnet's Wings

A father is a curiosity of birds’ eggs unstable in light to be touched only with bristle never exposed to water a father is an antlered head from the Tableau Hall nostrils swabbed, eyes dusted teeth burnished softly a father is an old bird’s nest swelling inside the chimney where moths will graze and also a faded coral growing mould under glass a father is a death watch beetle that grinds through words leaving earth behind in grey ash circles.

91

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

92

The Linnet's Wings

Near the end of her life though only a year older than I am now my mother began to sit alone tending to her hands (big as a man’s, thick-jointed, meaty, quick to wrap a parcel tight as a corset, behead hesitant roses, tap out many hundred words a minute) with orange sticks, emery boards an apothecary of bottles on the chair arm, her slow concentrated attention on layer after layer, each darker and more clotted, with their acidic stink – oblivious to the evening’s passing.

Thirty years tonight she died. I remember those gaudy hands; a cigarette’s slow burn, a whisky tumbler’s surly flame their armoury.

93

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

94

The Linnet's Wings

We all travel there one day, snagged in the shock of the moment, lost in the emptiness of now.

We go alone without maps, entering a tunnel we cannot see where there is no magnetic north and even the borders are disputed, we cross them without recognition and gain no ground.

There is no language for afterwards, and no thought of tomorrow. as the horizon shrinks to a dot on the retina.

Time slows to a pace we do not recognise, so we take small steps, breathe, wade through days.

I have been there as witness, it is a hard country to understand.

You must adjust your perspective, feel their loss, helplessness, rage and even as a visitor, know it as your own.

95

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

"Not long now," the clock ticked, towering over the garden below.

"It will soon be over," yawned the sundial as he stretched and reached surrounded by green lawn.

"I could do with a break," sighed the stone goblin sitting cross-legged on the wall.

"To listen to silence," gurgled the brook, splashing over the rocks to the pool below.

"The breeze will soon pass and I'll miss her sweet song," murmured the grand willow.

"I have flown high and seen from afar," the blackbird called, "the red sky and thunderous mushroom heading our way."

The clock tocked, "It will soon be over and I fear for too long."

The Linnet's Wings

96

The Linnet's Wings

97

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The notice board, Biggest of four such warnings Along South Gare breakwater To Tees Mouth lighthouse, Round the back of abandoned Steelworks, did not mince words.

DANGER WARNING TO TRESPASSERS STEEP DROP STONES SLIPPERY ROUGH SEA LEAVE IMMEDIATELY Cold, grey Easter Sunday, Wind-whipped rain.

We came to visit boulders and jagged, Polluted, rocks from which, when waves Are easterly, John surfs at the point Where River Tees meets North Sea; With freighters, some the size Of apartment blocks, Entering or leaving Middlesbrough docks And the occasional seal for company.

The Linnet's Wings

98

The Linnet's Wings

99

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

End-of-the-day snowflakes shimmer past my kitchen window, the softness of each one a tiny white lie building a quilt over autumn’s carcass.

Bare trees slice the sky into jagged pieces of beyond and the frozen milkweed is an open-mouthed exhalation of seeds on silk.

This house is colder, empty of children. The dog ages faster than I do. Ruby is the grande dame of Irish terriers, eyes rheumy, bones sharp beneath her fur. She waits near the door until my husband walks through, snow on his shoulders.

I long for my kids at this time of day, miss how they hurtled through the door with friends behind them, tossed backpacks onto the floor, spilled noise everywhere.

Ruby would bark, wag her whole body, pull her lips into a canine smile.

Now she limps to greet my husband, her stance hopeful but I’m not sure why. She wheezes, follows him upstairs, gets between us as we hug.

We discuss dinner glad to be in for the night.

When did we slide into these bodies whose motion is reduced to such a small orbit? I yearn for friends

The Linnet's Wings

100

The Linnet's Wings

to fill empty dining chairs, a lit fireplace, something to warm this skeletal family.

I put my hand on Ruby's head, feel how prominent her skull has become. I mourn how time speeds up, how my body settles beneath shimmering memories.

