Inland Waterways: POEMS from a Peaceable Kingdom

Corn Field in Winter
Earth glares at husband sky,
Grinds her corn husk stubs
Like dry shark’s teeth
Broken near the roots.
 
Stubble rot crackles.
Her word-winds split the rows
And blow a sulphurous breath
Hard across his face.

She demands her rights.
New roots, new growth,
A summer coronet of broadband leaves,
Green ribbons for a corn silk crop.
 
Husband sky remains unmoved,
Hides the hot transforming rain
Behind the blind whites
Of a February eye.
 
The universe will turn, she says.
She’ll be on top then
And spit black cinders
Into his pretty blue eyes.
 ​
Pelican Lost
deep in the arctic snow
far from the coast
the pelican is in a strange land
his deep, orange pouch empty
of the frogs and salamanders
he loves to eat
he wonders how he got here
did he read the wrong guidebooks
perhaps he should have studied
maps more closely, ones that show
him clearly where he should nest
where he might find like-minded creatures
with deep, full beaks
and an aversion to cold weather
 ​
Not What I Expected
Yesterday
I descended to the deeps
of an indigo sea
keen to confront
what might await me there. 
 
I expected
sharks circling in spirals
crazy for the taste of my flesh
with razor sharp teeth ready to shred
the paper-thin edges
of my culpability.
 
Instead
I found lightweight fish
bright eyes brushed by the lazy current
fins luffing, scales blazing
with ultramarine, vermillion
and all shades in between,
teeth like miniature pearls
that tickled my toes as they played
on the seabed.
 
I expected
a fight to the finish
with killing machines
since so many others had gone
before me, leaving only spirals
of blood, scraps of paper floating
upwards to document the struggle.
 
Instead
I found a peaceable kingdom
rooted in a reef of living coral
where the law of the jungle
was ‘Do no harm’
where mythical sea monsters
vanquished long ago to undersea caves
slept soundly, no danger to the public. 
​​

When She Was Five
She rides
his lacquered flanks,
hugs his surge and fall
between strong legs.
Her bloodlines spin
hot webs
on a bony frame.
 
In a room
a grass-cut breeze
ruffles white curtains
along a window ledge.
A fly hums and bumbles
against the pane.
She inhales sunbeams.
 
When she was five
her mother came
into the room
and said, “Katie, dear,
let your sister
have a turn now
on the rocking horse.”
 


Bird Up a Tree
I’m a bored venerable bird
up a tree, brimming over
with a serious lassitude
weary of the same old songs
sung by the same tired throats.
 
I’m ready to relinquish
the golden bough where
I’ve clung since my prime
brandishing brilliant tail feathers
a celebrated dervish of my breed.
 
I’m ready to bribe anyone
to drop me into a dirigible balloon
raise me up where I can trill a trillion
new tunes, trade my lavish tail feathers
for the brown lark’s heavenly notes.
 

The Long Revenge

​The crime scene bordered on the farcical. The victim's body was propped against the trunk of a tree; two miniature poodles, one white, one black, licked at the gapping chest wound. An officer shooed the animals away. The poodles ran off but stayed close by, running in circles around the body as they whined and barked.

Detective Sergeant Jake Kapoor of the Halton Regional Police made a whistling sound and muttered under his breath. "Jezuz! Those dogs have gone psycho!" Turning towards the officer-in-charge of the crime scene, he gestured at the clearing in the woods. "Constable Maitland, this is ludicrous. Why haven't your men cleared the dogs away? They're disturbing the crime scene."

Maitland frowned at the implied criticism. "When we get close to them, they run off and continue their barking from a distance. They're small but they move fast. You might say the poodles are resisting arrest."

A flicker of a smile crossed the officer's face. Hardly a thigh slapper of a joke, Kapoor thought to himself, but he still acknowledged Maitland's attempt at humour with a faint smile. Under the circumstances any kind of humour would do to relieve the tension of entering yet another scene of blood and gore.

Maitland continued: "The ground is soft, sir. Good for taking foot impressions but we don't want to mix up our officers' prints with those of the killer. I've put in a call to the Humane Society. They have dart guns for stunning animals."
Before entering the crime scene, Constable Maitland had briefed him on the basic facts of the crime. The victim was male, Caucasian, in his early fifties. The chest cavity was pried open, the heart removed, and nailed to a tree trunk above the victim's head. Without an autopsy, the exact cause of death could not be confirmed. A revolver was found nearby but the ammunition clip was full and there were no bullet wounds on the body. Major contusions to the head and a deep knife wound at the base of the skull. So far, no knife was found at the scene.

What Maitland had not mentioned was the presence of two traumatized poodles. As he watched the dogs perform their crazy dance around the body, Kapoor visualized a posse of hefty police officers with dart guns chasing two rodent-sized poodles. Not an edifying sight.

"For god's sake, Maitland, we're not dealing with ravenous bears or man-eating tigers. Isn't there an easier way to bring the dogs to heel?"

Kapoor's driver, Constable Doug Price, stepped forward. "Sir, I own a Jack Russell. They're small, hyper dogs like poodles. Food always calms them down. Let me get my lunchbox."

A few minutes later Constable Price returned with a plastic container. He plucked a cube of chicken embedded in a clump of noodles out of the container and offered the food to the poodles. They stopped barking immediately, sniffed the air and edged closer towards his outstretched hand. The black poodle wolfed down the delicacy straight away. Price scooped him up around the belly and handed him off to Maitland.

The white poodle was not so compliant. She paced back and forth for several minutes then abruptly rolled onto her back whimpering and writhing in the damp leaves like a hyperactive snake. She let Constable Price pick her up but refused to take the food. Instead, she squirmed about in his arms, trying to climb onto his left shoulder, her hind legs churning against his chest.

