Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

Then he reached to the side, and turned on the
tap of the small bar sink, and filled a pitcher with water. Lastly, he opened
another cupboard, lifted down two tumblers, poured a goodly measure
of whiskey into both, and splashed water into the glasses.
“This is how you and I are going to do business,” he said. “We’re going
to drink.”
‘In the middle of the day?” Ken asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything? We’re going to drink.”
“Why do we have to drink?” Ken eyed the whiskey with revulsion. “My
guess is it’s to do with, ‘get a man drunk and you’ll find out who he is.’”
“Who told you that?”
“My father.”
“I’d like to meet your father.” He took a large swallow. “So, tell me
about yourself.”
Ken told his story, while he watched Fraser drink until the bottle was
empty. He drank a bottle every day, he said, and he was as proud of that
as the fact that he was a one match a day man. He struck a match in the
morning to light his first cigarette, and every subsequent cigarette, for the
rest of the day, was lit from the stub of the last. “It takes discipline to do
that.”
“I want you to come to the gallery two or three days a week. I want to
hear your story. I want you to tell me your feelings, your thoughts, your
understanding of the universe – everything. I want to listen to you. I want
to hear you.”
For several weeks, Ken visited and talked, while Fraser downed a bottle
of rye and smoked an eternal chain of cigarettes. “You have a passion that
is white-hot and I love it,” he said. “We have all these artists around, and
they’re all limp. I want to see a man with a paintbrush in one hand and a
sword in the other. That’s you.”
One day, Ken asked Fraser why he never saw the paintings he sold to
him. “Where do you put them?”
“I’ve sold them.”
“All of them?”
Yes, all of them.”
“Oh my gosh. Well, that’s terrific.”
“You look surprised.”
“I am.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say to me. Of course, they’re sold. So,
bring me some more. Go and paint.”
“There’s a limit to my speed.”
“I’m sure there is and I want to find it. I suspect the faster you paint the
better you get. You’re thinking too much. Don’t think. Painting isn’t about
thinking. This is not an intellectual exercise.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Arrows

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

Tell him I promise his village won’t be damaged, nor his
fields touched. Tell him.”
Losada dismounted and the others followed suit, but he stopped
them with a gesture of his hand. “Infante, Ávila, Galeas,
Maldonado, Pedro and Rodrigo Ponce, Gregorio de la Parra, with
me. Ten harquebusiers and ten pikemen, come forward as well.
Carlos.”
He snapped his fingers, then turned to me. “Friar Salvador, if you
please, come with me. The rest of you, stay where you are, don’t let
your guard down. It wouldn’t be the first time they welcome and
then betray and kill. Keep an eye on your surroundings. At the first
sign of trouble, Juan Suárez, sound the charge. All of you! Diego de
Paradas will command in my absence. Camacho! You are second.
Good luck and may God be with us.”
“Harquebusiers, check your priming!” yelled Diego de Paradas.
Losada put a hand on the hilt of his sword at his hip, as if to
reassure himself. Behind him, the harquebusiers grabbed their
powder flasks and rammed the charges down the muzzles. A flock
of parrots cawed overhead.
“Take good account of everything, Friar Salvador,” said Losada.
“I have a mind to have you write a record of this expedition.”
Recording the expedition would be considered a great honour and a
great responsibility. I nodded. But I knew immediately it would be
impossible to record the truth.
I admired the orderly arrangement of the village. The streets were
smooth under my feet, the houses skilfully made. Earthen pots
steamed over the embers of fires; hammocks were neatly
distributed; baskets and heads of plantain hung from the wooden
structures. Strings of yarn were stretched over primitive looms. On
the sloping thatched roofs, dozens of round cassava cakes dried in
the sun. Human and animal skulls and bones hanging among the
baskets and plantains reminded me of macabre tales of cannibalism.
The Indians stepped aside as we entered the village. They stared
at my feet and then at the rest of me, for I was the only barefooted
Spaniard, let alone one wearing a frock.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522

Medusa

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Trickle
Your words trickle on paper as if
An unnoticed creek down the slope
on its way to the ocean
But where will you hang
Your coat as the herald
announces the first
spring execution?
Trivial events leave you bereft
of thoughts and what
to do with the bird feeder and
the bird cage?
Birds have flown
to the warm climates
your canary died
you couldn’t fly away with it
you’re left comfortably alone
your words trickling on paper:
your turn to build the world anew

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763769

Poodie James

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

GLANCING UP FROM his reading, Thorp told his
wife he didn’t think Poodie was going to be
much help when picking started. He was too
short, he said, and his legs didn’t work quite
right. He wasn’t going to be any good on a ladder.
He wasn’t big enough to swamp out, couldn’t lift boxes of
apples onto the flatbed. Besides, when the pickers showed up, they
would need both cabins.
“Maybe he can find a real job in town,” Thorp said.
His wife walked over and looked at him across the top of The
Daily Dispatch.
“You tell the kids,” she said.
The next day Thorp took took Poodie along when he toured the
orchard, checking the fruit for size and color. The September air
cooled a little more each night. Days, the sweat rolled off Poodie as
he worked, and the dogs lay panting in the shade.
“You’re going to have company soon,” Thorp told him. “Pickers
coming to get these apples off the trees. Two of them are going to
stay in your cabin. They come up from Arkansas every fall, following
the harvest. I know these men. They’re all right. New family’s
going to be in the other cabin.”
The floppiness of their bib overalls emphasized the leanness and
height of the pickers who moved in with Poodie. They did not sit
on their cots or get up from them, he thought; they folded and
unfolded. He wondered at the length and narrowness of their
heads atop sunburned necks and shoulders roped with muscle.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W7SHCMV