101

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

102

The Linnet's Wings

I do not sing of brave soldiers who soldier weary on.

Leaves hurtle through the air like fleeing birds over straining guns, marching boots.

These soldiers soldier on to other soldiers soldiering on to them.

But I do not sing of soldiers.

I sing into the hurricane between them.

Into the mouth they march leaving all behind, lovers, mothers, dreaming children.

Into the hurricane wide eyed they go, between dumping each moment and the hope of the next: a still beat the clarity of being.

103

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

104

The Linnet's Wings

there’s a big white oak my spirit tree leaning over Highway D (the Old St Louis Road) near traintracks where a locomotive sat rusting in my youth I pass it on my way to work glance up the hill where my family lived— Spencer Brydon’s ghost visage of another self

Halloween – decorated yards looking up at windows into glowing warmth— serenity out of reach

for a short time in Denver I stayed with my dad and fishing alone by lantern in reeds of an urban lake I saw through backglass into a home venetian blinds part drawn a girl on a couch wrapped in a blanket a momentary picture— these many years still with me symbol of comfort safety, solace, and warmth years later in a dream I woke back home got up off someone’s lawn walked up Forster Street houses more elaborate than in waking life 105

I still drive by my oak my hill – my tracks and at night wander streets float channels— one evening I dreamt my dad and brother and I were on the Current— it’s in Missouri as were we but as we loaded our boat I could see the Rockies sun glowing off snowy caps a rosy orange (an evening color) and I told my father that it reminded me of sunsets in Lilbourn where as a child I’d stayed with his father— and we boarded the boat passing big white houses shady porches lawns stretching down to the water and I knew when we finished we’d go back to a home just like one of them— where my mother waited and we all loved one another The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

106

The Linnet's Wings

Your smoky voice, a silent statement of stale cigarettes, clings to curtains of currents that no longer stir between us.

It’s like those wallflower ghosts, ethereal echoes of our fleeting youth, that drift in now and then to jazz the floor with solo footsteps.

But the stiff dance of an age-graveled mind grinds underfoot the grit of forgetfulness until time, a door-slammed memory, once again shatters the shaded window of my heart.

And yet, late at night, always late at night, when the bourbon has melted all the ice and the crystal dish overflows with ashes and stubbed cigarettes, I confess I hear your words in the yellow haze as I sit lamp-lit in a circle of darkness, even though I may never press them all in between the pages of this unending journal, this brown-edged recollection of an old man in a back bedroom who, barefoot-bound and hard-of-hearing, did not inhale enough when you were still a fresh breath of a soft whisper in my ear.

107

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

They are gone, your lovers too.

For now the house is quiet.

Your mind will turn to sleep.

Your dreams will take you back to the beginning.

It was something you said.

It was something you did.

No matter – Your heart is a house with paper walls, they will collapse if you move too fast.

So you learn the ancient art of breathing and how to feel for your Qi in the veins of your neck.

What if you can recreate the beginning?

If they all return tomorrow will you burst into bloom?

Perhaps everything will turn out right.

Or you may wake from your dream to find the sun has yet to bring an end to the night.

The Linnet's Wings

108

The Linnet's Wings

109

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

110

The Linnet's Wings

Yesterday, in a pop-up tent café, Two dozen met for tea, cake and To exchange our thoughts on funerals and death.

Vajrayanan Buddhist Pat said she’d like a sky burial For herself; chopped into bits and left upon A mountain shelf for birds to eat their fill But, since this is deemed unseemly in North Wales, despite an abundance of such hills, felt That beetles, worms and rodents, could well fit the bill.

Discourse done, led by a birdsong guide, we plied Woodland paths and tracks with Bluebell dells on Either side, each housing plots of those who’d died And wherein now reside, just feet from where we stood.

Some among the strollers had their own reserved For years and which, with their pets, they yearned To occupy. Not so my wife and I, who, when driving Home, wondered were it quite our style and thought We ought to muse on it a while.

