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.

                            

Friday, July 31, 2020

Nonsongs and Neopsalms: a compendium of poems by Margaret Gunning (Part 1)




Herein, some poems I wrote during various times in my life, pretty much as they went down, unedited. A few of them even got published in the likes of Prism International and Room of One's Own, but my book-length manuscript (Nonsongs and Neopsalms) didn't fly because my style was all over the map. As are these, but I'd still like to share them. For the sake of flow, I won't break these up with my customary images. This ran so long I had to divide it in two parts.



What Happens in September

all the acorns of my brain rioting
           out of a little hole in the top of a tree

I can hear them rumbling
(like Frost’s apples) from long away –

Squirrels whiz in a double helix
         around the black tree/each
                                  tail-frisk

bright as a fizzing synapse

The smell of English walnuts

       and an old old box made of dusky wood
                just opened after fifty years in
                                                         the attic

Chestnuts on the ground like the
eyes of fractious horses

that gallop through

                   a seethe of

                                surf

I am six, scuffy-kneed, collecting
chestnuts to string or sell on the street

or Sixty, dimmed but simmering still,
hair gone to milkweed,

skin with the smell of dried apricots
and used aprons/still on the

wheel of Four, the wheeling and

reeling,

rocketing year.


Bite the plum

Naked is as naked
does:  as clear as
Your eyes are,

your clothing is
that much
       /clearer,

dearer still the scent
             all man,
of you,/inestimable.
I should never
Take you out of that box,
Never sample those
 dark
/chocolates,
      too
for / dear you are,
the Arabian horse
of my childhood
(standing still only to be
petted).

Notice me!  I am more
than a
Brain on a stick, but
an  (all-breathing
       (Non-fiction       /woman.   To break
this cellophane
  (that heatshrinks your
legend),
would it be a rupture,
an insertion, an
arrogance of the ovaries,
Or a sweet inevitable,
        angel driven  (deep)
my  /                                 into
the moist cake of your heart
   
              as
You are  /  removed as
an engraving of a dybbuk,
I can stroke your image
only,  Never get your
smell/or feel your hair
Never grab it –
                 up  in
Let it dry/to a soft
Black wrinkled fruit –

The juice that never
had a chance to
run down my
                          chin

will gleam in those
glacial blue
eyes:
Will spark on your
skin –

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.

Three haiku
                                              

I.      Gift

         Snow, just one slow flake, settles
         subtle as a breath
         Lighting on
         my tongue.

II.     Trail
        
         Beside the still railroad tracks,
         A hot sun.  Song of
         Cicadas. 
         We ride.

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

bridges (a Vancouver haiku)
                                    
latecity nightsky –
spill of black/Silk skirt:dancing
spritesparks/arcs of pearls


Fall

The antique
smell of
autumn
it charges me it

startles my nose:
leaves all turned
foxy,
shuddering into a
crumble of old
iron at my feet

in a great sustained
hallelujah of praise         /ancient trees are

praying up:  their frail arms
worshipping wide

                                               (some are
redheaded, some
blonde, a few
undecided, as if they
might make a change
at any time) The wind
shifts around like a
salesman,
                yellow of denture
full of rude/surprising charm

The antique smell of
autumn it changes me it
(startles my nose.    then all at once
an old old woman grundles
by/do I know her?

She is me   do I fear her?    A study in
black/clad with
a scent

the
lush whiff of
life-in-death

Violin


Falling into amber,
a buzzing blur of
honey and blonde,


strings as veins, a coursing, rush of taut
bliss, stretched across a
hollow core
of yearning:    Heart-bulb
                           lush
will vibrate as  /  hips of wood
shine like patient still eyes

and ochre sounds tease, tug
at hunger, reach, reach.
Fingers and strings kiss and
come apart, kiss and come apart,
The frail box eems in a subtle
pullulation, shy as a girl, lush as a

wild                           and
   /      whiff of mink:/                                all in a stillness

the bow sighs, sighs like a deep
diver, soughing the life in
this creature of tree, this female
fleshed of the organs of nature –

and all nature, all in a murmur
of intimate pain,
                           hewn
draws from this/heart of nothing
(this wood-held dusk, this
stirred scent of stored petals
this great warm handful of love)
a shining:  a chiming, a brining,
a pool of dark wine
spilled from the lustre of flowing eyes,
a seeing, a speaking, this songswept
woman of wood.

shiatsu

               
playing down the roots of my spine
like fleshly xylophone:    each vertebra

                            oceanic
humming with dim  /  secrets

                                                   ever
                     Every snake I have  /  handled
entwisted along the cord.    I am
awake now,
chorded by blunt fingers
strummed in the blood
which courses deep vermilion

in the sub-tectonic plates of my pelvis

The gut-song heaving upward
like a straining lifter, triumphant –
Selah, she is new!  (set loose
                                                 pure
in a slippery arcing dolphin of  /  prana)
splashed
in amniotic
baptism:

Behold, her crown.