Life is a Poem

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

BARBARIC POEM
You are a wound outside of me
an insult, a scream, blindness,
I do not want you,
something sick wants you,
something foggy, everything that I am
wants you.
The night’s chest breaks and you show up
in the bleak dust of the words of a prayer,
and in the burnt shade of large trees.
Take a sip of me,
soak me up while running!
take a quick sip of me!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C7KT7ZFV

Impulses

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Unstoppable
Dutiful and without pause
he fights to shape
the undefined
tries to paint the achroous in
velvet azure and decrypt
what won’t conform to borders
childlike eyes
a pedestal holding up past glory
all perished dreams
but why the sculptor
creates a huge statue bronze
why he makes his hands
so large is he to embrace the
whole world and his legs why
so large is he to straddle the universe
and his genitals why so impressive?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073565

Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Dyadic Automation
Careful! Cover yourselves! Be careful! The blowing winds have already brought the mysterious messages to our ears. Everything around us is just another threat. There wasn’t any neighbourhood not blanketed by fear, each object hides a soul inside it. Come, let’s go. The time is now. The rusty weathercock calls us wildly in the night. The draw-well stopped and the blind horses became one with the begonia flowers. Let’s go, march! To go far away to Galvana. The saviour plank is hidden from the wind harbour of forgetfulness, peace is there. Sacrificial victims of love, ascetic wanderers of the night, proud dawn walkers light up the sea lamp. Whoever has the strength, whose heart truly dares, let him come. But let us not delay in futile reviews of the past. The time is uncertain. The roads aren’t safe at all and the flood drenched many places. The Caryatid girls have crowded erotically the dark ditches, the lustful maidens of our erotic years. Their famous smile flew away and now it blooms in some abandoned islands. The thunderbolt shows us the way. Let’s go! To the Lycaonian Galvana, there we shall rest. After our kind foreheads are decorated with rose flowers, we offer the libations due to the birds. There, in the graceful wooden temples of the old capital, we shall slaughter the young bull and a fiery column will spring out from its shed blood. There, wrapped around phallic banners, girls are more beautiful than sudden conclusions of dynamite. There lives the Hellene Pantelas among the wild Soudanese. The flowers there are wise and sunlit leftovers of dead beauties. The tears of the shark and the enigmatic prayer of Zacharia are useless there along with the frosty embrace of the penguin.
The erotic spasms of the last emperors and their fiery tears belong to the same person. The offer of the boatswain to the footprints of the hypotenuse of anomalous attractions is accompanied by the angelic harp, and our imposing stature means the spread of freedom and the longing for freedom all over the globe.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763734

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume V

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Performance

Young girls get into the gardens early in the morning

to gather flowers “for the Lord,” they say. Women keep

quiet. “For the Lord”. The gates creak, bells chime. Swallows

oversee things from above. Buses go by the seashore road.

The wooden painted body is laid. He didn’t know what

to say to the questioner. He didn’t want to drink the potion.

They’ll dress him with flowers again, three days and three

nights. Then, people who couldn’t endure it anymore

“He is risen,” they’ll say and go to their daily affairs

with an Epitaphios flower on their lapel, a red egg and

two Easter cookies in their pockets.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763726

Red in Black

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Imagination
Absentmindedly I read the label
of the cereal box
and closing my eyes
your face stood before me
your smiling lips
I craved to kiss here along
the isle of the supermarket
you came to keep me company
when my glance left
the cereal box and I thought
I saw you walking
on the other side of the store
when hurriedly and with box in hand
I ran to your apparition
only to find out it was another
woman and I closed my eyes only
to see you here with me again and
with an ironic smile on your lips

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771713208

Water in the Wilderness

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

for a long, long time but she had heard her mom say that if he got upset about something, he was sure to wet during the night. She hoped and hoped he wouldn’t do that tonight. What was it Uncle Morley and Auntie Tyne said if something was bothering them? Oh yes, they always said, “Let’s pray about it.”
Rachael had forgotten most of the praying words she had heard them say, but it still sounded like a good idea to talk to God about Bobby. Quietly, she moved her hands so that the palms were together. “God, don’t let my brother wet the bed tonight,” she whispered. “He’s so small and afraid. And please, God, don’t let them send us to an orphanage. Make Daddy come for us soon.” She started to move her hands apart but then realized she had forgotten something. “And, oh yes – Amen.”
The house had gone quiet, so she eased herself from the bed and, in the faint glow from the street lamp on the corner, she made her way carefully across the room to the closed door. In the hallway, she tiptoed towards the bathroom, but stopped abruptly when she heard the baby whimper. Rachael waited, but Maybelle must have only been fussing in her sleep because, once more, the house was silent. She just hoped she wouldn’t rouse anyone when she flushed the toilet.
On her way back to bed, Rachael was a little less cautious. Apart from her uncle’s snoring, she heard nothing until she had almost reached her bedroom door. Then she stopped short as a sound from the boys’ bedroom across the hall caught her ears.
Crying. Someone in the boys’ bedroom was crying. Bobby!
Without even a second thought, Rachael pushed the door open and started towards the child’s cot near the far wall. She stared when she saw him, still fully dressed, lying quietly with gentle little snores coming from his slightly open mouth. She stood still and listened.
“What are you doing in here, Rachael?”
She swung around, every nerve tense, her heart pounding. Ronnie lay on his side, his head propped on his bent elbow. Even in the dim light she could see his swollen eyes and traces of tears on his lean cheeks.
“I … I thought Bobby was crying,” she whispered.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/192676319X