111

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Immortality is a figment not of human imagination, but of human desire.

A very human weakness. It is alright to seek immortality. Who will mourn you when you have returned to earth depends upon the dreams you left behind. Human desire feeds on dreams. Human will is built on the bones of human deeds, however small. Were you kind? A good husband or wife?

These small things are more permanent than photographs. Did you teach your children to hope higher, to reach beyond, even if it made the difference of a mere inch, or less? What stories can the words of your everyday life foretell?

Who can say where immortality lies in wait and for whom? The answers are embedded in the smallest of things. Go there simply because it is there. And take your heart with you, for that is the only part of you that will become the clay from which your children and theirs after them or your friends and neighbours and their children after them, will fashion an immortal likeness of you. The blood moon we watched together from different parts of this earth stilled time and condensed space. Some gifts blossom in their own time and cannot be unwrapped at will. Riptides too have expiry dates and earthquakes do finally subside. Abysses close. Mountains erode.

What remains eternal lies in the final settlement. And that my friend rests in your own fragile hands. Don’t drop them.

The Linnet's Wings

112

The Linnet's Wings

113

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

I see the clash of sea Shining rock of dead black Broken bark cracking the weeping shorelines a crumbled gun­turret above the beautiful belly of Torcross; faint circles of white trailed blue whirlpools fading into depth.

I see a ghostly old sea village Souls of fishing women ­ Field of daisy picker, I journeyed the battered coastline, Sip from cloudy glass of apple Seagulls feed on chip pebbles while the smoke of hand rolled tobacco Inhaled the brutal silence; Leaves float like sequins that hang Circling a sky humbled by vicious twists, A crooked aerial like a falling angel Bludgeoned on the surface of mapped ether.

The Linnet's Wings

114

The Linnet's Wings

115

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Standing back from the gathering crowd flamed turquoise water glistening, cardboard clock swings on rialto jetty, Towers feeling the swing of water cigarette smoke drifting Bending in-between the afternoon sips - Aperol spritz.

Answering her phone skin the texture and beauty as Autumn brown, yet delicately within a moment smeared with the tear lines in a frown, Her heart sliced with the news the worst sights that move this cold old heart of mine, are seeing such a beautiful girl at the Vaporetto stop being torn apart; Inside.

Each compartment of her heart opened - stretched out within each vessel that beats; Between memory and part each number inked like blood pools in heat.

The Linnet's Wings

116

The Linnet's Wings

117

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

Aoife oh Aoife- I have written this song for you who said- that whoever’s done wrong suffers in silence and will end up accused by the mirror-oh the mirror-whatever it views could it be clear as what’s left by the rain or closets all skeletons scream for and claim As their own is now yours yes, yours alone and where’s Owen?

Yes, Owen and his empty smile And his criminal record that he calls juvenile.

Wild, wild Owen, innocent as a leper but Innocent too was your missing child Do you still waitress in Dublin, Do you still grieve?

For all its hungry children, running hopeless through streets.

And you’d point and cry-say “There, There goes I” A few decades removed/ but never would you cry “being poor makes you hard” is all you would say “mine will have everything or inherit a grave.”

But where’s Owen and his working class hands?

The Linnet's Wings

118

The Linnet's Wings

His torn jeans or the whiskey, he never could stand, to drink enough of.

And he would now if he knew love, how he came to defile your dreams and those of your missing child..

And that ring with a diamond, how it must shine in some pawn shop in Clonmell, for a pretty dime that Owen gave you-before you gave him the news that his child was in you, then he left, then you knew even as you gave birth, that your child wouldn’t live Just how precious is life, when you can suffocate it?

Over wine tasting spoiled, I try to digest each word of your letters, that sing emptiness that curse all the fates and the heavens so wild they always have room for those undefiled Aoife oh Aoife in the yard exhumed by each rain.

What you’ve hidden there screams out our names.

Our bloody names as you’d say.

And I hear it when it starts I hear it when it fades Sometimes I hear it all the while.

Cause we know what happened to your first child.

