Peotry Korner: Paradise Lost

(Taken from an actual review on Amazon.com.)

Paradise Lost: Boring Peotry.

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

(Author's note. I'll be damned if I remember writing this, but it has to be mine because I can't find it anywhere else. As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden is perhaps my favorite poem, so maybe it got the juices flowing. In any case, I must have borrowed some imagery here and there. Auden I'm not, but we must wade in.)

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.”

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

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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

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Sylvania (found poem: I must have written this sometime)

Sylvania

I have dwelled in the land of     don’t want to

Very long, and find now I can trudge sunwards

If I try real hard

(But I must try real hard)

I had the wrong heroes when I was a girl, the Joplin curse,

the Sexton disaster,

and Plath most of all. That Sylvan creature: a spirit that lives in or frequents the woods

and surely, her best bursting blackberrying poems glistened with the slippery reality of nature.

Nature?

Hers?

I always thought in terms of an Autoplatt, an Automat, some autocratic near-Nazi standing at the blackboard with glistening blue eyes. Well, what did she know about his intellect anyway? Only that his foot rotted off, had to be lopped, but it was too late,

Because Autoplatt had decided to die.

To die, to die, to die

Because Plath had decided to die.

Death ripples along, unfortunately, vibrates sympathetically like a guitar string,

While the rest of the family clutches itself and can’t breathe.

No, no, not another suicide, this one I can’t bear,

Not Assia, that bitch, we knew she was evil,

And the villagers never liked her

Surely even the weirdest witch wouldn’t take a toddler with her

What if that girl had grown up? But she didn’t.

Sylvia, she of Sylvania, vain and full of mania

Was called “Sivvy” as a child, and maybe it’s more appropriate,

Since she was something of a sieve: all affection drained away.

Hey, how does this shit happen anyway? Is it a defective switch, some faulty wiring that can be fixed with a drug, a plug, electric slug?

Does it run in the blood, worm through the spiral of DNA, scream through the genes?

The circular path is a dizzy one, and it’s easy to get lost.

And look at the cost.

Sylvia, Sylvania, creature of the night, firefly, Tinkerbell,

Enchanted woodland sprite,

We saw you in your sweaters, all angora, and that lipstick like Lana Turner,

And the cinched-in belt, and the claim of biting Ted’s cheek until it bled

As if to say: Look how sexual I am, look what an animal.

Did she ever really have an orgasm?

When famous, poets take on a robe, become the thing they are painted to be.

Vaunted.

This was just beginning to happen.

But by the time fame came, it was too late, her heart had been removed again

But this time not shoved back in upside-down.

“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two,” she bragged in her manifesto of paternal hate: as if Ted Hughes had been rammed down her throat, as if she had no choice. She could have picked a faithful, more generous man. Could she? Would she? But she picked another poet. Was she mad, I wonder?

What is crazy? The categories bleed into each other. Plath was this, she was that. Today she’d be bipolar, because it’s the diagnosis du jour. And lithiumed, and Seroquelled, or even Lamotrigened. Purists would say this would kill her art for good.

Better to be walking around, so you can at least feed your kids grilled cheese sandwiches instead of leaving them there like some primitive beast rejecting your young?

Oh no, she had to live on her terms! But what terms? And do you call this living?

Make great art, kill yourself. Make great art, kill yourself. Then study biology and kill yourself, the same fault line cracking through the sweet little boy who knew nothing.

I hate this, I want it gone. I hate life too, I’ve tried to die, but it was sickening, embarrassing, I was no good at it. I have only spurts of joy in living, but I have them. I am happy “in” certain things. Not the rest.

Sylvia wouldn’t have it. All or nothing at all. And chose nothing.

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

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What in Christ's name does this mean?

The Starlight Night

LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! 

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! 

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! 

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! 

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows. 

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! 

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! 

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house 

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse 

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

So what does the poem mean?

