Nuance
Behind unfurled flags
and the horizon wall we searched
by borders and crests
deciphering lost codes
plumbed caverns just below
the sideburns of the fat general
beyond prison barbwire fences
and straitjacket ideals
we took arms for an image
but didn’t find one god
the general polished his stars
pronouncing God extinct
and people reveled in the square
foreseeing his verdict
excerpt
Finn MacLir dragged his feet back into the dining room after seeing his guests off into the night. He paused in the doorway, raised his outspread hands to his face, and drew them down over his cheeks. “Padraig, I’m tired.”
He was a tall man, over six feet in height. His broad, beefy shoulders were more rounded now, his waist wider than in his younger days. As Padraig remembered him, he had always been a burly, muscular man, full of energy and vitality. Now, at seventy-five years of age, that energy and that vitality had begun to ebb away.
He approached the table unsteadily, lifted the wine decanter and tipped it to his glass. But only a drop or two dribbled out.
“So much for that,” he said. He thumped the decanter down again on the table, and a few knives and forks jumped on their plates. Finn turned to face his remaining guest.
“These are troubled times to be returning to Ireland, Padraig.”
“When are there not troubled times in Ireland?” Padraig said.
“Ay, when indeed?” Finn sank into his chair with a sigh. “The last election left us in a pretty mess, didn’t it? A real shipwreck.” He paused in thought for a moment, tapping the empty wine glass with his finger. “Ay, a real shipwreck. The old ship of state, the S.S. Ireland—remember her?—she ran aground on rocks during a mutiny. A rebel crew tried to take her over. We didn’t know it then, but it seems this rebel crew, this Sinn Fein, had a lot of support on board. The passengers have since voted them into positions of command. Seventy-three of them no less, with Eamon de Valera, one of the old mutineers, escaped from the cooler and appointed captain. It could only happen in Ireland.”
Finn MacLir stared at the empty wine glass, silent, serious, disillusioned. “And half a dozen of the old crew, all that’s left of our old Irish Parliamentary party, cast adrift on a raft in very stormy waters. They’re doomed, I fear. But the situation doesn’t look too good for any of them; or even for the ship itself. They’ve renamed her the S.S. Republic but they haven’t got her off…
excerpt
EMILY IS GETTING READY for Matthew’s funeral service at Mount View
Memorial. Jennifer and Hakim should be at the house soon. Talal is there with
her, as he has been ever since Matthew’s death, and Emily appreciates that. She’s
in love with this young Iraqi man with the lilting voice and the cute smile. They
haven’t made love during these last days and she wonders how Talal feels about
that. But she is very appreciative of the time and space he has given her.
He has prepared a simple breakfast and goes upstairs to see if she is ready to eat
before they leave. It’s early morning and a good cup of coffee, at least, is in order. He
finds her out of the shower and in front of the mirror doing her eyes. He hugs her
from behind. She cuddles in his arms and lays her head back on his shoulder.
“Are you hungry, sweet Emily?”
She smiles at him in the mirror and nods yes.
“Are you hungry, sweet Talal?”
His eyes look deeply into hers in the mirror, and as he rubs her buttocks he
laughs.
“Yes, my sweet Emily, yes. However, now is time for breakfast. Let’s have a
good cup of coffee.”
She turns and hugs him tightly; she seeks his lips and kisses him passionately.
“I’m in love with you, sweet Talal, and I don’t care what tomorrow brings. I
don’t care how long this is going to last.”
“I’m in love with you, too, sweet Emily, and I know this is going to last a long
time.”
They go downstairs to the family room and he serves their coffee toasted
bread and jam. She leans closer to him and kisses him once more when Jennifer
and Hakim come in and see them kissing. Jennifer looks at Hakim, who smiles,
“So what, Jennifer? They are adults. Why are you looking at me as if they have
done something wrong?”
Talal gets up to greet them and says to Jennifer, “Your mother is a beautiful
person. Be proud of her in the same way that she’s very proud of you.”
“I know my mother,Talal. I just find myself wondering and I don’t know why.”