Yes, we know what happened to your missing child Aoifa, your missing child your murdered child.

119

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

ART: For years he'd been quietly filling his stocking, Arthur Rackham The Circus by Jules Pascin

The Linnet's Wings

120

The Linnet's Wings

randma, surrounded by papers and pictures, looks down at Archie sitting on the floor with his head resting on her sofa, “let me tell ya how it was, our circus was called the mud show because the roads we traveled on were often knee­deep in mud. The wagons were always getting stuck, breaking down or turning over. The first night out of Topeka my wagon turned over three different times. I decided to walk to Emporia after that. When a wagon turned over it was hell getting it back on its wheels, especially after dark. We almost always traveled at night. For light we had kerosene lamps hung on the wagons. Sometimes the men would walk ahead and plant flares at the crossroads so the caravan would not lose its way. Every trip was long, lonely and miserable. But it was all worth it when we got to a town.

No matter how dirty and beat up and tired we were we always rode into town like royalty. We always found a river or some kind of pond to wash up in. Then, dressed in our most magnificent uniforms, we would march into town with our trumpets blaring to alert everybody that we had arrived; it was circus day. We would march right through the middle of town with the kids, dogs, and even grown­ups dancing beside us. At the edge of town we would park the wagons, unload them, and start setting up the Big Top. Everybody in those little towns took the day off when the circus was there. The children were let loose from school and chores. It was the biggest holiday of their lives. I was new but I got over that real quick. The owners, Tim and Marg Blankenship, took me into their tent and treated me like their own daughter. My first job was selling tickets. I was scared to death but before the first day was over I was in heaven. People would come to the ticket window all smiling and happy. I smiled back and talked to them like I had known them forever. And they loved to talk to me and listen to me; I fit right in.

When the tickets were all sold I would close up and run into the Big Top. I was always 121

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet´s Wings The Linnet's Wings

looking for some way to help out. And after a few weeks everybody in the circus knew me and gave me jobs. I become so busy I didn’t have time to be lonesome or unhappy.

As time went on and we traveled from town to town I even replaced some of performers. Once I took the place of the girl who worked with the knife thrower. He told me to not be scared, just keep my eyes open and watch the knives coming at me and jump out of the way if any looked like they might be too close. I wasn’t scared and I kept my eye on those knives.

We had about thirty people working for the circus and I got to know them all. It was the best time of my life except for one thing, Tom. Tom was friends with everybody and he was always working. But he never talked to me or even looked at me. He was the boss of the roustabouts and he got right in and worked along side them. He drove the big wagon with ten reins in each hand and pulled by twenty white horses; it took a strong man to do that. He was a champion bicycle racer; it seemed that there was nothing he couldn’t do. He even did some of the trick riding and getting up on the high wires to catch the trapeze artists.

I sneaked into one of the sideshows to watch Tom fight in the boxing ring. He was so brave; one night he fought eleven locals one after another and made them all quit. He said he would give twenty dollars to anybody that could last three rounds; nobody ever did. I read the “Police Gazette” and later on “Ring Magazine” and learned all about boxing. I wanted to be a boxer but they would have laughed me out of town if I were to tell anybody.

The Blankenships had a farm down in San Antonio and we would winter down there. I liked “wintering.” We could relax, do repairs on the equipment, mend our costumes, and practice our acts. I become a clown and I was a good one. Shorty Van der Berg took me under his wing and taught me all the tricks of the trade. I was on my way to becoming a star and still Tom wouldn’t look at me.

One day Tom was driving across a creek and the bridge collapsed. The wagon fell on top of him and was holding him under the water. I grabbed a tent pole, waded into the water, and pried it up enough for him to slip loose. I saved his life and he started talking to me again. One day I just up and told him we had to get married. And we did.

He didn’t want me to be a clown no more so I told him I’d quit clowning if he let me be his sparring partner. He didn’t like that either but I had my way. I showed him a trick or two with the boxing gloves that I learned just by watching and he looked at me with new eyes.

