He Rode Tall

excerpt

Together, they buried the bay colt where he lay. They
dug a shallow pit in the bed of the coulee and then covered it with
stones that they collected from the hillside. The easy thing would
have been to let nature take care of the corpse, but burying the
foal was the right thing to do.
That night, they took turns standing guard over the horses as
their shadows moved gently in the paddocks surrounding the
barn. All was well. By now the big cat would be long gone . . .
maybe . . . or maybe not.
It was just after dinner on the second night since the crazed cat
had raided the ranch that Joel knew something was wrong.
Buddy, who usually satisfied himself by sleeping in the cool
breeze at the back door, was at Joel’s feet in the kitchen.
Quietly walking to the kitchen window, Joel scanned the
meadows. There it was, slinking silently along the tall grass in
the shadows of the trees. It was still daylight and it was headed
right for the barn. The wind was blowing from the opposite direction
so the horses hadn’t caught scent of the big cat yet. When
they would, all hell would break loose, and there wouldn’t be a
fence strong enough to keep them in.
For a moment, he felt bad for the cougar: something was obviously
so wrong that it had become desperate to risk hunting
domesticated animals in a ranch yard. Wild game was not fenced
in and as available as his horses, but any cougar should be able to
catch enough small game to get by at this time of year. As the cat
slinked through the shadows, Joel could see that it was not
healthy. It was long and desperately lean.
Quietly, Joel moved across the kitchen floor to retrieve the rifle
from the storage cupboard. Any unexpected noise would spook
the cat. Back at the open kitchen window, he hesitated for a
moment, not knowing what to do about the screen on the window.
If he tried to take the screen off, the cat would hear him and
retreat to a safer hiding place and wait for darkness to fall. If he
shot through the screen, it might impact the trajectory of his bullet
and perhaps he would miss, but he had no choice.

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Wellspring of Love

excerpt

In Millie Harper’s house on Pike Street in the town of
Emblem, Ronald Harrison lay awake in his upstairs bedroom.
Tired from a long day on the farm he thought that, like most
nights, he would be asleep in minutes. But something had kept him
wakeful and restless for the last two hours.
For several days he had tried to ignore the niggling feeling that
Aunt Millie was not well. The woman who had taken him in as
an eleven-year-old distraught child afraid of an abusive father, had
become like a grandmother to him, and he had learned to love her
deeply. Actually, Ronald often told himself, it was easy to love Millie
Harper, Tyne’s outspoken aunt. Short and stocky in frame, and in
her early seventies, she had an energy level that amazed him. But not
in recent days – or was it actually weeks, and he had failed to notice?
Millie’s face had lost some of its radiance and her eyes no longer
registered the good humoured spark he had grown used to seeing
there. She often appeared weary and, although she didn’t complain,
she seemed to be going to bed earlier every night. And she had stayed
home from church the previous Sunday, another thing that Ronald
found disturbing. He couldn’t remember Aunt Millie missing a Mass
since he had come to live with her.
This evening as they ate dinner, he had asked if she wasn’t feeling
well, and she replied with her usual show of bravado, “I’m just a little
tired. I always get this way when spring work starts in the garden. I’ll
get my strength back in a few days.”

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763327

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume I

OCEAN’S MARCH

Here silence regains a voice
Here the departed live forever
Here there is no flight and ravaging
Evening song over the open seas
accompanied by the absence of things
blooming in eternal circles
of silence and love
The sea stares at her face
in the sea
Take the subdued idols
Take knowledge that wrinkled up our youthful touch
Take the fruitless tired serenity
that sat on the rock
to build her temple and her grave
with the wood of our ancient ships
Leave us only
the night’s ecstasy
when mothers wait in
front of the bloomed door for
their strange and insubordinate children
who missed their evening meal
who swim naked all day
who search for the gull’s nests
and night-long whisper in their sleep
undecipherable words about ships and Angels
for some crazy Angels who live
in purple coral plantations
about some blond Angels who
got engaged to the sea
and forgot God
Angels playing wild trumpets
made
with the bones of castaway poets…

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The Qliphoth

excerpt

…premises. (Imust not let PP clutter this retrospective. I’ve been doing so well up to
now,making the old storymy own,making it behave sensibly.At themoment the
day room is quiet, like an exhibition gallery. The exclusive clientele are swanning
about on their big dozy sofas like carelessly installed soft sculptures.)
So now I can relive my hour of decision, all fifty-five seconds of it, when I
rode the bouncing crests and waves of my own mental excitement, propelled
by a sudden access of manic curiosity, this virtually sexual lust for knowledge.
“The only things worth anything are these Crowley items; and they’ve been
rebound and scribbled in.” I tried to lay back. But Larry could sense the eager
flutter in my voice. He muttered that Charing Cross Road dealers had a whole
network of private collectors on permanent standby; there were no limits.
I found myself running downstairs to the till and pulling out notes, any
notes, perhaps a whole week’s takings, I can’t remember, I didn’t need to keep
records then, so I’ll never know what I paid for the Relics of the Lore.
Pauline was standing in the doorway. She must have seen Larry’s car blocking
the pavement and sniffed conspiracy.
“Everything’s cool, Pauline. Just a little antiquarian transaction, that’s
all . . .”
Larry had ambled downstairs. He took the fat wad, fanned it, and gave Pauline
his summer smile, before kissing her hand. I think he saw PP as some sort
of stern goddess, the goddess knows what the fuck she made of him, but his
grin stopped her ranting at me, she just propagandised instead.
“I don’t know what you men are up to but I don’t trust any of it. It’s not just
the pseudo-imperialist name, it’s the sight of all those greedy goblins rummaging
through the surplus of late-bourgeois production, masturbating over old
military uniforms. From Middle Earth to Middle Class! I wish you could stop
being middle men and create something useful for people.”
As she turned, she drove her elbow into a shelf of imported glass hookahs, a
very good line, which scattered on the matting. Our shattered alembics. She
strode through beaded curtains into the sunlight.
And I confess, I feel her glaring at me across the stormy miles, even now. Sitting
in one of her dim kitchens, staring over the top of the newspaper, glowering
at the latest imagery of Palestine or Iraq, and transferring all that
concentrated outrage in a direct psychic laser-beam aimed at my brain, my
heart, my decadent bourgeois/anarchist crotch.
That’s why Pol Pot has done everything she can to erase me from Lucas’s
calendar. She has, increasingly, rewritten the timetable of history to exclude
the subject of me, the errant father, the wondering scholar, the free…

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186508

Übermensch

Priest
Like the immigrants who survived on dreams about
homeland the village priest kept his congregation
on a short leash. We decided to visit his kingdom.
Shiny vestments, though he was sorrowful that
his congregation was poor, unable for him to raise
necessary funds to build the new church Bishop
expected of him. We thought he mimicked a circus
juggler, a clown with no children in front of him.
He kept his eyes staring faraway perhaps to hide
his uneasiness before our Übermensch who pulled
the curtains aside to let the moonlight in the room
and staring at the priest He said to us:
‘He too will become my child when he lets go
of his dead god and fanaticism.’

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