Emily smiles at Hakim and asks him, “What happened with the apartment?”
“Well, the deal was finalized today. The agent called earlier…
Archean
Clutching on air a stony totem
godly apparition of rekindled memory
ancient stone made anew
primeval man made of lithos
frosty and elegantly crafted
systemic description of logos
in free spirited wilderness and
the sky concurs and
always returns to its first love
earth’s bosom
archean sphagnum and
delicate stimulant of life
the Inukshuk with open arms salutes
stray animal and man lost in foggy
winter land, ray of hope lit
by love of beast for beast and
relation of abstract to evident
excerpt
Whenever she wanted someone to erase the board, or recite a poem,
or empty the stupid wastepaper basket, or answer her latest booby trap
question, guess who got called? Not Zaccardi, the second smartest boy in
the class, not Cercchio or even Balestieri, but me, Amabile. (Anadora and
Astibianni were so dopey she gave up on them after the first few days).
So I began to have trouble with my eyes. I couldn’t read her tight
little chalk scrawl. The letters in the Italian reader made my eyes itch and
then go swimming off the page into the inkwell. Of course, I had looked up
this eye business in volume five of The Home Library of Health Knowledge,
and I practised a lot, squinting at myself in the mirror and stumbling
over the excerpts we had to read out loud to correct the vulgarities of the
Napolitano dialect in our pronunzia. Blackie caught my drift, but was not
impressed. When I asked to be moved to the middle of the room beside
Rita McCrae, her thick lips curled into a sneer. She informed me that my
debility was a spiritual asset. I must offer my discomfort up to be duly
noted in the heavenly account book beside my name, and be thankful that
I had been given this opportunity to experience the mortification of the
flesh. It would help, she assured me, to correct the sinful smirk I got on my
ratty little face whenever I asked her something she didn’t know. “Pride,”
she said, wagging her fat forefinger. “It’s one of the Seven Deadlies,
and don’t you forget it.” I nodded, trying to make the serious mouth I’d
seen that actor use on the late movie when he did that scene where the
President of the United States gets a phone call telling him about Pearl
Harbor. Blackie ignored it. And before I could beg and plead and reason
about the empty desk next to Rita McCrae, she went back to her boring
and very wordy attempt to explain page one of the Baltimore Catechism.
Even though I had not achieved my ultimate objective, I was not
discouraged. She was convinced, at least, that my eyes were bad. I had
made some headway and I had a well wrought plan, but I knew I had to
proceed with caution. Behind her puritan facade there lurked a spiteful
and unprincipled child. During the first week of December, Balestieri
had given her trouble, asking the smart ass questions he was famous for.
Blackie’s eyes narrowed and her mouth squirmed. She gave him one of her
lectures on pride and we thought that was the end of it, but during recess
one of the kids she’d kept in for detention saw her pour the filthy water
Athena
Athena smiled at me when I observed
that everything fit in its position
nothing jutted out of place
in all the sandy corners of the earth
but the palm tree beseeching
its skyward direction when
early in life I learned
of my secret love: sea
dark blue and merciless
inviting and ardent punisher
of sins told and sanctified
when the goddess chose
to make a marble cenotaph
and to erect my statue which
would speak of greatness
true demagogue that I was
with a vague smile
upon my face
she then placed a wilted daffodil
and a fiery red carnation
over my heart
it was a sad day when
I drank water to become diaphanous
before I vanished into the sea’s
deep blue embrace
Hermaea II
Perhaps because they indicated distances and rested
the passersby and perhaps for other reasons which were
forgotten through the years, Hellenes felt true reverence
for Hermaea, especially the common people and the young
boys and girls —
who during their evening stroll in
the summer, would stop in the road for some time and
look at the piles, to which they dedicated fruits,
sweets and small animals (birds or rabbits), they also
crowned their well-groomed heads with branches
and wreaths made of flowers, since they, with their pure
instinct felt something beyond reverence;
in fact, during
the festivals, as a sign of their high respect, they touched
their lips or phalluses (which they always firmly supported
to look erected) thus drawing strength for the days when,
irreversibly, the festivities would end.
excerpt
and pedal off. As soon as Tanya strolled in the other direction, Paul and Vera emerged from the bushes.
