As I Went Out One Morning (after W. H. Auden)

As I went out one morning






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.”

Margaret Gunning

Two men named Bill (and other poems)

Blogger's note. It's been a while since I felt like sharing my poetry with anyone. Having it "rejected" - booted back in your face for decades - leaves scars. It is traumatic, as is hearing, several hundred times, "We really like your poetry, BUT. . . " 

One editor said, "I hate to turn away what might turn out to be the next best-seller, BUT. . . " (we don't think it has the quality we're looking for). That kind of casual cruelty disguised as compliment is nearly universal in publishing.

The horror of the Stephen Galloway affair ripped the veil off Canada's publishing Mafia, and I am now relieved I will never be a part of it (though I spent the better part of my life longing for it, jumping at it like a balloon that always popped up out of my reach).

It's not that I haven't been published at all. A dozen or so poems over that many years simply wasn't worth the grief. But here some of it is, mostly written a while ago. It means something to me. More than I can say. There's quite a bit of it here, because I've found in the past that if I do a Part 2, no one reads it.

I would say     

I would say that you are springtime,

That lambs

could not be lovelier: laughing bells

Of eyes bright with seeing,

the shining, shone of you.

I would say that you are a

Renaissance painting

of a beautiful woman:

So restored

that the paint gleams; its sheen

Fresh from the brush; its wetness

smelling new.

I would say that you are living

Water:  I see tiny

perfect selves, suspended

upside-down in the silver

Merriment of your eyes.

If true, then I would say that you are

Not my brother; but some other; some

me not yet thought of; next year’s

Reflection

cast lightly (God’s amusement)

over waters

rendered still.

                                                

Gina

sweet shy

dark girl          I’ve seen her

here before

  

she always wore the best clothes

(silvery things/bangles

feathered skirts

necklace made

from the teeth of a wolf)

  

now I see Gina in the ward

kitchen.        Still beautiful

big-eyed

part Cree                            her hair tied back

she shows me the tracings of

partly-healed               gashes

sewn back together in

a gridwork

                                                           hands/

on her arms,                                            wrists.

She must be twenty or so

No one comes to visit

Once she had a boyfriend

but he got sick too

  

                                                        

 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.

                                          

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

Love is no quick thing

(a halfsonnet/explanation)

Love is no quick thing, Saltstream surprise

Unevening your pearling teeth at dawn:

Quick!  like a foxglove/silvertail is gone,

It tips the world’s rude balance/wild surmise.

Inside my glands the trump of lovedoom cries;

with white kidgloves I’d pluck your soulstrings’ songs

(Inside my brain your lovebeat

dongs and dongs

dongs and dongs

dongs and dongs

                                                                                             and      dongs

                                                                                                                        dongs)                                                                                                                   

Saxophone (for Bill Prouten)

i don’t know who invented this

reflexive question mark of an instrument

but i think it was a good thing

for it’s great to look at,

with fat keys like frog eyes

and a big bell like royal jelly

you could keep flowers in there if you wanted to,

extra socks

or even a clock

Snakes kink too

and this sound is snakey

purply mauve as the deepest bruise

and raunchy

as a man in love

smoked as some cat of the night

disappearing over a fence

it makes leaps

(but only because it has to)

There is no

morning saxophone

this is a sound that

pulls the shades down

a hangover

howl

fading to twilight

or the blackmost

belly button

of the night

Few can wrap their lips around

this gooseneck

without some harm coming to them

for this is an instrument

with a long history of

hollowing out

all but the most hardy

Bird flew into a pane

of glass and was

smashed

we don’t know why it does this to people

(maybe it was mad at him

for taking it all to such extremes)

but how could you blow this thing

halfway

i ask you

how could you rear back

in some great pained whiplash of the spine

without a sense of

terrible commitment

i never much cared for

saxophones myself

until i heard one blown correctly at last

jazz is a genre i will never understand

but perhaps that’s good

for like the priesthood, one must enter into it

without question

reservation

or doubt

two men named bill

i love two men named Bill

and one of them is fancy

one is plain

i love one for his looks

the other for his brain

and when we are together

(and especially when not)

such yearning for his body

pulls apart

the art

of the life i’ve made

here in this patch of shade

one Bill plays the saxophone

the other Bill washes the floor

one writes songs and sucks on bongs

and one’s worth dying for

i’d run away with one Bill

but that doesn’t mean i’d have two

the laws of the world don’t work that way

i’d have to choose

or lose

both Bills

(which would kill

me.)

one Bill made two babies

one just made me rue

one Bill’s a restless bachelor boy

the other is painfully true

there are two

sets of eyes

one brown

one blue

four eyes i love so well:

see my soul reflected in the

searching blue

fall in cognac amber

‘til i drunken drown

i love two men

and both of them are Bill

there’s a cost to loving them

so well

when god presents his bill

i’ll have to pay my way

and choose

or lose

both Bills

(. . . which would kill

me.)