Tommy was born one winter and Lonnie the next. Those boys took to circus life even faster than I did. They was everywhere and getting into everything; the cook said he never seen two humans eat so much. Tommy watched his dad fight and that’s all he ever wanted to do, be a fighter. Lonnie was interested in fixing things; he wanted to be a blacksmith. They went to school here and there but mostly they played hooky. I didn’t have the heart to make them go to school. Back in those days book learning wasn’t so important.

The boys were still little when we heard about automobiles—horseless carriages. We all laughed about that and didn’t believe it. We thought it was a hoax the big shots were pulling on us yokels. Then Mr. Blankenship bought one. The damn thing made a lot of noise, smoked a lot, and backfired incessantly but it went faster than most horses. Tommy and Lonnie took right to it and learned to drive in a few hours. The older folks never did get the The Linnet's Wings

122

The Linnet's Wings

hang of it. I learned to drive right away but Tom wouldn’t even try. He said it was the devil’s own contraption.

Those first automobiles needed somebody to be fixing them all the time ‘cause they were always breaking down. Lonnie was just a little kid but he jumped right in and did what needed to be done to get that heap of bolts going again. He was the first automobile mechanic in our part of the country. Everywhere we went he would show folks how to get their cars going. He became famous as an auto fixer­upper and he was only a little kid.

Chapter XII Grandma Johnson’s voice drones on as she continues her rendition of Lonnie’s killing of Todd Toolbee. Archie’s mouth is zipped tight as his eyes transfix Grandma while he grabs and translates the unintelligible words.

“After Lonnie was born I went to work teaching Tommy everything I could. I even put the gloves on and traded punches with him. At first he cried when I tagged him but he got over that early on. When he was half my size he begin to get the better of me. I decided to stop sparring with him before he found out he could whip me. Tommy always respected me though. He never said mean things to me like I hear some of today kids saying to their ma and pa.

Lonnie was the funniest kid anyone could imagine. Soon as he started crawling he was all over the place, getting into everything. Tommy looked after his little brother until Lonnie got big enough to want the same things as Tommy then we had some rip­roaring squabbles. I laughed so hard my sides split when I saw happy, good­natured little Lonnie refuse to back up when big Tommy was trying to push him around. I guess Tommy could’ve really hurt him but he didn’t want to. Lonnie, beautiful little Lonnie wasn’t scared of anything. They started boxing almost as soon as Lonnie learned to walk. I always said Tommy was a born fighter and Lonnie had to be taught. But I was wrong Lonnie was a born fighter all right. It’s just that he tried to be reasonable and saw fighting as the last thing that should happen. Another way to look at it: Tommy had to fight and Lonnie would be happy if he never fought again.

We soon had a regular sideshow, the Johnson brothers boxing each other. They put on a good show and often the tent would be filled with people screaming for the little fellow. It was good business but looking back on it I come to believe that must of tore Tommy up because he was always looked at as the bad guy.

When Tommy was fifteen or so he teamed up with Tom. Together they would challenge all comers to last three rounds with one of them for twenty dollars. Of course Tom wouldn’t let Tommy fight anybody that weighed more than one hundred and forty pounds. He also looked over any opponents before he would okay a match with his son. I don’t think he turned down anybody because they looked too tough or too good. This didn’t last more than six months or so because Tommy never pulled his punches. He’d just storm out throwing both fists like a mad man and send some poor citizen crashing to the canvas with broken bones and concussions. Tom tried to get him to take it easy but he never did. Finally, Tom sent him back 123

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

to look after the horses; his circus fighting days were over.

We got new acts all the time. Some lasted and some didn’t. About the time Tommy got demoted to the stables a daredevil motorcycle rider joined up. His name was Count Von Ridenhower, a made­up name if I ever heard of one. He had a fake German accent and an eye for the ladies. I never saw such a phony in all my life but he fooled a lot of people.

Especially some of the nitwit dancers we had that come and go all the time. He was a real daredevil though; his act was the most dangerous we had and motorcycles were new to most people so the crowds flocked to see him perform. Lonnie followed him everywhere and it wasn’t long before he had my little boy on that dangerous machine. I tried to stop it but I might as well of tried to fly to New York.