What means this bizarre double-jointed curvature, this sharp hairpin turn from fireworks "ooooooohs" and "ahhhhhhhhs" into the kind of heavy and even suffocating religiosity that leaves me completely kerflummoxed?

I don't know much about Gerard Manley Hopkins except to say that when he became a Jesuit, he burned every poem he had ever written. Thus perhaps some of his best works were relegated to the ashcan.

He's the one who wrote about depression, that Carrion Comfort one that I find so harrowing, to the point that I think he must have been a true sufferer. But why must everything in Hopkins be Christified?

The poem starts off very much like an innocent Robert Louis Stevenson verse for children, a "how would you like to go up in a swing" sort of thing. But there is a sort of urgency to it, as if we'd better look now or we'll be too late. It seems to tug and poke at us, hey, take a look up there, look at Casseopeia (which I can NEVER see - I am the poorest of visual discerners and can't tell one bloody constellation from another). Then comes a flood of almost-precious elven description right out of Lord of the Rings. Cockle-shells and dingle-bells. Except that, because it's Hopkins, he can get away with it. It's a surprising, even shocking quality, the art of verbal daring.

Fire-folk sitting in the air, why yes, that's a line any poet would kill for. Quickgold: that's perfect, isn't it - why didn't anyone think of that before? The air swirls with magic, you can see your breath, you're shivering yet too warm, your companion's hand is like ice in yours. Yes, you're there, transported, borne up like a downy feather (take THAT, Gerard!) as the constellations wheel drunkenly over your head.

Where I go off-course is in the line, "Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize." What can he be getting at? Taken literally, it makes no sense at all. Purchase what? Prize what? Does he mean we have to earn the right to get into heaven, so to speak - heaven represented by the rapturous star-filled night? Is immortality a kind of lottery, a spiritual 6-49?

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

I don't know if he's talking about "buying your way in", trying to bribe God (good luck!), or the cheapness and crassness of reality compared to the gasping celestial vision. It's one of those weirdball Hopkins-ian things that makes you want to toss the book across the room.

But then he gets back to the "look, look" stuff, which by now is getting a little old (can't help but think it!) in spite of the "Maymess" (a word I really thought *I* had invented) and the "mealed-with-yellow sallows".

But then come the strangest lines of all.

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

I don't know, this grounds the poem with a thud, steals all its magic. Hopkins must have had some sort of a thing for Christ, and it's weird. When I first read this startling thing, my reaction was "what"? These are indeed the - barn? And what are "the shocks"? Kindly explain yourself, poet.

I can only guess - and I am really guessing here, because this is an odd thing that doesn't make much sense even after a lot of analysis - that he thinks of the heavens/nature and all that jazz as "housing" Jesus and Mary and all those holy folk who to him represent God. Or does he glimpse the holy/eternal in and through, are those starfolk sitting in the air little glints of God, God's little birthday candles maybe?

Is the universe just God's skin?

I might be reading more into this than I should. Hey, maybe I'm smarter than he was, or at least less obscure. But there are things I don't like here, words that may or may not be used for jarring effect: "barn" (barn? Haven't we just travelled to the farthest reaches of the universe? Why use the image of an outbuilding that is basically full of shit?); "shuts" (an awful word, implying "shut-in" and even "shut up!); "spouse", a sort of creaky word referring to one's life partner - oh, that's creepy! Oh, that's creepy! Is he married to Jesus, or his mother? I guess "espouse" can mean just believing in something. Or something.

Or surrendering to it? Oh God. I was never one for surrender, though in certain circles (does the term 12 Step Program mean anything to you?) it's considered the highest achievement.

And that word "hallows" is not one I am comfortable with either - all hallows eve, hallowed be thy name (which for some reason always reminded me of the inside of a pumpkin, that punky smell). So he throws in some language which could not be more at odds with the dazzling fluidity of those first few lines. What of buying, selling, bidding - what's he on about? Maybe it would be better to stop at Line 7. Can the Sunday school lesson; just dazzle us.


