The Poet

It isn't me, for sure, the hen next-door. ...!

'She' was always watering the plants. That's how you know a hen! His grandmother gave him a little flowerbox at the side of the house when he must have been six years old, where his 'Song of India' pleomele species thrives rampant today, eight feet high. Every time he waters this plant he remembers the tree-like one he once saw in town in his 'hoeing heydays' when he was young and beautiful - well he thought he was, and at least one or two others, okay, several others willing to say anything to get some free loving - well he thinks his 'Song of India' is almost as wonderful as that one.

But his doesn't have the trunk, the thickness that made that one fabulous. Fabulous, everything had to be fabulous, and he'll be darned if his garden isn't fabulous one day. It has had some fabulous moments. There were times when people slowed and stared, in admiration one assumed, but not always, at something in his garden that was really a fabulous too much, maybe even at him.

Once there was the cascading pink Congea at the front gate that no one else had, there was the whimsical whitewashed rockery and birdbath another time, the guava tree with the treehouse and children in pyjamas and blankets tumbling out one night, the rose garden, his rose garden down the side of the house which some people remember even today, the roses along the front fence, the hybrid crotons, the Cereus cactus taller than the house that bore hundreds and hundreds of fragrant white flowers that opened at night and attracted thousands of insects, the orchids, oh the orchids that shot out and cascaded in sprays and sprays of dendrobium and phalanaeopsis and oncidium blooms all over his front porch, and his fishpond. And his Julie mango trees, his lime tree that never stopped bearing, that rare white mussaeanda, and that hibiscus he planted outside the fence that used to be covered with fuchsia pink flowers like no one had ever seen till his uncle walked up the hill one day when he was out there carefully pruning and fertilising it just to say to him that in all his life - and he was now retired and an expert grower himself - just to tell him that in all his life he had never seen a hibiscus shrub that beautiful and healthy and so covered with flowers anywhere in the island.

It was never easy for the hen though. Where others boasted how they had a green thumb and everything just grew and flourished with them, and he would see fabulous plants growing neglected in other people's gardens everywhere, the hen fought tooth and nail all the time for his plants and later his garden to look like anything. Something was always attacking his plants, they needed manure and fertilizer and sprays and fungicides and careful pruning and constant watering as his house was on a hill, not in a valley, and then the snails and slugs came, the dry season, the tiredness when he began teaching and he just gave it up for weeks. ... Then the dogs. And the money for the gardener. It was always too much.

But neighbours could always be assured of some entertainment when the little hen, now the big hen, was in the garden fighting or chasing the dogs, screaming and cussing at fruit or plant thieves at all hours of the day or night, or battling with branches, pests, and her drug addict gardener. The hen, now in advanced middle age, was convinced that 'Maljo' or the 'bad eye' was real, as she'd witnessed the demise of many glorious specimens over the years, gone down never to recover after someone watched them or commented on them, intentionally or not. It's a wonder at all she's still there. Oops! His garden is still there.

This evening she was a bit fed-up she told me. The two huge hybrid crotons she's struggled with all through the dry season and watered and fertilised and sprayed diligently, and which had just been covered with a fabulous flush of large healthy new leaves, beginning to look like they should, the most fabulous specimens in anyone's garden the town had ever seen, no sooner than inexplicably - or explicably if you count that both his favourite successful sister and her husband(who abhors rampant growth) - both had 'watched' her crotons admiringly. Now all the beautiful new leaves, all, were falling off and the fucking trees were looking a starving beat up mess. God bless them, she thought, they can't help it (not the crotons!). A whole season's work falling in a litter of healthy leaves, and the hen must start all over again, spraying and fertilising and watering in, or chop them the fuck down(prune back vigorously that is). But he can't do that. One was planted in the '70's, the other when he started teaching, they've survived much, and his sister did everything to keep them going while he was abroad for ten years. ... He can't just chop them down now, the fucking crotons. You can't just get rid of fabulous things or things that could be or have been fabulous and wonderful he believes. Sigh!