One day Tommy was missing. We asked around and found a man in town that told us Tommy told him he was headed to New York City to be a professional prizefighter. We had circus people search for him but he never showed up in New York or anyplace else we could think of. It would be years before we heard from him.

Lonnie took Tommy’s place in the ring and he was a natural. He was so good from the very first time. He wasn’t very tall and Tom thought he was never going to be a circus fighter because of that. But Lonnie had this way of just slipping and sliding and not giving his opponent any target. I swear he won fights without throwing a punch. And nobody got hurt when they got in the ring with him. He would just let them wear themselves out trying to hit him and then he would ask them to give up. They usually would quit but if they didn’t he’d drop them with a shot to the belly. Like I said nobody had anything to fear when they boxed Lonni The years rolled along and it never got any easier; it seems like there was always some kind of crisis that kept us broke and searching for some way to keep the circus together.

Payroll was a big headache but the Blankenships always managed to meet it some way, somehow. I can’t say the same about some of our suppliers; we slipped out of more than one little town owing money. We were always talking about buying more trucks and getting rid of the horses and mules but we never did. We thought that the highways would always be too bad for motor vehicles. We had an elephant once—old Barney. We loved him. He could pull or push a wagon out of any mud hole ever born. He was better than our truck when it come to raw muscle. I laugh because he liked his whiskey and he drank a lot of it.

Lonnie was twenty­one or two when we set up the Big Top in Conway Springs. By this time he was working at more jobs than his pa. That boy was the mechanic, truck driver, fighter, and by this time, he was our daredevil motorcyclist. On top of that he was always on the go helping out wherever he was needed. I don’t know how he managed but he started sparking a farm girl. She was from a farm over near Wichita and visiting a cousin. She was only sixteen but damned if they didn’t up and get married. I was dumbfounded but I don’t know why because I was about the same age when I married Tom. Yes, Archie, that was Molly that Lonnie married.

Lonnie and I didn’t know it at the time but that marriage saved us from the poor house.

It wasn’t more then six months later that Tom took sick. We called in a doctor but the doctor couldn’t figure it out. He was an old­time doctor but he never saw anything like what Tom had.

The Linnet's Wings

124

The Linnet's Wings

Tom just lay there and we watched him die. We carried him out into a field and buried him.

The preacher was saying a prayer over his grave when Lonnie screamed and run off across the fields.

We, Molly and me, didn’t know what to do so we just when home. The next morning the sheriff come and told us Lonnie was in the hospital. It seems that during the night he come back to the circus and pushed his motorcycle out into the countryside and started riding it at top speed. Of course he crashed it in the dark and tore his leg all to hell. The hospital wanted to saw his leg off but I wouldn’t let them. Molly and me picked him up and carried him out of that hellhole. We got in our buggy and went back to the circus but we couldn’t stay there because they couldn’t afford to have anybody around that’s not working.

We decided to go and see if Molly’s folks would take us in. Her ma and pa were the nicest people I ever met. They said we could stay as long as we needed to. It was a long time because it seemed like Lonnie was never going to get well. We must of stayed two years and Lonnie still wasn’t getting around very good but we decided to leave anyway. We went to Topeka and Lonnie got a job working for an automobile repair shop. We stayed there for ten years and was better off than we ever thought possible. Andy and Paulie were born in Topeka.

It’s a funny thing I was living in the town where I was born and raised but I never felt I was a part of it. I never went back to visit the Emma Broward home because it just didn’t seem right. I saw the Spauldings go by in their carriage but they never saw me. I was a stranger in my own hometown. Molly and Lonnie were working all the time so I was left to take care of the boys. Andy was a lot of fun but Paulie was a hostile little bugger.

When Andy was ten and Paulie was six all the money dried up so Lonnie was laid off.

We didn’t know what to do ‘cause Molly’s housekeeping job didn’t pay enough to feed us. A man come by and said they needed a mechanic in California so Lonnie sold everything, bought an old car, loaded us up, and it was, ‘California here we come.’

