A Capital Affair

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character sketches, creative process, Elaine Stirling, humour, narrative poetry, novel writing

I paid a call today
upon a gentleman
of capital repute who
spends his days upon
an island in a mansion
noncorporeal and pores,
or so I’m told, over his assets.

I found him, though,
outside with no portfolio
in sight, on a wrap-around
verandah, in a linen suit and
boater’s hat, a ten of hearts
stuck in the band.

The purpose of my visit, Sir—

I know why
you have come,
he said, and bade
me sit upon a swing
of woven cane that rocked
with some ferocity whene’er
I took my feet from off
the floor—but worse,
in planting firm my soles,
the swing rebelled
and threw me off.
Three times I flew
across the porch, a
squawking crane, before
the gentleman whose laughter
shook the eaves and smelled
like cedar chips and tide
pools of Madeira said:

The swing is quite a
marvel, no? It will slow
when you let go. As I have
told 10,000 presidents and
plutocrats, the most important
things in life revolt against
both feet upon the ground.

A maid in lace
arrived with tea while I
swung back and forth so
hard my bones were
loosening the sea and sky
the mansion and the questions
I’d intended to put well to him
swirled in hurling tones of
puce and pome—bleeaaaagh!

Your tongue, I heard
the fellow say. Rest it in
the center of your mouth.
Let go your need to prattle
and opinionate. The world
will turn just fine without
your constant, cranking,
over-educated urgency.

I did as he suggested
and eventually, the motion
of my ever-present, non-
directed, aggravating
energy decelerated and…
I found myself in poplin
with my slippered feet
a-dangling, no evidence
of anything, apart from
strange attire, embarrassing.

The gentleman
picked up the tiny
silver tweezers from
the china bowl of
sugar cubes. One
lump…or thousands?

Your word, he carried on,
as Word will do, preceded
you. I understand you’ve hit
a juggernaut of flaccid minds
and rubber necks, and now
you know not where to turn
to think without upsetting
apple carts and moral
codes and labour laws
and anti-trusts and love
affairs and laissez-faires…

I knew from his biography
the gentleman was sharing
all he’d struggled with in nearly
fourscore years of life until
a clot no bigger than a lentil
reached his heart and showed
him with a flash of light so
blinding white he thought
he’d died (he had) but in that
great illumination too he knew—

And there he stopped.

He knew. He knew.
Knew what? The cost?
I finally ventured.

Yes. Of what,
do you suppose?

The swing that held
me with such stillness
creaked and started to
lurch forward, and my feet
so nearly touched the floor
I felt its grain and heard
its oaken warning: No!

I lifted limbs
with gratitude
and tucked them
underneath my skirt
and drank my sweetened
tea and thought of all
I had been trained
with humourless
rigidity to think

of me
of him
and systems
we call politic
and passionate
and treacherous
and lecherous

and just as quickly
as I thought, the issues
I’d assigned such gravity
they flowed away. For free.
No cost to me or him
or anyone. And in that
nearly total clarity,
a question: Do I
have to…?

Die to see the light?
he said and took a walking
stick with silver tip from
near his chair.

I don’t believe he
answered, not in words,
and neither spoke for hours
while we toured his private
island, though I see here
in my notes, I wrote:

Injurious self-government
is all I need to overthrow.

~~~

One of my creative processes in writing long fiction is to create character sketches in poetic form. This is one of them.

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

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My Anima

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all is truly well, anima, animus, being easy on yourself, Elaine Stirling, humour, humourous poetry, Jungian archetypes, the shadow

She isn’t quite a friend
of mine, a bead of light,
a trickle, spark…I see her
in the silence when I step
outside, and outside hasn’t
noticed yet. A grip of cold,
a rise of sweat, she carries
her own weather and dispenses
like a medic from a space
shaped like a sack that smells
of cardamom varieties
of pills, some bitter,
mostly sweet, a few
that taste of offal grilled—
quite awful till one gets beyond
the need to cluster-rhyme
at every friggin’ trill and turn.

She’s not my Mum
or Grandma, though she
knows the matrilinea from
whence I came down to their
baby toes, and in a pinch
could stand for me and often
has, when heels and early
graves I’ve dug. She’s not
a ghost, though scare you
out your wits she will when
fancy strikes, and haunt
surrounding tables at posh
restaurants until my date
and I are quite alone. She’s
shown the way when I’ve
been lost more times than I
can shake my sticks at, then
she elevates my thoughts to
grasp, however briefly, that
the path is always cleared
well in advance. If I’d be less
a scaredy pants and more a
glad participant, her sight
and mine would true align,
and life would furl before me
like a set design, a plan divine,
divined by me and her with
opposites and shadows central
cast. Of future, present, past
she is my every person, place,
and thing, my noun renowned
and infinite, she is my anima.
You have one, too.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Image by Ben Stirling, ©2005

My Love and the Paper Boat

Tags

contemporary mythology, Elaine Stirling, happiness is a decision, humour, interrupted rhyme, love, manifestation, rhyming couplets, romance, taking life lightly

I

My love built me a paper boat
to float upon the sea

across its flimsy hull he wrote
in script too small to see

with eyelash of an octopus
as brush, and ink of squid

the magic words to bring us back
when one sees fit to quit.

A magnifying glass I held
to that wee paper boat

attempting to decipher what
my love had sweetly wrote.

I thought I caught a word or two
but then came Mr. Sun

who lit what I had magnified
and burnt it into crumbs

of ash that blew across the sky.
Oh, crap, I thought, now what?

My love will have a fit when he
sees how I crisped our boat.

In fear, I found myself a clam
and asked if I could rent

his shell to hide myself until
I’d figured how to tell

the news. The clam said yes, but when
you’re done, be sure to leave

the shell behind for someone else
to find and hide inside.

Good shells, they don’t come cheap, you know,
and everyone’s afraid.

II

I hid inside my puny case
and read the daily news;

I texted friends and buffed my nails,
did anything I choose

and wondered why my love had not
come round to say hello.

I cranked the lid and peered outside
in time to see the tail

of Jupiter the Whale before
he swallowed everything.

III

The darkness here inside the gut
has no apparent end

and Jupiter can’t feel me when
I poke him with my nail

so I decide to sing about
my lover’s beauteous ways

his touch and smell, the smile he wears
when life is going well

and as I start to sing I hear
weird stirrings all around

that grow to voices, weak at first,
that rise, a mighty swell

and soon we’re all a-weeping ‘bout
the loves we left behind;

ahead is surely nothing, sniff!
but more, oh, woe betide…

discouraged by the swallowed mob
I wonder how to squelch

their ever-pining misery
when suddenly a belch

erupts that pours the seven seas
across new land—I’m free!

IV

This island with the coconuts
is big enough for two—

a sandy beach, a woven hut,
there’s nothing much I need to do.

The squid whose ink my lover used
to write has told the octopus

whose lashes have grown in,
exactly where I am, and lo!

before the sun has set, my love
arrives upon his boat

full grown, no longer paper, and
I see the words and laugh. What

happens next, we will not share.
You’ll have to ask the birds.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Pages Ripped from the Secret Diaries of a Blocked Writer

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American novelists, divisiveness, Elaine Stirling, fertility gods, flash fiction, humour, irreverence, magical realism, prose poetry, purple prose, soft porn spoof, the myth of writing block, the nature of time, Tom Robbins

The following contains mild profanity and euphemisms. Reader discretion is advised.

—how would I write if All the Time in the World showed up, uninvited, and offered herself to me? Would I push her away, saying, “Sorry, no time”? Argue in defense of not enough?

This is why I don’t…
This is why I can’t…
This is why I haven’t…

Or would I truly hear her name, All the Time in the World? See her where she stands before me, berry-blushed and naked, legs apart, arms open, a smile playing on lips that make me want to…

Make me want to
Make me want to
Make me want to

…rush. Her lips, slightly open, and all the rest of her make me want to rush. The hammer of my accelerating heartbeat gives my urgency away, while the hair on my arms and other vital parts rise.

All the Time in the World moves closer. I can smell the sandalwood and cedar musk of her. A breeze picks up from somewhere to my left and lifts the corkscrew curls of her reddish-brown hair. The slope of her collarbone, a pair of apostrophes above two cherry pips on sundaes take me back to banana splits at Woolworths with Shirl Hedlock where I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out, and then her family moved to West Chester, and I never saw the east-west chest of Shirl Hedlock again.

All the Time in the World wrapped her arms around me. I’m aware of being inconsistent in my tenses. Does she know I’m tense? Present, past and future are balling up in my head like the pungent rolling prize of a scarab. Maybe the hard-working dynastic bugs of old were trying to impress scarab pharaohs, Nefertiti queen beetles, competing for the biggest—shit! If I don’t get serious about my writing soon—

“No, no, no, screw serious! You’re doing fine.”

All the Time in the World pokes my sweaty diaphragm with a cocked finger, and I tip like a bowling pin, like a bottle of milk left on the porch in a sudden squall, onto the bed where I’d been lying and thinking and lying to myself, “I will never write again.” Now, All the Time in the World is lying on top of me, and while I’m having trouble remembering what comes after exhale, lush, ripe pomegranate prose starts pouring out…

~~~

Author’s Note: While debates with no hope of solution at their present level of thinking zing across the airwaves, dividing us in disillusioned heaps of politics, religion, sex and how we orient our sex, a fertility god walks the earth. His name is Tom Robbins. The American novelist, author of Jitterbug Perfume and Skinny Legs and All, among others, navigates a fine, humourous, invigorating line between all of our insanities. For forty-plus years, Robbins has been penning phrases that are seemingly innocuous, setting them in scenarios so absurd you feel like you’ve found a piece of meteorite or the Meaning of Life. The phrase that got me sprinting to my keyboard this a.m. comes from Tom’s 1971 novel (his first) Another Roadside Attraction. “The uncomfortableness of associations” doesn’t sound like much, I know. As with all Robbins’s work, you have to be there—but only if you want to. In the tradition of the best gods and goddesses, he doesn’t seem to give a flying rip one way or the other.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Paint

Tags

be easy on yourself, brave new business leadership, confidence, covering up, Elaine Stirling, free verse, healthy ego, humour, insecurities, poetry for fun, self-reflection, The Corporate Storyteller

No matter how
many coats of paint
I paint the past
it’s passed, the point
of paint, of course,
to beautify, protect,
to cover and reflect
what otherwise I might
reject for being plain,
unvarnished, bare…
bare like branches in
late fall, bare like
weathered sheds
and truth—egad,
no, not the truth!

And when I paint
to cover, glossing over
bumps and flaws, I call
them out, though not
to play, there is no fun
in imperfection—can
there be?

And in my fear
that you might see
the curvatures of life
as she displays herself
with some magnificence
through me, I’ll focus
on your semi-nakedness,
the neither-here-nor-there
of you that is the me, stuck
in the past, reflected, and
I’ll point them out quite
helpfully—just there, a little
flaw. Hold still, I have
the perfect paint.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

The Crow, The Trout, and Me: A True North Story

Tags

alignment, brave new business leadership, business fable, business plan, creating new worlds, Elaine Stirling, humour, Moose Lake, new mythologies, Ontario, poetry, profitability, sustainability, The Corporate Storyteller, the fun of run-on sentences, the power of thought, transcending paradigms, vibrational reality

I threw a bottle
with no message
to a trout who tried
to catch it with his mouth
which gave me time
while he was occupied
to stretch a bridge across
the lake and build a cabin
with a view to something better
than the current occupation
with non-clarity, and thus
the trout expanded his
ability to yawn, and I
forgot what it was like
to drown in non-essential
gravities; the fish and I have
made a pact to bring the
relaxation back to moments
that are units of pure profit,
and the crow who came
to analyze our business plan
agreed there is no finer way
than to practice with a simple
preposition like an and, forget
the but, the or, just focus on
vitality; so now it is the three
of us, the crow, the trout, and
me who write the strategies
of messages in bottles that
we throw into mad oceans of
perplexity with knowledge
that the best of you will
join the best of me and
then the rest of us will
follow and we’ll find
there is no end.

The End

~~~

P.S. The “More” Behind the Poem: Several friends enthused about the rhyme scheme and playfulness of this poem, and suggested I share its beginnings. Every creative birth has a story, of course, but this one felt livelier than usual. I’d been listening the night before to a YouTube clip of a latino dance style called “la cumbia”. Drop the first “I” of the poem, and you’ll hear it–threw a BOT-tle with no MESS-age to a TROUT who tried to CATCH it, etc.

Next morning, I went for my usual trail walk, thinking about an empty plastic water bottle. I sat on a bench to write a poem about the bottle and a trout, when a large crow landed in the nearby pine and SQUAWKED in perfect cumbia rhythm at me. I’d already written the first ten lines; the crow wrote himself into the final ten, exactly like a manager or talent scout taking over the “business side” of things. When I was finished, I looked up to see if he’d flown away. He was still there; a lady crow had joined him. The two were making out, uttering little cooing noises you would never associate with crows. It was the finest proof I’ve ever seen that the Universe has perfect timing and a whacked sense of humour. Thank you, Tiel Healy, for suggesting I add the P.S. Readers, you would love Tiel’s “Plan BE”, which you can find here at her blog.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Coriander Boogie

Tags

all in good time, cilantro, coriander, Elaine Stirling, flow, fun and silly rhyming verse, humour, letting things be, plants that bolt fast, poetry, tolerance, vibrational reality

Coriander boogie
got me shakin’
in the morning
got me thinkin’
‘bout my baby and
the ways that we
been stormin’.

Coriander boogie
took me down
where there’s no
‘scaping, showed me
how we’s all behavin’
in a way that
keeps us slavin’.

So then I says to coriander,
what’s a gal to do when
all that’s sweet and green
and leafy turns to spice
that ain’t so nice?
You got advice?

And here’s what
coriander said to me:

You gotta let the green be green,
the fully ripened brings the flavour;
the twigs ain’t meant for eatin’
but they fed the seeds all season.

And the leaves that was
cilantro knew the time
to say, so long, and
that’s the thing you got
to learn that every reason
has its time. There ain’t no
right or wrong, only Mama
Nature growin’ up a bushel
and a beauty of a coriander,
once cilantro song!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Kit, my Kaboodle

Tags

authenticity, brave new leadership, duality, enjoyment, free verse, honouring feelings, humour, individuality, intention, light and dark, lightness of being, my voice is my voice, nagual, parody, poetry, satire, self-importance, self-pity, The Corporate Storyteller, uniqueness, vibrational reality

I have a caboose
at the end of my train
with an imp that enjoys
thumbing noses and moons
at the sun when a new dawn
arises my eyes need to blink
and the imp sees his chance
and he hangs from the tail
where he shouts at the passing
terrain, whatcha you gonna do
now, pretty boy?

My imp’s name is Kit, and I do
try to shush him, though not very
much ‘cause he’s got the touch of
a jester at heart, and my brain with
its lore is a bit of a bore, and my
soul isn’t whole unless I can
laugh at the bridges we burn
and the tracks we lay down
and pretend when we crash
that they weren’t our
own handiwork.

The thing is, we all
have to run on the steam
that we bring, and if mine
blows too hot or too cold in
your face, and yours makes
me yawn, we could still show
some grace—not go stupid nutty
all over the place, when our tracks
must diverge. I have no intention
of leaving sweet Kit at the station
or anywhere else for I love how
how he thinks and he sees and
he laughs—he’s divine. Yes,
Kit, my kaboodle, is mine!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of caboose from http://www.bbcrc.org

Neighbours: A Creepy Little Horror Poem

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a bit of silliness, Elaine Stirling, eleven syllable lines, hendecasyllabic, humour, minding one's business, my crush on Alfred Hitchcock, nosiness, parody, perception, poetic justice, poetry

Those people that keep to themselves, curtains drawn,
have you seen? Never say where they go when they
smile, say hello. Something funny going on,
you can tell ‘cause he walks slow and sneaky, way
after dark, doesn’t smoke—what’s the point? He should
stay in the house, it’s not safe in the park, and
the woman, her arms black and blue with tattoos
so the bruises won’t show, mark my words! No good
ever comes when you let loose your guard. A hand
will reach in, snatch it all. Don’t sing me the blues
when your house crashes down. You heard it here first!
…
Ka-ta-boom!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image from the 1954 Hitchcock film, “Rear Window”

Piebald: A Toltec Whimsy

Tags

approach to alignment, Aztec and Maya mythology, Carlos Castaneda, cognitive systems, deliberate creation, don Juan Matus, Elaine Stirling, Feathered Serpent, humour, inner silence, light verse, nagual, Quetazalcoatl, quetzal bird, sacred word play, shamanism, sonnet, time/space reality, Toltec wisdom, vibrational reality

Pulling strands of Time and Word, a feathered
snake and quetzal bird met nose to beak, their
first impressions, Hiss! and Cheap! Bad weather
held them in abyss, abasement, nowhere
could they fly or slither without dragging
scale or tail of the other. Get me out,
Time, I’ve nation-states in crises raging,
cried the snake. Word, the bird was heard to shout,
I do not like this freakish serpent’s coil!
The strands of Word and Time between them squirmed;
they braided, grew, a messy lambent toil
silencing both views and scales overturned,
delivered unto Space, Creation’s king.
Well done! From such as these, new worlds must spring.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of Quetzalcoatl as depicted
in the Codex Barbonicus is from http://www.crystalinks.com