Leaving Constable Price to subdue the poodles, Kapoor pulled on his latex gloves and followed Maitland to the body. The victim was on the short side, not more than five foot six, with a stocky build. Black leather shoes, cashmere trousers, silk shirt and a fleece-lined leather jacket signified a man who didn't stint on money when it came to his wardrobe.
Maitland pointed at a reddish-brown mass on the tree trunk just above the victim's head. "That's his heart. Poor bugger. This killing was sure an up-close-and-personal deal."

Kapoor crouched beside the body for a closer look. The killer had ripped open the shirt, tearing off the buttons. The ribs poked out of the blood-filled chest cavity where the heart had once pumped blood throughout the body. The person responsible for this desecration had wielded a knife with a surgeon's precision, slicing out the heart without damaging surrounding organs. 

Kapoor pulled the bloodied shirt away from the waist revealing a silver belt buckle engraved with the head of a bull. He gently raised the head off the victim's chest and pushed the strands of dark hair partially hiding the face. His pulse quickened.

Usually, the blank helplessness on a murder victim's face generated in Kapoor a stab of compassion. What must it feel like to realize in the last minutes of your life that someone hated you enough to kill you? But this time was different; no compassion pierced his heart. Instead, a shudder convulsed his body followed by an uncontrollable urge to laugh. Not an ordinary laugh, more a cosmic shout that bubbled up from his gut in response to the crazy crapshoot known as life. A similar laughter had possessed him once before at the morgue where he viewed Elise's body on the gurney. In that instance, the laughter brought with it a fit of deep sobbing that rendered him unable to function for hours.

Kapoor swallowed hard, stood up, and pulled off his latex gloves. He was at a crime scene in the company of colleagues. No histrionics permitted here. Composure was everything.

“Nothing more for us here, Maitland. Forensics can handle the rest. Don't bother to check car plates and license id. I know this man well. His name is Vincent Scarlatti.”
 
Two hours later, the sound of slamming car doors reverberated throughout the woods like machine gun fire. The team from the Forensic Identification Unit was packing up, ready to move out. They had photographed the body from every conceivable vantage point and crawled over the forest floor, scrutinizing the damp ground, leaf by soggy leaf, seeking any trace of the killer or killers. They bagged soil and leaf samples as well as cigarette butts, soft drink cans, and an unidentified marble fragment. Molds were taken of footprints and tire tracks. Nothing was overlooked in the search for traces of the killer or killers.
​
Three men from the Coroner's Office wheeled the blanketed body of Vincent Scarlatti out to the road and hoisted it into a van. Detective Kapoor watched the vehicle recede to a black dot as it travelled down the concession road. Silently, he congratulated the killer, whoever he was or wherever he might be, on a job well done. 

Something-Other-THAN
[Preface]

For a significant portion of my life, I’ve yearned for something that I could not name—a secret knowledge shared by others but for some reason unknown to me. If I searched hard and long enough, so my thinking went, I might discover the password to this invisible, glorious universe I chose to call “Something-Other-Than.” While the phrase is rather vague, it creates in my mind a spaciousness for whatever I might find on my quest, without being restricted by traditional theologies formulated by others.
​
I’m under no illusion of being the only one to experience such a yearning. For millennia philosophers, mystics, poets, and psychologists have tried to crack the mystery of human existence. The great religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism have spent centuries honing the results of their pursuit of this craving, claiming to have had conversations with God about the meaning of human existence and how to conduct oneself so as to reap a heavenly reward. Prophets, priests, and ordained ministers have devoted their lives to writing sacred texts about the divine order of the world and established powerful ecclesiastic hierarchies, buildings, and rituals to help seekers navigate the razor’s edge of the spiritual life. Those raised within these established religions would, I’m sure, see my lone quest for an answer as an act of supreme hubris. Who am I to think I can discover a wisdom on my own that the venerated prophets were unable to find?

In return, I ask why should something so essential as our divine nature be kept a dark secret, open only to the chosen few? Why is it not possible for a person to penetrate life’s mystery without relying on intermediaries to dictate the answers? And yet, over the centuries we have observed millions of people around the world who remained attached to religious creeds drawn up thousands of years ago and who are collectively willing to perform horrendous deeds, as well as loving ones, in the name of a long-ago prophet or deity.

I wasn’t raised within the comfort and confines of a traditional religious community. Some might say I was religiously malnourished as a child, although I’ve always considered this so-called lack in my upbringing as a great source of freedom, one that liberated me from conformance to religious rules and conceptions drawn up in a process of groupthink that lacked firm evidence. I was able to freely explore the possibilities of experiencing the divine without being devoured by guilt and a fear of being assigned to eternal damnation.

This memoir recounts how I navigated my spiritual quest using approaches available to any seeker trying to figure out the purpose of this amazing state of affairs we call “Life,” and what happens when we arrive at its endpoint. I’ve focused on five ways: the Way of the Book, the Way of Yoga, the Way of Poetry, the Way of the Dream, and the Way of the Cosmos. To be sure, there are many other ways to divine enlightenment, but only so many can be undertaken within the span of one human lifetime. Heading into my eighth decade, I want to share my experiences of this quest and what it taught me about the mystical world of Something-Other-Than.

We rarely speak of our experiences of the divine, fearing to open ourselves to ridicule. I believe a willingness for each of us to express our discovered truths, while honouring the truth of others, can contribute to a deeper understanding of how much we share in our spiritual yearnings. Perhaps by doing so we can vanquish the spectre of spiritual sectarian violence that has inflicted and continues to inflict so much suffering in this world.