We got out here and Lonnie, busted up leg and all, went to work right away. It wasn’t long before he was the top mechanic in the shop. Then the depression that we left behind in Kansas finally got to California. Soon, he was the only mechanic left because all the others were laid off. The boss, Ross Manning, really liked Lonnie so he kept him on but had to cut his pay. Lonnie, to keep food on the table, had to work night and day. I remember the night of the killing like it was yesterday. It was a Saturday night and Lonnie, after working all day, went back to the shop after supper to finish a job. It was after midnight and Lonnie, except for supper, had been working since five o’clock that morning. He was all by himself when all hell broke loose.”

Grandma begins rummaging through the trunk. “Some newspaper reporter wrote a story about the Toolbee family. If I can find it I’ll let you read it, Archie.” She pulls a newspaper clipping from the trunk and hands it to Archie.

Archie reads the headline:

125

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

An American Success Story Tainted by Tragedy

By Scott Mallory

Caleb Toolbee came from the hard­scrapple oil fields of Pennsylvania over fifty years ago. He is known as a hard man with a dollar. The first to find that out was Sol Goldburg.

Sol was the proprietor of the only hardware/farm implement store in town but it was a struggling business. He took the young Caleb in as a partner and within five years business was booming, expanding. Sol never profited from the success and soon found himself pushed out of the ownership. He died a broken man.

Caleb had found the formula for success and a wide variety of businesses fell into his hands in the years to follow. The most notable was the fertilizer industry. Before Caleb, an eastern company, Moss Hunt Inc., dominated the valley market. Caleb established his own corporation and used his, by now, vast resources to undercut prices. Moss Hunt was forced out of California and San Joaquin Fertilizers Inc. has enjoyed a virtual monopoly since that time.

Caleb Toolbee’s monumental success didn’t spill over into his private life. He lived alone in a large mansion with but a single manservant. His acts of charity were non­existent.

He refused to talk about family. When asked directly his reply, “They’re all dead and in hell.”

His employees were not spared; he hired and fired frequently. There was concern for his estate when he passed on.

In the winter of 1920 he took an unprecedented vacation. He was not heard from for three months and when he returned he had a bride. She was a beautiful woman and clearly thirty years younger than her husband. Her name was Consuela Obregon. Rumor had it that she was an aristocrat from Spain. We never knew because she was reclusive and neither she nor her husband was forthcoming about her background.

One year later she left town, some say she went to San Francisco, and when she returned she was trailed by a nanny carrying a tiny child. The child was a beautiful blond­ haired boy. Caleb, for the first time in everybody’s memory, showed joy and happiness. He was an attentive father and doted on his offspring who he christened Todd. Observers noted that the new mother did not share her husband’s celebration; she was cold and even hostile towards her son. Within days she disappeared and was never heard from again.

If Caleb Toolbee was troubled by his wife’s disappearance he never showed it.

Rather, he poured himself into the care of his son even to the point of neglecting his business empire. The first four years of Todd’s life was fun and games.

The Linnet's Wings

126

The Linnet's Wings

At age five Caleb entered his son in kindergarten and the trouble began. The teachers were perplexed, he was a beautiful child and had a bright happy smile but he couldn’t be trusted with other children. He wanted to hurt anyone smaller than himself. Not just pain, but serious injury was imminent for any child unfortunate enough to get within reach.

Characteristically, Caleb blamed the teachers and classmates for the problem. He even suggested that the parents of victimized children were somehow at fault. He hired a tutor and removed Todd from private and public school.

The years passed and the boy grew tall, muscular. He retained his splendid good looks but the problems persisted. Time after time complaints were made, the police called, and each time victims and their families had to be bought off. Caleb finally decided that he had to take some drastic measures. Todd was sent to a military academy in Pasadena. He walked away after two days.

Back home, he hooked up with two of his friends. They purchased whiskey and proceeded to drink as they walked the streets. They became loud and abusive challenging passers­by to fight. Nobody accepted the challenge so they entered a saloon on Ninth Street. The bartender cautioned them to keep to themselves and avoid the party in progress.

They retreated to a booth away from the festivities and proceeded to drink the night away.

It was a half­hour to closing time when a woman approached the cigarette machine to buy cigarettes. Todd leaped to his feet and wrestled the woman into the booth. This was witnessed by several patrons and soon all the partygoers were alerted. An army of men armed themselves with pool cues and sundry other weapons and confronted the trio. Todd’s uncontrollable temper was suddenly controllable. He apologized and with good grace he and his companions exited the establishment.

Back on the street Todd was furious and promised someone was going to pay for this gross insult. The streets were dark, deserted not a soul to be seen or heard. As they walked by an alley they saw a light shining from an open doorway. They entered the alley and were soon standing next to a garage with the backdoor wide open. Inside they could see a short stocky old man with a bad limp working on an automobile. He was oblivious to everything but the car right in front of him. Todd led his companions inside where they surrounded their target. This is the conversation that followed according to court transcripts: Todd standing directly behind Lonnie said, “Working kind of late aren’t you?”

Lonnie jumped and he turned to face his visitor. “Dang, boy, ya give me a start. How long you fellas been standing there?” His eyes took in all three as he sized them up.

Todd laughed a scornful evil laugh. “We’ve been here long enough to see you’re not much, old man. You should be more careful about leaving your door open at night.”

Lonnie smiled. “You come here to rob me?”

Todd was really grinning now. “Rob you? Hell, you haven’t got anything I want. You’re pathetic. I could buy and sell you with the change I carry in my pocket. No. We’re not going to rob you. We’re going to break both your arms and that one good leg you got. We’re going to…”

Lonnie buried his fist into Todd’s belly, spun him around, and sent him flying into the 127

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

alley with a shoe to the seat of the pants. Luke Hobbs and Bob Michaels, Todd’s friends, never raised a hand before Lonnie rendered them helpless with blows to the groin and throat respectively. Now, he walked each to the door and flung them out. Before Lonnie could close the door a rampaging Todd smashed it wide open. A knife was flashing back and forth aimed at Lonnie’s face. Lonnie threw his arms in the air to ward off the blows as he was driven across the garage. He backed into the workbench on the far wall and could go no farther.

Todd had a wild gleam in his eye as he lowered the knife to gut level and moved in to disembowel his cornered prey. Lonnie reached back and grabbed his heavy mechanic’s hammer, and smashed it down on the top of Todd’s’ head crushing the skull. Lonnie, both arms bleeding profusely, collapsed and fell to the floor beside his dead foe.

“Gee Grandma sometimes you talk just like those high­falutin’ folks.”

Grandma laughs and taps her forehead. “I told ya, Archie, I got it rit rite cher and I could ditch my hillbilly talk tomorrow but folks would say I was gittin’ stuckup.”

Archie is puzzled but decides to press on. “What happened next, Grandma?”

Grandma pulls out a newspaper clipping with big black headlines; “CALEB TOOLBEE’S SON KILLED BY AUTOMOBILE MECHANIC!” Archie reads quickly until he gets to the part where Caleb Toolbee says he is confident that American justice will prevail and execute this murderer. “Why’s he say that, Grandma?”

“Folks that lose kin always want revenge. Old Man Toolbee tried but he never was able to get the law to make Lonnie go to trial. Folks like him never give up though and Lonnie will never work in this town ever again.”

“Why not go to Tracy like my mama did?”

Grandma shakes her head, “Lonny was tore up that he killed somebody. That boy ain’t never gonna work again.”

Cut Loose by Digby Beaumont ###

The Linnet's Wings

128

The Linnet's Wings

129

The Linnet's Wings

The Linnet's Wings

epilogue:

"She sat down and plaited herself an overall of rushes and a cap to match ..."

Art: Arthur Rackham

The Linnet's Wings

130

The Linnet's Wings

131

The Linnet's Wings

134