Fractured Paradise (Volume IV)
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"For whosoever has been born and whosoever shall be born must act in such a way that, when the moment comes to leave this world, he may have Paradise as his portion and Garothman as his reward." From the Canon of Truth: Aogemadaeca, Zoroastrian Memory Monday January 3, 1997 Shit! I can hardly write, I'm so nervous, but the bakery over on twenty fourth and Hennepin must be haunted, or something. I've never seen anything like it. After years of walking by that place I saw something that simply gave me the creeps. I don't know if it was a ghost or some kind of optical illusion, but there was a moving picture in the window of the restaurant tonight. I swear it scared the shit out of me...jeesh... ...and what was the guy in the picture trying to say with all those signals? Maybe they had some large television on and forgot to turn it off. Open Mic at the Caradog Welsh Pub: The Caradog was great tonight, but I didn't get to read until after midnight. I can't believe how many people were there. Here's what I read tonight: Poem #1203 Mothballs flying. Locusts eating the rotten milk Of neighborhoods In heat. I pick up the nation of flies that land on my conscience and release them... to the pagan god of reproduction. 1997 Cynthia Green Monday January 3, 1997 This is really weird. That picture I mentioned last week was there again in the window of the bakery on twenty fourth and Hennepin, and the same man was trying to get me do something...but what?! I wonder if that image is there all of the time. I must remember to walk by the window at other times, like during the day, and see if they have just put some kind of poster on the window...but that wouldn't explain how it moves...strange. I did get a poem out of that picture though. Here is what I read tonight: Poem #1033 In the window of a bakery the future, or the afterlife, beckons. It calls me, but the messinger is mute. 1997 Cynthia Green I had several comments on the poem. Several thought it sounded mystical January 12, 1997 Damn! My fingers are almost frozen. It's the coldest night of the year and the picture was in the window of the restaurant again, and it only seems to show up at night, and only when I'm walking by. If I didn't know better I'd say that the man in the image wants me to understand something. I know that the picture is not occurring during the day. I've started walking by in the morning and afternoons on my way to and from busses and it is never there when there are other people around. They would think I was crazy if I said anything about it, so I don't. Caradog Welsh Pub Open Mic: This scene in the bakery window is getting to me. Here is one of my poems from tonight: Poem #1048 It's haunting me in the early time, before the sun, before the world wakes up to testify, so I look away, hoping it goes... Copyright 1997 Cynthia Green, Poet, Minneapolis January 30, 1997 Allright, I guess it's not going away, that image in the bakery window. I even went by during the week at two in the morning and it was there...every time...what the fuck! Tonight I actually stood and watched this guy in the scene. He was making signs with his hands and mouthing something. Finally I started thinking about trees, so I started making hand signals in the shape of trees and mouthing the word "trees" and he started smiling, and I started smiling because there was some kind of contact, but then he started making signs with his finger, pointing down the street. When I pointed in the same direction he was pointing and mouthed the word "trees" he smiled again, so I went down the street to Smith Triangle, a small park in front of the Jewish synagogue, on Hennepin. There were a few trees there, but it was winter and the leaves are all gone, except for a few evergreens. Fortunately, it wasn't all that cold this morning so I could take a closer look without freezing my ass off. Nothing seemed unusual at first, but then I started to grab the limbs and look at them in the dim lights from the street lamps. What was strange is that they were covered with notches, or stripes, or lines...I don't know what to call them. They were too well organized to be random markings in the bark. The markings seemed to be set into different, distinct patterns, but it was nothing I could recognize. Not knowing what to do I pulled out my notebook and wrote down some of the patterns. Here's one of the more common patterns: __||||_______ /////__||||________|||__|||||__|||||______/ |||| ||| ///// |||| |||| ||||| ||||| || \ I don't know even know where to start on figuring this puzzle out. I just wrote this poem. I'll read it next week: Poem #1048 Magic marks on the leaves of trees... I'm all too confused, slashes slanted and vertical, some half long and others full, all saying something to the night. Copyright 1997 Cynthia Green, Poet, Minneapolis February 1, 1997 I can't believe it! Remember that poem I wrote last week? About the strange lines I saw on the trees at Triangle Park? I read it and afterwards this guy came over to my table and sat down. He looked kind of strange to me, even for the Caradog, but he said that his name was Kevin Marcherd and that he knew what the lines were. He said he was a pagan and studied all kinds of ancient alphabets, including Nordic runes and the Celtic tree alphabet. He even wrote down a chart on the Caradog napkin that I could take with me. He said it was called the Ogham. He seemed very excited about what I found and wanted to see it...tonight, so we walked to Uptown to look at the trees. I couldn't believe that he would walk that far at two in morning, but he insisted. But he was quite disappointed when the lines weren't on the trees. Even the images on the bakery was gone. This guy must've thought I was crazy or something. I was beginning to think so too, until just now. After I got home I was very puzzled about the man in the window and the lines on the trees and how they were gone, especially after having been there consistently before, so I walked back over to Smith Triangle and...what do you know...they were there again. I guess I have two ways of interpreting this: 1. that I am indeed going crazy. 