Yes; or The Chagall Bride
    
                                     (i)                                         

i pray myself
Awake:   the smudge and
drudge of day
bleared by the bliss
of existence
a leaping fish of Be/the singing
blood that cries
 I am

                                          (ii)                                         

(i insist on you
the way I insist on
Yes:
an E. M. Forster yes
close beside the
everlasting “why”

                     (like man
and wife
why answers
Yes in an endless
                 “I do”

             
Poem on my fortieth (for my secondborn)
  
and bliss flicked
through, too, (quick)
like the flip of an
eyelid,

         /just
when did it pass over,
an infant surging to
      burstingly              woman?
a  /                beautiful  
when lost it I,             gone
                         these/
days, these days, when
               violet
did the  /  plum become a
           dead-
(small/sweet)
driedthing

She went by, my dayspring my
firehorse of a girl, life fiercing in
       glace-blue
her/          eyes:
        fleetingly                    this Astarte,
too/danced, Fred Astaired/                     toddle
turned to whirl as (slowly
my age
pulled ripe skin down
like the rind of old
fruit).

              Love fresh and juiceful

 when?/

       passed  into a darker
hymn, quiescence. 
The juice of jigs, all
         hard
that/ sex, gone by
too.  Ova will
        soon
dry/to peach pits
dessicated as hair.
                                   mainspring/
(She, my spring, my/
offspring, spurts still
                                   with
    that warm
juice,/sucked hard out
                 howling
of  my      /      heart)

                                                        
                                                      Guitar (for Keith)
  
How could I tell the way, tender as a lute,
his voice plays me,

especially over the wires, in the place
Without faces, a coiled, blue

Secrecy?  Sound strums off
 the tips of my fingers.

Some chords are stiff,
Almost hard; slick and shining,
stretched in iridescence
over my ringing ears.

My smile bars the strings.
The warm seal
Breaks; the peal
(spreading like a fugue
inside my chest) makes an
Easy, reaching harmony.

There are worlds beneath the words,
This overarching pattern, high
as a cat’s back; caught by the spreading
Nest of my hair.

  
                                               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.



Unbegun



I sense a tightly curled potential in an
alternate self/I have never met:  is it me or
thee?
What do you call the sound before the wind blows?

(and)
How many wolves precisely hide behind
the icebound pre-flood of your
unmelted eyes?  How would they bound,
unbound?  How does a glacier
feel when it groans and cracks like a
cannon, all its
                       sluicy sperm released?

How to judge the fertility of what has
not yet happened,
an approaching train rocketing backwards
into the sucked-back pre-time of imagination?

Would you smell like shredded wheat,
like gunfire, like an impending
surprise?  Would I be able to touch
you, at least with my mind,

or would all my juices, sunparched, bleached with shock,
frizzle away to the nothing in which it all began?
      

blue popsicle (for J. G.)

I live in your throat, curled
with a cat
 sleeping in sounds
 that drift daily/supple man-
music

What flavor?  I cannot
fathom/Yet shaking my head at you

(underwater) with surprise.

Joyborne, my heart smiles
(chiming) in sleepytime

                                          tune – is it
magic yet?/Dark out
now, I palm the
 chocolate

of your voice.  Dandle me:  cat
in a basket
 breathing our lonely, our smilenest in larksilent

candlesmoke - 


                                                 pomegranate wine

I sip at
your smile;
fire        light
 dances on your teeth
cat 
               
 on a hearthrug oh; comfort.
  
Close with you, on the sofa
(tight) breathing
in unison
                                                Succulent
rubies.   Heavy
with spice; promise

(of bursting kernels
shared on a back step
I’d stain my shirt)
                     
                   
                                                           Tryptich
  
I.                   Lover

    What is the song of you?
               Electric; blue
               A spurt of brimstone in the dark.

               I snatched your eyes
               from the fire,
               They lit the coals
               of my desire
 
               You’re
               sharks,
               you’ve turned my being
               to steam and sparks.

 I.            Tin man
              
                He walks through
                robot days,

                listening to the echo in his chest.

                Quicksilver tears
                spill from his liquid eyebeams
                to fuse his jaws in place

                And then one night it rains.

                Waiting
                for the tender mercy of an oilcan,
                he holds his rusted axe aloft
               
                Frozen in mid-chop.

 I.                    Skater’s Waltz

    We slice in new ice
               Keen figures with bright, honed blades

               carve in the virgin white
               Harsh cuts that cannot be erased.

               I let you go.  I trust you
               to move gently on my twinkling plane,

               You loose my hand
               to let me spin across your space.

               We slice in new ice
               Keen figures that cannot be erased.


                                                 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
                                           
                                                                    
  fantasy


I dreamed of a petting zoo 
with live men in it
all naked in their splendor

some
fuzzy, some smooth
all smelling good
of dark leather/gull feather
spanish heather

eating their golden chest hair
like shredded wheat
and leaving whenever we feel like it

could we name them?  No,
that would be getting involved.

But we’d remember their
sad eyes at noon
(feeding time – go feed the bulls)
some luscious sea-blue, some rich as
melted chocolate.