The stupid drug addict labourer who does odd jobs for him wants him to cut down the Solanum in the back which has grown to seven feet tall and ten feet wide, but he won't because his brother brought that home from his office when the company went bust in '88 and the hen had always wanted that plant which was too expensive for him to buy. He was pooor poor poor at the time, 'self-employed', the euphemism for 'ketching his ass' designing and sewing and painting fabrics, and his brother brought it home and he 'de planted it there, just so in that spot in 1988. His brother migrated and has never come back, but every time he's watering his garden he remembers his brother brought him that plant. And there's the huge, much too huge, Flaming fucking Poinciana tree that's pushed down the bloody wall and has no business to be there that his godson's father planted. No one can get him to cut it down. It's the only Flamboyant tree in the country he thinks with double fabulous red flowers, that continues flowering and is covered with blooms into the first week of September when school has reopened. He remembers ironing his trousers and shirt for the first day in September with the red flowers outside the louvres and thinking What the Hell, mine is the only Flamboyant that's flowering right into September, all through the rainy season, crazy like its owner, 'one of a fucking kind. ...! Won't give up!'

Fabulous and rampant. Rampant and fabulous! Who remembers? Well the hen remembers. The hen will never forget when beauty triumphed. Others wish he would, and never mention or talk about those things. Or the constant battle. There were roses, Patsa and Picture roses, and Peace, and Queen Elizabeth and Princess Elizabeth and American Beauty, Tiffany, Tropicana, Cinderella and Whisky Mac all down the side of the garden once. Now not a single rose grows there or anywhere in the garden for that matter. Fabulous, rampant, wonderful, gone! There aint no rose petals blushing the hen's cheeks now either. No roses there. The hen next door was once beautiful and she once was rather exciting, has lived through many exciting times. Maybe she was too exciting. Maybe excitement is only good for memories. Maybe excitement is rolling into and exploding into people's lives as they crash into yours. Lots of exciting crashes and rolling around and explosions large and small happened in the hen's life. She told me of some.

She always wanted to be noticed and be heard. I've seen the little hen next door put on a large kind of cowboy hat, and dressed in some bright, really brightly coloured jersey, brand new, and whatever else, I didn't want to look too long, skipping up and down their front path, singing, mumbling script to herself, hoping to attract attention from passers-by or the neighbours, or me! That was when she was young. Once she tucked yards and yards of coloured crepe party streamers from her birthday party the day before into the back of her shorts and ran skipping all over the yard and lawns, wishing to be some sort of fairy or bird of Paradise or ballet dancer, then got on the seesaw to go up and down so the streamers could fly a little. ... She remembers a particular day way back when when she was running up and down her aunt's front lawn playing 'catch' with her brothers and sisters and she actually thought it would be much more exciting if there was screaming while being chased. Thus literally began, on that day, the hallmark screaming and shouting of playtime in that family. The entire neighbourhood became familiar with it. Led by the hen, they always put on a great show of children wildly at play, like in a movie.

She felt the eyes of the public, and relatives, were always on her and smiling endearingly at her imagination and the scripts for their games. It never occurred to her, as the years passed by, that any of it could cause embarrassment, or that anyone would ever be fed up with their noise, or hers in particular. She didn't know that some people, even her mother, could not like her. She was very bright in school, sang at concerts and even won prizes at children's talent shows, performed in plays, sang at birthday parties, and was 'very helpful', and they were rich and always well-dressed. Decades later she chuckled bitterly to a friend as they both cringed in shame over the phone, across the Atlantic, when they discussed how that phrase was a code phrase among ladies to describe other people's gay sons. Hens were always 'helpful'. Hens loved gardening and plants. Hens relished making decorations for Christmas, helping choose curtains, carrying the basket in the market for their mothers, sifting and picking rice, scrubbing and cleaning and painting wherever they could, making everything spotless and pretty when relatives or guests were coming. Arranging flowers! He told how he was beaten badly for rearranging furniture and ornaments once and couldn't understand why his father and grandfather, his mother and grandmother were so angry. He laughed forty years later to his friend that it must have been a horrible thing to deal with then, a hen in the family, a visible family, and a bright and visible boy at that. He was not quiet!

Another friend told him once that no one could hide him, he could never blend in. He knew he would never blend in. He found nice words for it as he grew older. At the opening of an Art exhibition to which his father was invited - his father had started buying paintings - his father said a painting had to be 'original', it had to stand out, be different. The hen took it to heart and soul in everything she did. It was a happy night with him and his father in their expensively tailored suits, the oil paint smells, minced beef pies and other dainties, and his father in a good mood.