“We must go in and see.” Vera dragged him to the rickety building.
“We don’t need to,” he demurred.
“You think I am a spy, but it is good to have this information. It is good to know about our government officials. It can help us.”
“And I thought you would be a good communist,” said Paul.
She stopped in the path and stared at him. “But I am being a good communist. I am.”
She darted away into the boathouse and Paul followed to find her casting about widely at this love nest as if she would find something incriminating that she could take away.
★
The home of Fyodor Shukshin was set half a mile down a winding dirt path that branched off the main regional road. It was a dark, old, wooden house with some remnants of the original gingerbread still clinging to the eaves, though it had long needed paint and repair. At the gate stood a cement well covered with a sloping roof and this had been kept in trim condition. The front yard was a small patch of dirt with signs of thorough grazing by chickens now gone to roost. Although the light was waning, Paul could see that the surrounding fields were covered in growth: beet greens and carrot tops showed on one side, bright green potato plants on the other. They entered the house through a groaning, battered door and Vera greeted her father.
Vera’s sudden return to the farm even with a stranger in tow bothered Fyodor Shukshin not one bit. Apparently she was in the habit of dropping in at home at any opportunity in her work schedule.
“So it’s you,” he snorted. “Come from across the Volga.”
“Some day I’ll go much farther away than Toglyatti,” she said, smiling at her father fondly, then turning to Paul. “Meanwhile, I like to visit here.”
Her father returned the smile a bit cynically. “Of course, when you can get fresh vegetables here—and sell them for a profit—why wouldn’t you like to visit your old father?”
She grinned, searched through the cupboards and served pickles in a bowl accompanied by slices of heavy black bread. At first Vera’s father appeared delighted to meet the foreigner.
excerpt
Yet the evil pouring out
of that entry shook him up as if a powerful tempest unlocks a
house off its foundations, such was the thunderous burden put on
his mind to comprehend the atrocity the details of which he read.
“Why, father? Why a man would end up doing these evil
things?” Anton asked.
“Most of these behaviours relate to the man’s psycho-spiritual
essence or level of human’s advancement but in this particular
case it all flows out of what these people who run the Residential
Schools believe, on what philosophical basis they have been
brought up, what values they have been taught in their schools,
and believe me, in the era we live in this country, the Anglos, still
live with the colonial era mentality. They still consider themselves
occupiers rather than co-existent people next to other
people they see themselves as the archon class and everyone else
down under them. That’s where all this misery springs from.”
“Dad, how could that be possible, we live in the 20ieth
century, this is an advanced country, this is not Africa,” Anton
resisted his dad’s negativity.
“Yes, son, it is true this is Canada, yet think of it seriously,
how did these evil things could ever occur? Where would their
origin be but in the colonial era mentality of the people? Because
when we supress we follow in the steps of tyrants who declare in
speech after speech their desire to bestow freedom to all and to
work for the betterment of people’s lives whereas they indulge
in self-deception and monologues which have themselves as the
only audience, satisfying themselves and their ideologies, whereas
when we reject suppressing others and accept others the way they
are we transcend deception and become true societal citizens.”
Anton said nothing. He felt his father was right. He felt
it in his heart and he only hoped that one day things might get
Unusual
Something unusual would always happen when we met
an old friend who we hadn’t seen for a while. He’d shake
our hand and ask of our well-being as it was something
important and we tried to hide behind unspoken words,
relating our loneliness, news we always kept to ourselves.
After all what could one say to an old friend to make him
feel concerned? Our everyday things, our routine, the job,
the wages never which were never enough for the necessities
and always the traitor behind the shadow the door? For
this we always cried behind the wall or alone under
the bed-sheets unless we could hear the sparrows, our
forever hungry friends.
I like those who prefer a few virtues. One is better
than two when one has more means to uphold destiny.
Manolis Aligizakis 