Gone west                                                         

It seems in my life I have always

moved west, New Brunswick, Alberta,

the boardwalk behind the Quay;

it’s a left-handed sort of life

driving me heartwards, though never,

no never,

heartwise.

                                           that day

when I thought I saw you/  on the boardwalk

my guts jumped:                       it

jerked the hook in my colon

(you always knew about bait)

You know how it was:    I wanted to stand on my desk

on the last day of classes

and shout:  o captain!  My captain!

But you had your own rotation – I saw

it reel from view, and

(helpless to catch you)

watched your spiralling apogee

What is the remotest segment of an orbit?

Booze, blondes.  Too much of

a good thing.  But I did love you.

We wandered, Pooh and Piglet in an

Escher maze, searching for heffalumps.

You calmly said, “Watch this,” and set fire

to my mind.

I saw you as the human yoyo, bobbing up and

                                                                   down,

sleeping, walking the dog, in and out

and ‘round the world.

I knew you’d be back, like hounds,

like a cycle of blood, like black

fruit springing into tree.  When the

string broke, I hid my eyes, and

said, but it’s only a lute,

it will heal itself,

half-hoping I was wrong.

I don’t know why or how God looks

after you, beached like Stanley’s whale,

stared at by the curious.  I don’t know

how God manages.  It was beyond me.

And so I kept on moving.

Poems from the Land of Random (or: it's my painting and I'll cheat if I want to)

                                               

 I would say

I would say that you are springtime,

That lambs

could not be lovelier: laughing bells

Of eyes bright with seeing,

the shining, shone of you.

I would say that you are a

Renaissance painting

of a beautiful woman:

so restored

that the paint gleams; its sheen

Fresh from the brush; its wetness

smelling new.

I would say that you are living

Water:  I see tiny

perfect selves, suspended

upside-down in the silver

Merriment of your eyes.

If true, then I would say that you are

Not my brother; but some other; some

me not yet thought of; next year’s

reflection

cast lightly (God’s amusement)

over waters

rendered still.

 Smile                                                               

The one thing we shared

that day, after the wrench

and wrangle of misunderstandings,

pride, ego batted back and forth

like an exhausted bird,

was the look, that precious, that infinite, the

tinkling of camel bells

five thousand years ago on the Syrian

desert, with one gleam

(a star the size of Christ, or a

small diamond

briefly appearing on your

perfect front tooth)

Sideways, barely caught, like the music

that breathes over the horizon at very dawn,

hush of Bach unravelling in the

midst of my tears, fragile veil of flowers

pulled aside, revealing a shyness, a sweet

almost succulent, bashful ripeness,

all this bloomed, bloomed in less than a second –

then

quicker than a cat off a windowsill,

your face relaxed into its

Forty-four years of God knows what:

but for that flash, that flush, that sprinkling moment of

stars pale as laughter,

I turned; I saw.

    

Dressing for death

I just don't know what to wear

to the funeral

even tho I know

she’s not really dead

I don’t know why flowers                           /why?

I bought this skirt

but it was for a recital

She was alive yesterday

though

/   not eating

then I saw her face in the crowd

knowing she was in the hospital

I don’t know what to wear to the ceremony

     almost

It’s/as hard to figure out as

where they go

Sorry

My heart unclasped

one day in your office,

suddenly, all in a shot, the catch

broke loose, and it

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.

                                                     

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

Blogger's note. NEVER explain poetry. Ever. So now I will explain it a bit. I sometimes trawl/crawl through the files to see what I can see, and so I won't have to write anything that day. Lately I've happened upon poetry, stuff I mostly wrote a long time ago. But there are surprises. The stuff I was SURE was good then has somehow changed. Now it's not so good. The really slight stuff, the ones I felt I tossed off, feel better to me now. I actually like some of them.

The paintings, well. . . I originally painted these during a fever of creativity that I would never want to repeat, the type that requires medication. I was sure they were the best things ever painted, so I kept them. When I found them I went, whew, oh sure. The paper was all yellowed and bumpy from using too much poster paint. So scanned them and basically forgot about them.

Then every so often I'd find the file and fool around. My computer wasn't up to much on altering color, focus, etc. Then I got a new computer, and bam. I was inverting them into negatives, increasing saturation to make up for the fade of time, turning dials and knobs. It's cheating, I know, but is it really? It's my painting and I'll cheat if I want to. I still have to fool around to get the effects I want, or (better) to happen upon things I never even counted on. Somebody has to do it, I guess, and if it's me, isn't it still my painting? And I'll cry if I want to.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm