Sunday, August 2, 2020

As I went out one morning (with a nod to W. H. Auden)




As I went out one morning 
Walking the primal road
My shoulders were bent over
With an invisible load.

And down by the creek where the salmon
Sing all day in the spring
I heard a man with holes in his clothes
Say, “Love has no ending.”

I wondered at his heresy
He wasn’t supposed to speak
Of things he did not understand
And shouldn’t even seek. 







“I love you, Lord, I love you,”
the ragged man proclaimed,
although his face was badly scarred
and his body bent and maimed.

The man was clearly crazy
For as he spoke his rhyme,
The salmon danced in the shallow stream
In fish-determined time.

I didn’t try to love him
But I loved him just the same
For he broke the diver’s quivering bow
And called his God by name.

“Oh tell me, man, oh tell me,”
I cried in my anguished state,
“What is the secret of the world?
Where is the end of hate?” 







And all at once his face had changed
To an evil, ugly mask
His body had become the hate
About which I had asked.

“How stamp this mask into the mud,
How keep despair at bay?”
“You can’t,” he told me, grinning,
"But my God can point the way.”

“How dare you speak of God, you wretch,
When God’s abandoned you?
How dare you use the Holy Name?
He doesn’t want you to!





Your life’s just spent surviving
With the sidewalk as your bed
And taking poisons in your veins
And scrambling to be fed.”

The man just stood in leaves and mulch
While the salmon sang and spawned:
“Just see the other side of me
And tell me I am wrong.”

Another face appeared just then
A face all beaming bright
Its eyes were streaming like the sun
With pure mysterious light:

“You blinded fool, you stand before
A drop of mist made rain
An eye that Paradise looks through
That holds both joy and pain.” 






“I cannot understand you, for
You play such games with me!
How can you masquerade as God
And tell me how to see?”

“No one knows how Life began,
From Nothing came our birth.
A stir of seething molecules
Sparked all the life on earth.”

“Don’t tell me, wretch, you are the one
Who made this world come true!
Imposter, get out of my road,
I cannot look at you.”

“Just so,” the man said, streaming light,
“For no one knows the why.
But you will be forever changed
By looking through my eye.”



Nonsongs and Neopsalms: a compendium of poems by Margaret Gunning, (Part two)




Part two of an excerpt from a much longer book-length manuscript of poetry (Nonsongs and Neopsalms) that never saw the light of day, though some of the poems were excerpted and published in various literary magazines. These were written over a long stretch of time and represent multiple mental and spiritual transfigurations.



                                       
Delivery


This is a strange
Horse I ride, feet
Pointing up, all bloodless and blue
On a long trail of ether.

My brain swims in a vault of chrome
through the removed murmur of voices
and a distant
Clinical clanking.

I will emerge now, slick and
purple as a baby.  The surgeon’s eyes
Crinkle over the mask.

Hands cool as paper, hands that have never
Handled a snake, patiently suture
All of my holes.  The work is true.


Emergency waiting room


Which is worse:  the spilled
smell of
accidents
or the sound
of magazines
slowly
growing older
in this
ticking house of death?
  
Sorry

My heart unclasped
One day in your office,
Suddenly, all in a shot, the catch
Broke loose, andit
Fell behind a pile of files.

I did not mean to;
It was an accident of gravity.
Earth reached up and pulled it down.

I stood dizzy,
My centre lost, the core
Riven.  It felt silly
to lean over like that.

My face grew hot.

There was no way to put it back.
The space had grown over already;
The fall had changed me.

I left that place different,
Looked outside.  The light
Hurt my skin.  The world
was a new color.

I wiped my eyes, and kept on walking.
A small place
in my chest
Grew still with singing.


loom (a hymn of gratitude)

God sings
As she works.  My, my.  A merry

tune:  Bach; birds.

This weaving

of flesh fibres, new nerves

stretched across dead pain, Awakens
the ache of joy.

How it tingles!  Deft hands move,
A shuttle.  Darting threads,
A gleam.  A sense of fabric.

Substance where there were holes.

The moths driven out.

I will hold now.  No secrets will
Spill through.  The bag is
Solid; it nests
All the marbles.


  Somedays

Somedays, the harshness of nostrils

Bus-lurching crowds, rudespeak
of news-seekers, is too much for me,

I need to nestle, to throstle,
wrestle with the renewal

(of your mint-melting
inner adagio)

The bus vomits; I catch hold of things
again.  Taking charge of the crowd,
grabbing thumbs
manipulating the traffic

pulling the world with a pair of
pliers

It’s no good any more:  I need your dependable
light somnolence:  the old silk robe
of your being
(I need to
wear you
like
hair)

 Crown (For Joshua)

It’s purple out today; no mistaking
it.  Purple sings

The imperial air.  Where
roses were lost, that dimension

They were sucked into/I traverse
(as through a secret panel
or revolving door)

to the Other Side, where essence of roses
Smells.
Purple wings shot through
with veins – with skeins of slaughter
We know the price:  the smell of
(blood and roses)

Purple sings the imperial air.  Where
roses are hidden/purple roses
that spill

 You-riff (a favorite)

If mint ice cream could be made flesh,
(moreover
                Gershwin’s
                                   (innocent
piano keys (not the    (inanimate:  but the

        (hot
very (act of playing) teeth, a fine Mary-
morning

(could be a bald spot:a hunch of shoulders)
                                                                 (all
then I guess this Everywhere where we  (call
the universe/this minimouse, into the Here

would be exhaling you/expressing you
daily,
in daily bliss, dally, bless blush 
       
              doily
in gaily, /  earthshivering
Maymess triumphant, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’
hosiery/then, I guess your

Bashful tigersmile’s a paean to
“Great Chocolate!” eyes  (a-bleeding
                                         (monument to
(hooting hyaena’s
                            laugh’s a plainsong to)


  Lean into it


Haven’t they played this song before?
It’s pain, and it has been on my radio
For weeks now.  Let’s settle down

(my yoyo:  the tiny precious blue one,
has been asleep for days; some dream
told me it had died,
             (spring died,
That it   (would not be back again.)

“But an astral yoyo”  (this is
an official statement) broke loose

between our tromboning eyebeams,
our Sprung-together selves.  You are
an Arctic expedition; I a mere

can of Spam, better than eating the dogs
but less tasty than your bunkmate


           Everything stopped breathing


There was a gown
Made of apricots,
Woven from
A dream of bees, a smile
so drunken it was breathed by
Mother Teresa; I was saturated.
Then you came along like an
Old saddle, your walk as
wobbly as
Copland’s cowboy.
Was I expected to just
                                                           (go on)
breathing again?



  Mary Alice


I sing of Maryalice,
nun as sweet as she
(tied up in the AA meeting/back to back
with Ray the pervert, the man
with the gun in his pocket

Fisheye Red, Lazy Sprockett, and the kindly forever prostitute)

A dizzy harrumph, and Mary Alice spoke
of life/in an abstinent/dry convent


Not even the sacrificial
Wine/A sober nun!  I longed
to anoint
her
/        screwed brow
with the oil of self-congratulation the raw
Bursting sanctity of very existence.

Her voice was frail as a Gramophone,
her hug like rails,
her print dress (out of habit?) disdainfully
Particolored.  I wanted an umbrella

to shield her bent crown

from the raining destruction of reality
  

  Buzzed

Your hive was a hum of
Cortical surprise; a splendor
                                (golden fuzz)
Of psalms:  a salty                        of Bee
being.  Such passion
in the apiary!  Such dizzy repro- (se-?)
Duction!  Bee
attitudes frighten me.  I will pick
the salacious hairs, the
haloed laughter of swarms
From my bee-blurred eyes.


                                                
Three-part invention

(a) indigo eyes

I am the salt
you are the sweet
hair/
        My heartsprung

(horse) of the air,
au clair
ah! care,
         clover
to the/stables,
We.

     Drenched with the scent
of hens of hay
                    dear
of tree:  your/odor
(of salt
(of sap
(of sea


b) cunningerotic

Lip, let me laugh
You.  Set the salt
Sally, sashay down
The hay of my mind.

Seashorn,
feverworn
hairborne:  Your
face a chiming, a
Brining.  The
(stainglassed
seahorse
of your
                                          (voicy
                                      (ice




c)     Fifth chakra (for ray lynch)

a blues tunnel
blamed open

pitched down
to the base of the soul

Mermaids spinning
in your throat, Dear
heart:  shining vessel,

opened for a song,
shut open,

Wept for a penny

disabled
    the
by/(dreaming
      (door


  
Three more haiku

I.     Back road
                                             
The way unspools, retreating
           from a back window:
           Unreeling
           vision.

II.               Spiral

               Higher I mount, and higher.
               I look down.  The screw
               Turns deeper.
               I climb.

 III.           Final exam

              Horses explode from the gate.
              Pens surging forward –
              Furious
              focus.