And little hens couldn't help themselves when it came to weddings and wedding dresses, they were uncontrollable, unstoppable, their heartbeats raced, it brought out everything utterly and totally feminine in them! The little hen told me of that Christmas in the early '60's when his cousin got the Barbie doll, they were the newest thing that Christmas, and it was the Barbie BRIDE, complete with glass high heels and wedding dress and rhinestone tiara with veil. And earrings! If he was a sickly boy he would certainly have died that day or had an asthma attack, as for him it was to die for. A nasty girl cousin caught him reverently playing with it in the bedroom and made it her wicked pleasure to announce it loudly to all the grownups. He was shooed outside to play Cowboys and Indians with the boys. He felt ashamed but dreamt of that Barbie. Mothers had to protect their families from further embarrassment by shooing young hens away from wedding dresses and bouquets and lace and crinolines, but somehow, like avid rats, hens would eventually end up in the heart of matters when the going became frenetic and help was needed. Little hens grew into big hens and became indispensable for weddings. When it comes to wedding dresses and bridesmaids' dresses, corsages, bouquets and decorations, hairstyles and veils, beading and appliques, sequins, silk and satin, or silk satin and candyfloss, hens are the acknowledged experts. How could hens live without silk! Maybe it was always so since the pharaohs, the shahs and maharajahs. The hen next door has sometimes been heard singing to herself: "There will always be a hen. ..." to the tune of "There is nothing like a dame. ..." as she descends into her garden on a happy morning when she feels she is still beautiful, her train languidly dragging behind in her mind as admirers gasp at her ageless and magical beauty. ...

It wasn't till much later that the little hen began to understand that not everybody loved him all the time, and that even his beloved cousins and sisters and aunties were capable of being very fed up with him and sometimes got a wicked pleasure by excluding him from play that was suddenly only for girls. His heart sang for a tea set or kitchen set of cooking utensils at Christmas, which all the girls got but not him of course. Many a time he had to be coaxed out of a closet, this long before closets had anything to do with being gay, he had to be coaxed out from between the hanging garments behind which he could be found crying agonizingly, or from behind a bed hidden in the folds of the mosquito net. His feelings were hurt easily and deeply. He was beginning to understand that he did not belong; they could exclude him whenever they wanted. But the cousins and aunties were very kind mostly and protected him from those who called him a girlboy.

He never learned to fight. He was mortally afraid of being hit. He knew from early what being beaten up felt like, what being hit and belted felt like, when the blows of the belt or slaps or slipper rained down from every direction and stung everywhere and you scrambled and didn't dare scream or bawl too loud as that would cause even more blows to fly. Somehow he was always found wrong or rude or lazy or greedy or forgot to do chores or hitting his younger siblings or breaking something or destroying something while trying to make it pretty. ... he was always doing something that merited licks or wrath it seemed. The neighbours certainly heard, they told him so many years later. He was so afraid of the pain, the belt marks on his legs at school, and dirty untidy clothes. He was told decades later that one day he was belted senseless, he must have been 4 or 5 years old. His father came home from work and discovered him behind the closet door playing with and wearing one of his sisters' many beautiful frilly glittery fluffy crinolines as he made believe he was a fairy princess. ... He had no recollection of it, he was told he passed out from the beating with his father's belt. But in those days all children got licks. He would cry till he hiccupped when he got beaten and was made to go apologize and say sorry to his father by his mother! Go figure. He told me he sometimes gets so angry when he lets himself remember. He was raised to believe that his parents loved him, and still do and always will. ... He said laughing to me what would you have done when you discovered and had to suffer every day the fact that your eldest and firstborn son was a little girlboy. Many believed and even advised in those days that it had to be beaten out of him!

He felt he could die, earth should open and swallow him, he wished he could disappear whenever a boy, or worse, a girl, called him a girlboy in a nasty knowing way. He knew it would embarrass his mother and father, his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, and they mustn't hear or he would get licks when they got home for sticking up too closely to the girls and not playing with the boys. He was always terrified someone would mention it in conversation. He would want to die. He knew already it was a bad thing to be a girlboy, a shameful thing. Later, in his first year at college, at eleven years old, in an English class, when the meaning of the word 'effeminate' came up and was sneeringly explained by the English teacher, he felt his ears turn red and was so ashamed he broke out in a violent hot sweat, his shirt stuck to his back as he perspired frozen in his seat staring ahead hoping no classmate would point at him, knowing every single one did, sniggering. And there was the day the teacher stopped him reading 'The Owl and the Pussycat' to ask him why he had such a sing song voice and sounded like a girl! He had virulent, seeping, painful throbbing boils on his bottom that first year of college and had to sit on a cushion, a further embarrassment and humiliation. He found out 30 plus years later that it was from extreme stress, a breakout, which happened again when he was 43 and he thought the someone in San Francisco didn't love him and he'd been made a fool of, again. ...