2. that the lines are meant only for me to see. I'm not sure if I like either interpretation, but I was convinced that the lines were there. I wasn't able to sleep, so I got up and compared the chart given to me by Kevin to the patterns I copied down the other night. The following letters came out: evrestiil It didn't make any sense to me, so I put away the paper until I could talk to Kevin again. Poem #1048 I, alone, can see the words, but I can't decipher them, I'm more curious than I have ever been. Copyright 1997 Cynthia Green, Poet, Minneapolis February 8, 1997 Kevin wasn't all that interested in talking to me at first. He was convinced that I was just bullshitting him, but I showed him the patterns I found on the tree and the letters that I translated. It was difficult at first because there was no punctuation and the Ogham only has twenty letters, fifteen consonants and five vowels, which meant that whomever was responsible for the lines on the trees had to use double letters to represent the English letters not found in the Ogham. At least that is what Kevin figured out. Here are the letters found in the Ogham: B L F S N H D T C Q M G Ng Z R A O U E I Here are Kevin's substitutions for the missing English letters: F - FF J - NG K - CC P - BB W - UU X - ZZ Y - II One of the paragraphs that we translated was: thisisquuinnngacobsinevrestiilkeepcomingtothetrees Which we initially converted to: This is Qwinn Jacobs in Evrestyl. Keep coming to the trees. We figured that the 'j' in 'comij' was an actual 'ng', rather than a 'j', so we wrote it down as 'coming'. We assumed that 'Qwinn Jacobs' was the man I saw in the window, but we don't have any idea what 'Evrestyl' is. At least Kevin started to believe me, so he walked back to the trees this morning, but they were gone then to. It seems that they are only seen by me. Kevin has some doubts about my story I think, perhaps even thinking that I am simply showing him different trees so that he can't find the markings. But he has asked me to get more or the markings written down so that we can translate them. So far they all seem to be in English. I'm going to take tablets with me every night from now on to write down all of the letters. Hopefully I'll get familiar enough to write them down directly in English without having to write them down in Ogham first...it's too time consuming! Caradog Welsh Pub Open Mic: Poem #.... Copyright 1997 Cynthia Green, Poet, Minneapolis Month Day, Year Caradog Welsh Pub Open Mic: Poem #.... Copyright 1997 Cynthia Green, Poet, Minneapolis OK, I'll have to admit that, being an unknown poet prowling the streets of Minneapolis and reading quickly scribbled words at open microphones, isn't going to grant a great deal of credibility when it comes to eternal truth, philosophy or theology. Even I would have difficulty giving someone like myself a second thought after hearing me ramble on for a while, but what I have written down on these pages is only my meager attempt to write down words that were given to me. The fact that these words appeared only as scratches on the branches of trees would be enough to give rise to much doubt, especially if I told you that they were from a man in the afterlife, but that is what I am left with, a story that we simply will not be able to verify in this life time. For years I had struggled to maintain a meager existence, supporting my poetry habit with various low paying jobs that asked for nothing more than a couple of free hands and a willingness to work. I genuinely felt that I had maintained my integrity as a poet, not caving in to the pressures to go to college, latch on to some carriage path and settle down with a family in some serene suburb. Now, I'd be the last to say that downtown Minneapolis has that world class gritty feel of large eastern cities like New York or Boston, but it's OK. My little one bedroom apartment in Uptown works just fine for me, keeping me warm in the winter and giving me a place to sleep. The local coffee houses are good at providing some caffeine and a table to write on, especially the Disco Grind on Hennepin Avenue, just a couple of blocks north from my apartment building. Even the gaudy disco ball they hung up on the ceiling light fixture doesn't get in the way of writing down my thoughts on any given evening. My favorite times are early in the evening, before the suburban high school kids arrive and start talking and smoking with adolescent density. But even then, snippits of conversation will make their way to my ears and inspire some interesting verse. Monday nights are my favorite time. That's when I would head down to the Caradog Welsh Pub with my disheveled stack of handwritten work and wait for the open microphone to start. Around eight thirty the mistress of ceremonies arrives and starts setting up for another evening of unrehearsed expression. Monday nights at the Caradog had become my own religion, a place where I could worship at the feet of other unknown poets and allow the moment to ebb and flow with the intensity of loneliness. I was proud of the fact that I would stay until either the very last reader had performed or the waiting staff had run us out at one in the morning. I was equally proud of my determination to walk the entire distance from the Caradog to Uptown, a forty minute walk, even if it was twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. It was on just such a cold night in January that I encountered Qwin the first time, in the window of the Bakery at 24th and Hennepin. As usual I would look in on the workers covered in white as they prepared dough for the kneading machines and ovens. The contrast of lightness and warmth within the bakery and the sinister, cold darkness of January after midnight always intrigued me. Once I pass the well lit bakery, I normally look into the shadowed depths of the restaurant, with the chairs, tables and counter empty and silent, awaiting the sun and patrons, but on that night those windows were filled with light as well, but not the artificial light from interior bulbs, with the brilliant light of a blue sky, and a mountain range, with groves of trees and forests extending far into the distance. It didn't make sense that such a scene would be blazing at me from a restaurant's plate glass window, but there it was, so bright that I was tempted to shield my eyes. I stepped away from the window and looked around me. Hennepin avenue was no different than it usually is at two in the morning. There was no traffic. The street lights cycled mindlessly through their colors and the neon signs of stations, video shops and restaurants staked their own claims in the darkness. Turning back to the window I half expected the image to be gone since I had convinced myself that I had conjured the image within my imagination, but it was still there, as exotic as when I first looked. A man was approaching me from within the image, waving his hands, gesticulating in a very specific way, as thought he wanted to say something, but there was only silence. I would have loved stay there and figure out what was going on, but it was too damned cold. I figured that I wouldn't see the image again. Cynthia Green, Poet, Minneapolis |