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Sex, drugs, violence (in no particular order)

Poems by Margaret Gunning

                                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 a Wellfleet whale,

stared at by the curious.  I don’t know

how God manages.  It was beyond me.

And so I kept on moving.

Stalked by surprise

 Part A:

Is Sprung the past tense of Spring?

Is the world (then) forever sprung

ruptured/like a

cosmic hernia?

Will I in fact (in spite of

Shelley Winters in spite of

everything) fall into the butter

again?

Part B:

If life is a puckered

Promise,

an orgasm

dipped in alum,

The dire fruit of an

(unsuspecting

(apricot,

A half-born bee,

then:  what are you doing

in my

coatcloset, HEY!

                          Einstein,

Get out of there,/Fondle me, man

Even with your subconscious

and  - even though God

doesn’t throw dice

                        (dead man)

I’ll throw you  (out)

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. 

SPRING-LOADED

April’s where I live,

         the place my heart opens

                   rose-burgeoning, shinyleaf-new

a smell of bursting peonies,

           bumble-dizzy bees bumping

                       butter-and-eggs

swollen buds thrusting

          in the lovesick air.

Leaden, laden, leavened, lavendered, loaded,

one big quivering nose, a moist surprise

hatched out in the nest of my body

April Pegasus-leaps

        in my pulse,

sun-shot                    Pan-piped

       heady, relentlessly

tender,

recklessly

sweet.

                                               BIRD IN THE HAND

My bird in the

hand,

My bright dollar,

blonde head

Hard as a dime,

there in your

trench coat streaming

with spring, wet

as new robins

           or

Downy as stamens,

                          all

I would suck up/the

merry contempt in

your sleigh-bell

eyes,

Pepper my salt

with the wit of your

wounds,

Dive into the

iced-over pool

of your

voluptuous

disdain.

  

 

                                                            

 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

              

i)          Paul

(Biblical

spinning/verbs,

(so many gulled

fever

dreams swarming

in chaotic

blindness) a blueberry

moment --- Your

            (bees

hasty argument

My slant,    (arcing/jerked

dilapidated/heart

Your groin of sweated

     blood of the lamb

fire/Leo in a glass

snowstorm

 ii)  Cancun

      gusted

the             rustle

of a physics class

                                                                                                                                                aroused by the

                                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                clouded haste

                                                                             of a subconscious

                                                                             baritone door:If this

                                                                             were an opera

(a damp weeping

head as if just

crowning a gush of

birth) orgasmic aria

                                            

                                                 another                                                 

                                                /       

                                             dizzy commingle

                                                   /

                                                   

                                                fruitstone

                                                    /

                                             the  fingerings

                                            of florence

                                           nightingale

                                               iii) Small fish

                                                                /discharging

                                                 i may not get there in time

                                                 The minute darting

                                                            /disengaging

                                                 (all of a mind/marineswarm

                                                                             (salty

                                                          severalness(sequence

                                                  multiplicity of           minnows

                                                           stirring severance

                                                              /drowsy

                                                  dousing in          dowsing

                                                                dis/       dosing

                                                  Persal dis

                                                  Proportionate dis

                                                                /Persian

                                                  passion

                                                        (possession

                                                  saul’s      Slick

                                                                              silksliver

                                                   (Slippery                    purse

                                                :This is the ship that

iv)        a                                    launched a thousand

clitoris        pearl                                           tiny---briny

                                    faces; this/mollusc/heart

                             dampalternate being/trace of shellfish                                       

                                                                              /flesh

                          (repairing its innerdamage)

                             The princess and the pea

                          A glistening eye/(that never

                                  stops seeing

     Points of departure

What did intelligent women

do then?  When their brains

were squeezed together by

whalebone

prisons,

when sexual lust was still criminal.

Men breathed and heaved then,

full of leviathan waters

what did intelligent women do then?

did they get examined

by dirty doctors

with a velvet speculum?

Did they speculate

on the nature of existence

and give themselves orgasms

under the sheets?

What did intelligent women

do then?  

                                              

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)

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